Inception (with implanted spoilers)

so presumably only the 'regular' rules applied

So limbo is dangerous because it is unpredictable? Its the easy ticket out if not. It'd make the kicks kind of pointless.

Also kind of dumb as pointed out somewhere above that the rolling van didn't wake them up when the chair tipping over did during the tests.

because it wasn't a free fall, whereas the chair tip was.

how many threads feature people arguing over an instruction manual?

how many threads feature people bitching about the same things over and over?

oh wait, a lot....

Just trying to get the movie, thats all.

I was a bit bummed that with all the portent and ambition, huge hunks of the movie still boiled down to people with machine guns firing at each other in pursuit of making a giant energy company less powerful. The B- James Bond snow stuff pretty much made me snicker. Appreciated a lot of it, regardless.

The thing is, in "Memento" all the narrative trickery plays perfectly into the narrative itself, with a sad, tragic result. Here, all the trickery, as such, largely amounts to sound and fury signifying nothing. Per that interview quote somewhere above, the most interesting way to think about the movie is as about an implied character that exists both before and after the movie (Cobb possibly being incepted, etc.), but agree with the actor/interview subject that Nolan is so literal minded he would never do anything that radical. I mean, I like "The Prestige" a lot, but almost because of its acute literal-mindedness, where the big reveal turns out to be impossible but you just sort of go with it. In this one, the rules and metaphysics are kept so loose they don't even matter, and the only guy you end up caring about at all is the guy the super team has been assembled to con.

Intrigued by the (again, unsupported) idea there may be multiple teams at work throughout the world, but again, the specifics are so vague. Like, what are Cobb's qualifications, exactly? What wisdom did (extraction inventor?) Michael Caine impart, and what made Cobb so (uniquely?) receptive to it? Is extraction a massive national security issue and, if so, is it in and of itself illegal? Etc. A prequel would be totally justified were this movie not already so focuses on circuitous exposition.

Evan -- comment was for Tape Store, not you. I apologize that I didn't make that clear!

Its OK! It was a response to him ultimately.

Another weird thing: how could a movie explicitly about the subconscious and dreaming be so totally sexless? I guess you can say it's just as explicitly about guilt and control, but still.

i have a theory about that

but meanwhile though i definitely <3'd this movie, i do think the snow fortress stuff was probably the biggest mistake. it was competent enough, but nothing more. if they'd made it zero-g, that would have been something.

If they had made it zero-g, that would have been "Moonraker."

so i take it ilx did what i did and didn't overanalysise this film, instead just treating it as a fun james bond movie for yr summer?

oh wait its ilx, what should i be complaining about

Watched it again yesterday to see if it would pass the second-time-through test as an engaging view -- and it did, which was handy. I concentrated a little more this time on specific plot/script/visual details to see if the film really was as tightly locked in as it felt like and while there are a couple of lines I need to catch again whenever I see it next it really did hit every beat to make the internal logic work. If anything I felt a little more engaged with the Mal/Cobb throughline if only because I wasn't suffering from 'I have no idea how this is going to end!' syndrome.

That's pretty much exactly how I found a second viewing.

so i take it ilx did what i did and didn't overanalysise this film, instead just treating it as a fun james bond movie for yr summer?

this is a really stupid zing imo

it's obviously not just a fun lil bond movie

but the people who say this kind of stuff -- i kind of wonder what movies they think don't deserve condescension

it really did hit every beat to make the internal logic work

Here's just one obvious question that, for me, collapsed any idea of "so beautifully crafted internal logic wow":

+ Why did Cobb have to "inceive" Mal with the falseness of their world?

Because according to him at the end of the film (in the limbo conversation on top of the building with Ariadne and Mal) she was so far gone into the shared dreamscape that said inception was the only way to get her to snap out of it.

The follow-through being Cobb's realization that Mal ended up thinking the real world was itself false -- inception can be successful but it can be too successful.

Because they were in limbo, and purposely building environments from memories and desires, so their understanding of whether it was real or a dream was blurring; Mal (consciously?) decided she preferred it 'down there' in beatific limbo, as it were, and hid her totem, intending to stay there forever, but Dom wanted to wake up and go back to the kids. So he planted the idea that the reality was fake, and sadly it stayed with her back in reality, so she was convinced she needed to wake up one more time. Of course, there is (circumstantial) evidence to suggest that they DID need to wake up one more time, and that she was right.

xposts

Saw it a second time last night too. It was on a smaller screen in a regular theater (saw it on IMAX the first time) and a lot of the dialogue was suddenly harder to make out and it did feel less impressive. I wonder if that has anything to do with anyone else's experience. It was still a fun movie however and the six people I saw it with who hadn't seen it before seemed to enjoy it and debated various elements of it on the drive back home. I've seen so few movies with people that actually get them talking about it afterward that this seems like a positive thing.

