“And it was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milkbar. And I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise. And the shivers crawling up like slow, malenky lizards and then down again. Because I knew what she sang. It was a bit from the glorious 9th, by Ludwig van.”
(via fuckyeahghibli)
… you say the dreams didn’t seem ‘dreamy’ enough, did you not see the parts where they could just change their surroundings however they wanted?…
I loved those parts. It happened like three times in the entire film, and the bulk of it was already in the trailer.
I knew when Cobb started lecturing Ariadne on not changing the dream world for fear of alerting the subconscious, and when someone says that “dreams always seem real when you’re in them” that this movie wasn’t what I was expecting.
Dreams definitely do not seem real when you’re in them. In dreams we fly effortlessly through the air, fall into infinite chasms, posses supernatural strength etc. I’ve almost never had a dream that didn’t break some basic laws of nature. Yet the rules of the real world were absolutely unbreakable for about 95% of Inception. That’s because this movie isn’t about dreams. It’s just a vehicle for a heist film.
… Arthur flat out says to Ariadne, “… They’re looking for the dreamer. For me.” and in the snow level Cobb says “Eames, this is your dream.”
Amazing how he strains the third wall with this dialog and I still didn’t catch it. Ariadne knows exactly who the dreamer is, and so does Eames. This is a really bad, heavy-handed technique, used solely for the viewer’s benefit. There is so much dialog like that in this movie, and it accomplishes surprisingly little.
In my opinion there was a lot of emotional investment, especially with Cobb. Between the death of his wife and losing his kids, he’s gone through a lot and this job is how he’ll be able to finally see his children again, and I think that would be worth the effort…
Yeah, it was obvious to me how the movie was supposed to appeal to me emotionally. I just didn’t buy it. At all.
Time to watch The Science of Sleep again.
Inception: A Cinematic Twinky
I did not enjoy Inception. I left the theater feeling confused and unsatisfied with an inadequate story. Since my experience was apparently anomalous, I decided to try to flesh out exactly why I disliked it.
I think the main reason I was so disappointed was that I was expecting a cerebral movie about dreams and I got an action movie. Salon’s review said that “Inception may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan’s dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay” which is a low blow, but accurate. There’s hardly anything dreamlike about any of the dreams, with the exception perhaps of limbo and Dicaprio’s subconscious.
Many things were unexplained, or inadequately explained: whose dream we were in at the time, how on earth the level designer imposed their design on the dream, why Dicaprio’s character needed to perform inception on his wife to get her out of limbo when she already knew she was dreaming etc.
There was also an awful lack of emotional investment: I didn’t understand how achieving the goal that they were intending to achieve was at all worth the effort. Character development was woeful, and I struggled to identify with Dicaprio’s character, even though he was focused on to the detriment of other characters (notably Gordon-Levitt’s and Page’s).
Nolan took a serviceable story, gutted it, and injected it with action-movie fluff like a cinematic twinky. He managed to stretch it out to 2:30 without adequately fleshing out either the narrative or the characters. He needs to make another Memento.
