Review: Inception
Go see it. Seriously. It is well worth full price movie, regardless of where you live. A great story. Good acting. Nice action and special effects. I will be owning this movie to re-watch as much as possible.
I started the review with that statement because, like movies of its type, telling you anything about the story is kind of a spoiler and ultimately this movie is about the story. Its a science fiction action heist movie and if none of those terms appeal to you, then it has some handsome/beautiful actors/actresses and a great director. Also this movie is no A-team. It will take you along for a ride but it is also going to try and make you think.
So that is all I got there. I'm going to discuss the rest in the following spoiler section.
===*SPOILERS*===
So all that being said, I cant' say I am as excited about how awesome Inception is. Most of my friends are. I hear rumblings about people being confused and people having their minds blown, and people having already seen it 5 times. But perhaps I am just getting old but Inception's concept almost felt cliche to me. Don't get me wrong, it was beautifully told, the science fiction was awesome, the action sequences, special effects, and characters were a lot of fun. But in the end, it was no Memento or Prestige. Both of those movie took me on a ride that I wasn't sure where it was going. Inception, I knew the ending by about the time they started explaining Limbo and I was just waiting to see if they'd leave "The Cookie". That is the scene that makes you wonder if anything is real or not.
Again this is a case were expectation was the mind killer. I'd heard that Inception had a twist ending. That it was an awesome mind bending thrill ride that the average movie goer might have a hard time follow. Now I know I'm not the average movie goer, but the "twist" at the end wasn't a twist. It was what I call "The Cookie". Plenty of movies involving memory and reality have done it. For example Total Recall. And the plot really wasn't hard to follow. There were clear delineations of time, color, and action as to what memory level we were at at any time. Sure small details like who's head we were in might have been lost if you weren't paying attention but really, that didn't matter for the story, which is why it wasn't focused on much.
I still think the movie is awesome but I can't find myself enjoying the technological and philosophical concepts of this movie because I already did that when I was a kid watching Total Recall or The Matrix. Neither movie were as well told at this one but the concept was the same.
So all that aside, what are your theories on the movie? Here are some of mine.
1. The Easy One: It was all a dream from the very beginning. The projection of Mal was write and Cobb has been stuck in another dream layer, possibly higher than his own limbo, but not awake yet. None one we met, except Cobb, was real. Some of this theory hinges on the idea that we never saw a the spinner totem fall. I actually can't remember a scene where he wasn't interrupted while testing his totem. But then you need to remember that the totem Cobb uses isn't his totem. It's Mal's. Which means he never uses his totem, ever. One could argue that he is still in limbo because by using Mal's totem rather than his own, he is dying the truth that he is still dreaming, similar to how she denied it in limbo.
Problems: Problem with this theory is the problem with all subjective theories. At this point anything is possible and the story has no meaning. Was anything we were told true? What was false? There is no point in speculating.
2. Cobb was right about reality being reality. Mal did commit actual suicide. Everybody we met was real. It wasn't until the end, when Cobb dived into his own limbo to get Fischer back, did he get stuck. His finding Saito at the beginning/end of the movie, and his waking up on the plane and going home, were all still his personal limbo. He never escaped and the spinner totem never stopped spinning even after the movie stopped.
Problems: Its a nice theory but not a lot of what was given backs it up other than the feel and tone of the falling action starting with waking up. He never interacts with anyone but his father/father-in-law and then there is the spinner at the end which looked like it was going to topple but the movie stopped before we saw it. That being said it gives meaning to the rest of the movie. I like to think that Arthur, Adriane, Eames, and Yusuf existed and were real people.
3. This one is the most odd and I'd need to see more to prove it. But there was a disconnect during the recruitment phase of the heist when we first met Yusuf. Cobb tried out the machine and part of the "new" sleep inducing chemicals. We split from that to when he is in a bathroom trying out his totem and he hallucinates Mal. We know Mal is a projection, so is he in a dream state from that point on?
Problems: This also vaguely supports my first theory as much as itself, sadly. It also isn't a very interesting interpretation from a story standpoint since getting "lost" in the dream during the middle of the heist planning stages is boring.
So, you ask, what would I have done to make the movie more interesting for myself? Probably come up with a better twist than Cobb being stuck in a memory. We were leading that from the very beginning like a train barreling down the middle of a street. Instead make it more interesting. Perhaps Mal wasn't a project but actually Mal, diving into Cobb's dreams in order to make him realize he needs to wake up. Of course this doesn't fit with the shade of Mal we met in Limbo. I agree with him that she was a very flat character. Another interesting twist might have been Adriane. I might be saying this because I've decided I find Ellen Page to be very cute but as the "new" character to the bunch, she could have turned out to be a mind spy, or an inception artist, or a dream rescuer. I guess ultimately I was disappointed that the layers within layers only went one depth, and that was the dreams. It could have been very very interesting to turn the movie on its side and say it was all a dream in order to get Cobb to accept an inception that his wife wasn't dead, in order to wake him from a self-imposed dream.