I think this thread is pretty key evidence for it being a very good film, purely for the amount of discourse about it.

this is a really stupid zing imo

it's obviously not just a fun lil bond movie

but the people who say this kind of stuff -- i kind of wonder what movies they think don't deserve condescension

― pieter brogel the elder (history mayne), Sunday, 25 July 2010 15:52 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Ok yeah you are right but this thread is gigantic and I just don't know whether there is really that much to talk about other than lol dreams.

I also saw it in a smaller/non-IMAX theatre and it didn't feeling as punishingly overwhelming on an audio level for kinda obvious reasons. If anything I caught a little more of the dialogue, and 'smaller' lines and acting moments stood out though at the same time that's probably down to having had seen it the one time already. My friend Matt was seeing it for the first time and was fully engaged with it, really liked it.

Saw it for the second time I should say.

she was so far gone into the shared dreamscape

This is what the film says but does it actually mean anything? M and C went to limbo together. M liked it better than C. But where does this lead to M forgetting limbo isn't real?

Mal already knows limbo isn't real. There's no need to inceive this. They both went there together.

One thing I noticed is that the opening scene is, I believe, different from that final scene with Cobb and Saito. Made me think that the whole movie was them attempting to mutually wake each other up (you've come to remind of something, let's enact this whole adventure to see if we can remember what).

Sean; she locked away her totem and made herself forget (or so Dom tells us).

On a modest screen the bass action was totally overwhelming, to the extent that I briefly considered we weren't meant to be able to make out all the dialogue. Found it amusing that this is the second Cotillard film in a row (after "Public Enemies") where the audio makes it tough to make out the exposition.

This is def. a good movie-movie. I guess the debate is whether it's in essence pretty middlebrow or (like "Being John Malkovich" or "Eternal Sunshine" or "Memento") more profound. I lean toward the former because, again, TOO MANY MACHINE GUNS!!!!

Still wondering about unexplored avenues in the film. Like, if there are (literally) underground dream dens (a la opium dens), then the practice is either widespread or illegal. Or both, since the drug abuse metaphors abound in this flick. Wonder what someone edgier, like Aronofsky, would have done with it.

Fucked it up, probably.

My idea for a hypothetical prequel, since everyone wants to know, involves the invention of the extraction practice and the subsequent invasion of Cobb's dreamscape, with the big reveal being that his two kids are merely disguised projections of the nascent inception concept that someone wants to steal. Or, even trickier, that his "kids" were hidden there via inception by someone, and a third party was trying to extract them. That would square a lot of the logic (as such) issues I have with this film.

Aronofsky, by the way, is two for three, and even then "The Fountain" counts as an ambitious failure rather than an abject failure. And for all his cold formalism, Aronofsky has a much better grasp of emotion and the human condition than Nolan.

OK, here's a proper flaw: if an architect/Page (does her character even have a name?) can alter her mazes/maps/cities in real time, even though it risks attracting attention, then why doesn't she do it to mess with the defensive machine gun toting projections, since they're under attack, anyway, and the mark already knows he's in a dream? No biggie; just another distraction.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l61pw0Kw5t1qcbjrjo1_500.jpg

Page's character is named Ariadne?!

Yup, she's introduced as such by Michael Caine's character.

One thing I noticed is that the opening scene is, I believe, different from that final scene with Cobb and Saito

Yeah, you're right, I caught that as well, a difference in dialogue but it's bugging me I can't remember exactly what now.

Meanwhile, take it as you will:

In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, which features Inception on the cover, Nolan says that the metaphor for cinema developed organically as he wrote the script over a 10-year period. Cobb’s crew of mind-hackers don’t infiltrate people’s “real” dreams—they actually build ersatz dreams and place them inside people’s heads, in the same way moviemakers craft worlds that are transmitted into our brains via movie projector. Nolan explained that each member of the team serves a role that has a movie analog. The Architect (Ellen Page) would be the production designer. The Forger (Tom Hardy) would be the actor. The Point Man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) would be The Producer. The Extractor (DiCaprio) would be the director. And The Mark (Cillian Murphy) would be us—the audience. “In trying to write a team-based creative process, I wrote the one I know,” says Nolan.

There’s actually a great deal more of Nolan in the film. Inception is also a reflection of his artistic life. The various dream scenarios are implied homages to his favorite movies (including 2001: A Space Odyssey) and filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, and Michael Mann. He also says he can relate very much to his hero, Cobb, who is at risk of becoming lost in dreams and must fight to reconnect with reality and return to his family. “I can lose myself in my job very easily,” says Nolan. “It’s rare that you can identify yourself so clearly in a film. This film is very clear for me.”

