It was about this time three years ago, when barely anyone could contain their excitement for Christopher Nolan‘s “Inception.” The film was just a couple weeks away from release and subsequently blowing minds. The puzzle box blockbuster, perhaps one of the smarter summer movies to come along in quite a few years, managed to take dreams and multiple levels of reality, and make them breathlessly linear and easy to navigate. It was a pretty magnificent thrill ride all around but the nearly perfectly constructed movie wasn’t without it’s minor flaws.
One of them that many discussed was the movie’s weirdly non-sexual atmosphere, a bit odd for a movie dealing with fantasies and a tortured romance at its core. The film also required a lot of exposition to keep things moving along and much of that came via Ellen Page‘s Ariadne, named after the character from Greek myth who was put in charge of labyrinths by the King Of Crete. In ‘Inception’ she functions as a sort of guide through the complex world of “Inception,” asking a lot of questions and getting answers from Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Cobb.
Strung all together, it makes the device look far worse that it actually is but it’s still an amusing way to look at the movie. Take it in below. [via AV Club]
Funny to read all these backlash views of what is actually a pretty good movie. It seems quite fashionable to do this with mainstream movies that break out. But such criticisms serve little purpose. This movie made its mark. Deal with it.
Personally, I didn't like Inception, because I never bought DiCaprio's Cobb as, firstly, a father, and secondly, a husband. Therefore, I never cared about the construct of the film because the emotional core of the film felt hollow. Apropos, Kubrick – I bought into the character of HAL 9000, who, I'd argue, reveals more character as the circumstances change than anyone does in Inception. The "logic" of the dreams – and the ever-tightening reign it enforced on the characters – renders Inception's characters as lifeless expositionary devices, where, much like The Dark Knight Rises, there's really nothing at risk (everyone civilian got sent home, Gordon's in hospital, Jen is dispensable, Bane is not the real badguy, the entire police force was made up of no-name badges) – nothing for me to care about because the levels of the dreams only served to further distance me from having any emotional investment in the characters. It looks and sounds amazing, but every time I try and watch it I just do not care enough to sit through to the end. James, remember in Memento when Shelby's running through a carpark and asks, "OK, so what am I doing?" "Oh, I'm chasing this guy…" Dodd shoots at him. "No… he's chasing me."? Remember how fresh and funny that line of expositionary dialogue was? Well, there's been nothing in Inception or TDKR that's been even half as human as that, because the characters in Nolan's films present to me only a disconnection between the signifier and the signified. Personally, based on what little I've read of Kip Thorne, I am already dreading Interstellar.
this really is the essence of the movie. god how aweful
Nolan drowns his films in expository dialog. It's fucking amateur and awful stuff and yet people eat it up like slop.
"Strung all together, it makes the device look far worse that it actually is"
No, it really is as bad as this video makes it seem. The second time I saw the film it was completely sunk by the exposition of the rules of the dream world through nearly every moment of the film.
It's about dreams. The audience expects things to go against logic. The way the world is so rigidly defined by rules makes it seem more like a film about video games.
Also, almost every character in film noirs, caper films, and genre films in general are nothing more than cyphers – because story and plot is the star. To criticize a film that actually does what very, very few film of its kind have accomplished (merging characters, visuals, plot and story) is really unwarranted. If so you have to dismiss so many of the greatest films ever made. There isn't much to any of the characters in most Kubrick, Lean or Hitchcock films, but I don't find people complaining about that here.
Come on this movie is obviously a classic and actually quite moving in parts (I cried when Malle jumped twice)
Just re-watched this again the other day and my god its still one of the best films I've seen come out of Hollywood in the last 10-15 years. Pure cinema.
The exposition (vital part of the caper genre.. and understanding this film) isn't automatically a flaw or bad. It is too much of it in Inception, but its nothing more than a minor setback here.