Inception

[mosespa]

The new Christopher Nolan movie means that I now have to reassess my opinion of Leonardo DiCaprio as a talentless hack who only gets work because teenage girls swoon over him.

I may have been wrong.

Note this...it may never happen again.

Thought the movie itself was effing great...but then, I'm going to say that about a Christopher Nolan movie.

What do you lot think?

[oz1701]

Y so serious ?

i have no plans to see it.

[danielcaux]

Talentless hack? Really? I recognized him as a talented young actor since Gilbert Grape and Basketball Diaries. But yeah, around the time of Romeo+Juliet, Titanic and The Beach I tended to view him just like a pretty face prop put into a movie in order to cash in teenage girl money. I'm pretty sure that Titanic wouldn't have sold half the tickets it did had they put, I don't know, Jeremy Piven in the lead role.

Haven't seen Inception yet, but I'm eagerly waiting for it. It looks like the Sci-fi movie Matrix initially attempted to be in the first reel but wasn't able to fully become in the remaining of the film.

[Damn!t]

Matrix should have stopped right after the first movie. Further parts became just another american good vs. evil gunfight bullshit.

I'm def. looking forward to this.
If mossy is reassessing his opinions, then theres nothing here to discuss more lol.

[danielcaux]

No, even in the first movie, after the first reel or so, they flushed away thru the toilet the interesting sci-fi premise (becoming aware of virtual reality and dealing with it) and transformed the flick into a no brain action gunslinger and martial art fantasy with stupid messianic overtones. Because of that I found the highly flawed The 13th Floor the better film, along with Existenz, both released in 1999 too. Those films hold true to their initial premise and develope on it.

Anyway, it seems that Leo still has the touch with the ladies. Hilarious!

[Cowards]

Wish I could make teenage girls cry. Without punching them, I mean.

... with punching them too...

Um... Inception. I'll see it later yeah.

[henno]

Inception is a great movie!

It has everything, an intelligent plot, great action sequences, great locations, relevance, fantastic acting all round......

definitely the best movie i have seen this year, beating shutter island easily into a distant second place.

as regards christopher nolan, i have seen most of his movies to date:

the dark knight, memento, insomnia, inception, the prestige, batman begins....
all very good movies.... memento was ground breaking... but insomnia was a major disappointment after it. The two batman movies have been highly entertaining whilst remaining uber cool at the same time.

the prestige is an interesting one, it came out at a time of a very similar movie 'the illusionist' ... which i think it beat hands down... while the ill8usionist was darker pictorially, the prestige had a darker story....

[oz1701]

The new Christopher Nolan movie means that I now have to reassess my opinion of Leonardo DiCaprio as a talentless hack who only gets work because teenage girls swoon over him.

What do you lot think?

it occurs to me that you are either saying he is, or saying he isnt, depending on where the implied punctuation goes.

i dont want to have to watch the movie to find out which.

[Damn!t]

Saw it. Very clever script. Great film.
In some ways it remindes me of Memento.
I highly reccomend it folks.

[mosespa]

Oz...in order to reassess my opinion that he's a talentless hack, I first have to think of him as a talentless hack.

I now have to reassess that opinion.

[oz1701]

so now that you have reassessed your opinion of him what is your opinion of him,

a talented hack ?

[danielcaux]

A talented hack-er ...of dreams.

[Hudini]

The new Christopher Nolan movie means that I now have to reassess my opinion of Leonardo DiCaprio as a talentless hack who only gets work because teenage girls swoon over him.

You should see "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "Marvin's Room" if you haven't already.

[David Smith]

Really good film, definitely one of the decade's best action films that i can think of. Decent storyline, quality action sequences and fairly intriguing characters (at least for compared to other genre films). Very much enjoyed it

[danielcaux]

Finally was able to watch the film yesterday!

I hate to say it but I was rather ...disapointed

I believe many of the thoughts I'm about to share could be taken as spoilers, so beware.