Personally I would have thought that Saito would be the Producer but maybe he's the Executive Producer or Studio Boss. (But does that make Yusuf the Drug Connection?)

The one guy Arthur fights in the hotel hallway sequence = clearly Armond White. (That's Rex Reed later in the sequence hiding under the overturned cart.)

won the box office again.

I don't get people (fans) getting infuriated about poor reviews. If you really loved the flick shouldn't you just feel pity that dude didn't get out of it what you did?

well there are people who get aggravated over any negative review (which usually means they have some sort of inferiority complex and need to reassert themselves), but then there's also those who get aggravated over 'smug' bad reviews (a la Armond White that implicate audience members that like the movie). That I suspect is what ILX is on about (as well as me).

the Dr. Morbii of the world are merely amusing.

just for the record, it wasn't me who posted

I don't think the end says "it was all a dream" so much as "i used to read word up magazine"

but yeah, i wasn't at my best when i saw this film at 9.30am on a sunday (following 7am alarm call and confusing supertram journey, sheffield rip), which may explain why i completely failed to respond to it on an emotional level. but i stand by my basic criticism, which is that, in the absence of character development, credible drama, etc., the premise is just not interesting enough to sustain the entire film and the action is feeb. cf. eternal sunshine and most star trek episodes.

I feel like I'm the only person who thought the aspect of 'man feels psyche-destroying guilt over his wife's suicide' was interesting and touching and I LIKED that it was played very coolly and not overblown, or with Cobb's anguish becoming the whole focus of the movie (I mean, arguably it was, but not on the surface). I agree that a different actor could have brought more to it.
This is probably down to my own personality and dislike of how movies 'talk about feelings' generally, I admit.

What I didn't like about it was the implication that only Cobb had some horrible guilt or regret haunting him and endangering the team, whereas in real life everyone has something horrible lurking in their subconscious (which would have made the dreams more interesting than simply anonymous modern sprawling cityscapes). That and the fact that the relationship with his wife and particularly the kids is just totally glossed over. I know not being able to see the kids' faces is part of the narrative, but ... we don't even get to see the kids' faces. It was hard for me to care about what seemed no more than plot convenience ciphers grafted onto the shoot 'em up, even if we leapt to the "it's all in Cobb's head" conclusion.

BTW, was the wife the daughter of Michael Caine? That's sort of glossed over, too. If Michael Caine knows about extraction, and taught Leo, then surely he would have made a good character witness in defense of Leo. Unless, again, extraction is totally under the radar. But then why would people train their minds against extraction? Anyway ... all that stuff, totally glossed over in favor of relentless anonymous machine gun fire. Liked Scott's take on all the shooting int the Times review:

The conceit that they’re all dreaming takes some of the edge off the movie’s violence, since it’s hard to grieve for extras who are just “projections” in some else’s mental theater. On the other hand, that is pretty much what all movie characters are.

What I didn't like about it was the implication that only Cobb had some horrible guilt or regret haunting him and endangering the team, whereas in real life everyone has something horrible lurking in their subconscious (which would have made the dreams more interesting than simply anonymous modern sprawling cityscapes)

True, and up to a point I was expecting some 'twist' where another member of the team was either a mole or unwittingly endangering them through their own issues. That would have been a step too far, perhaps.

I think this thread is pretty key evidence for it being a very good film, purely for the amount of discourse about it.

STFU

that is a stupid stupid STUPID argument that makes no fucking sense and does nothing to absolve this film from its suckiness

xp
^ also one of my criticisms upthread, come to think of it :)

Leo wasn't allowed to know the layout of the dream designs because his messed-up psyche could try and interfere, so presumably all the rest of the team are 100% well-adjusted and psychologically 'normal'? Wasn't too sure about this.

BTW, was the wife the daughter of Michael Caine?

Yup, and Caine's wife, based on her being overhead in the phone conversation with the kids near the start, is French too based on what I could tell of the accent. It's not spelled out as you note but while Caine could argue for Cobb in court the unstated implication throughout is that extraction is indeed 'under the radar,' something that's known at a very high power-politics/research level, transnationally -- thus the idea that a number of high end targets could well be trained to resist it -- but is otherwise hidden in plain sight. It's glossed over because it doesn't really need extra explication, at base it's a fairly standard story device of what high-end politics/money/etc. could involve, and as I muttered upthread somewhere a big strength lies in the fact that this is NOT addressed in detail. Like the whole question of how Saito could 'fix' the charges against Cobb -- which the script itself points out is hardly assurable anyway.