But that really would have been too much I imagine. We would have gone into indie-film level plot and obfuscation, or saved that for a novel.
I started the review with that statement because, like movies of its type, telling you anything about the story is kind of a spoiler and ultimately this movie is about the story. Its a science fiction action heist movie and if none of those terms appeal to you, then it has some handsome/beautiful actors/actresses and a great director. Also this movie is no A-team. It will take you along for a ride but it is also going to try and make you think.
So that is all I got there. I'm going to discuss the rest in the following spoiler section.
===*SPOILERS*===
So all that being said, I cant' say I am as excited about how awesome Inception is. Most of my friends are. I hear rumblings about people being confused and people having their minds blown, and people having already seen it 5 times. But perhaps I am just getting old but Inception's concept almost felt cliche to me. Don't get me wrong, it was beautifully told, the science fiction was awesome, the action sequences, special effects, and characters were a lot of fun. But in the end, it was no Memento or Prestige. Both of those movie took me on a ride that I wasn't sure where it was going. Inception, I knew the ending by about the time they started explaining Limbo and I was just waiting to see if they'd leave "The Cookie". That is the scene that makes you wonder if anything is real or not.
Again this is a case were expectation was the mind killer. I'd heard that Inception had a twist ending. That it was an awesome mind bending thrill ride that the average movie goer might have a hard time follow. Now I know I'm not the average movie goer, but the "twist" at the end wasn't a twist. It was what I call "The Cookie". Plenty of movies involving memory and reality have done it. For example Total Recall. And the plot really wasn't hard to follow. There were clear delineations of time, color, and action as to what memory level we were at at any time. Sure small details like who's head we were in might have been lost if you weren't paying attention but really, that didn't matter for the story, which is why it wasn't focused on much.
I still think the movie is awesome but I can't find myself enjoying the technological and philosophical concepts of this movie because I already did that when I was a kid watching Total Recall or The Matrix. Neither movie were as well told at this one but the concept was the same.
So all that aside, what are your theories on the movie? Here are some of mine.
1. The Easy One: It was all a dream from the very beginning. The projection of Mal was write and Cobb has been stuck in another dream layer, possibly higher than his own limbo, but not awake yet. None one we met, except Cobb, was real. Some of this theory hinges on the idea that we never saw a the spinner totem fall. I actually can't remember a scene where he wasn't interrupted while testing his totem. But then you need to remember that the totem Cobb uses isn't his totem. It's Mal's. Which means he never uses his totem, ever. One could argue that he is still in limbo because by using Mal's totem rather than his own, he is dying the truth that he is still dreaming, similar to how she denied it in limbo.
Problems: Problem with this theory is the problem with all subjective theories. At this point anything is possible and the story has no meaning. Was anything we were told true? What was false? There is no point in speculating.
2. Cobb was right about reality being reality. Mal did commit actual suicide. Everybody we met was real. It wasn't until the end, when Cobb dived into his own limbo to get Fischer back, did he get stuck. His finding Saito at the beginning/end of the movie, and his waking up on the plane and going home, were all still his personal limbo. He never escaped and the spinner totem never stopped spinning even after the movie stopped.
Problems: Its a nice theory but not a lot of what was given backs it up other than the feel and tone of the falling action starting with waking up. He never interacts with anyone but his father/father-in-law and then there is the spinner at the end which looked like it was going to topple but the movie stopped before we saw it. That being said it gives meaning to the rest of the movie. I like to think that Arthur, Adriane, Eames, and Yusuf existed and were real people.
3. This one is the most odd and I'd need to see more to prove it. But there was a disconnect during the recruitment phase of the heist when we first met Yusuf. Cobb tried out the machine and part of the "new" sleep inducing chemicals. We split from that to when he is in a bathroom trying out his totem and he hallucinates Mal. We know Mal is a projection, so is he in a dream state from that point on?
Problems: This also vaguely supports my first theory as much as itself, sadly. It also isn't a very interesting interpretation from a story standpoint since getting "lost" in the dream during the middle of the heist planning stages is boring.
So, you ask, what would I have done to make the movie more interesting for myself? Probably come up with a better twist than Cobb being stuck in a memory. We were leading that from the very beginning like a train barreling down the middle of a street. Instead make it more interesting. Perhaps Mal wasn't a project but actually Mal, diving into Cobb's dreams in order to make him realize he needs to wake up. Of course this doesn't fit with the shade of Mal we met in Limbo. I agree with him that she was a very flat character. Another interesting twist might have been Adriane. I might be saying this because I've decided I find Ellen Page to be very cute but as the "new" character to the bunch, she could have turned out to be a mind spy, or an inception artist, or a dream rescuer. I guess ultimately I was disappointed that the layers within layers only went one depth, and that was the dreams. It could have been very very interesting to turn the movie on its side and say it was all a dream in order to get Cobb to accept an inception that his wife wasn't dead, in order to wake him from a self-imposed dream.
But that really would have been too much I imagine. We would have gone into indie-film level plot and obfuscation, or saved that for a novel.