I want it so much to like this film, but encountered some very significant problems that prevented me from enjoying it. Mainly the almost total lack of emotional relevance of the dream sequences. This are mostly structured as "heist" but with the serious handicap of not being able to elicite a real sense of danger in the viewer, or at least in me, 'cause after all it's only a dream, there's nothing at stake really; so one doesnt' really give a _____ (how can I politely replace "fuck" here?) if they succed or not, or if they get caught. The writers were obviously aware of this problem and tried to fix it with the whole "limbo" concept, but meeeh, "they can't wake up because they are sedated, so they would go to the deepest level of dreaming for what would feel like eternity and then gone insane when finnally waking up"? Come on! It wasn't believable at all! Wouldn't be more logical that they would just stop dreaming and remain simply sleeping? Like you know, what happens every night when a dream ends at 2:00 am?

A side effect of this lack of emotional relevance was that it led to a situation where there was a cognitive dissonance with what I was watching in the screen and what I was listening in the soundtrack: the ominous and grandiose music was always telling me "This is important! This is big! This is dangerous!" while my mind, following the story, was totally calm and unconcerned because of the lack of danger.

So, that was the main problem for me, but there were other logical issues, like the dream within a dream premise, and the dream-time conclusions the movie try to impose "as laws of dreaming". I guess that we all have had those dreams where we believe we have wake up but are in reallity just into "another" dream. It seems that we would be dreaming that we are dreaming, but that's not at all the case, what really is happening is that we just dreamt that we had wake up, that's all, and then we continue in the same dream (perhaps in a different setting) but is not another dream, and CERTAINLY is not the dream of our dreamt avatar that we dream is sleeping and having a dream! It doesn't work as that, doesn't make sense. So the whole exponential increase of "thought speed" that makes the time dilate in "deeper dreams" is a really big fallacy that I wasn't able to believe. The characters in a dream are not the ones that are dreaming, it is still the real people who are dreaming that all is a dream, so the dream-time should work in the same way, not exponentially slower. Also, from my experience, "dreams within dreams" can only work backwards, going from the deepest level of unawareness ("this is real") to different levels of awareness about all being just a dream ("I'm dreaming that I had a dream", but NEVER "I'm dreaming that I'm dreaming").

Even less believeable was the idea that each "dream level" was the product of some character dreaming within the main dream (or dreaming in some of the sub-dreams). So this is Cobb's dream, and then this the girl's dream in that dream, and this the tourist's dream in the dream of the girl? Nah. I can believe that each real individual could have a main dream and that they could jump from one to the other thanks to the machine, but that the "dreamt characters" were the ones having the sub-dreams? Pfff! I mean, they try to imply that if one character is dreaming within the dream, and by some reason they were to be killed by someone while the were asleep in that dream, then they would also die in the sub-dream. Doesn't make sense, if they are asleep in the first dream they wouldn't notice that they were killed in it, so they wouldn't "wake up", because their counciousness would be in the second dream unaware of what is happening on the first, so it wouldn't affect them. Unless the fimlmakers had invented a dumb enough world were the subdreams were the product of, and existed only inside the little dreamt represation of a character's brain and nervous system within the dream! Which would be hilarious non sense.

Other thing, the use of the dream machine within the dreams was totally unnecesary. What was that supposed to represent? In a dream they could have perfectly use any other kind of device (a door, a book, a magic wand, and interdimensional portal) to induce the jump from dream to another dream.There's no need to sedate a character in a dream to make him sleep and dream! That's silly. The architech should be able to just throw everybody into the next dream, and that's all. There were other issues that escape from my mind at the moment, but mainly those were the big problems, logical holes that made totally unbelievable the mechanics of dreams in the movie.

That said, the movie did have many interesting elements, out of which the most captivating was definitely the wife character, and her role within the dreams. I think that was really well done, from a logical and emotional standpoint. A neat mix between Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Agent Smith from The Matrix. Although I felt a little let down with the final resolution, 'cause I was kind of hoping that at the end it would be revealed that she indeed was REAL, that despite of being dead and with no physical body, Cobb had accidentally "downloaded" her counciousness into his mind (a byproduct of the "50 years" of shared dreaming), and she was now living there, kinda like Being John Malkovich, trying always to kill the "invaders" and make him come with her into their dream world.

Other good things: the action scenes in the hotel were top notch.The training sequences really cool, with all the delightful Escher architecture. The totems. The use of Piaf's slowed down song as the main motif in the soundtrack during the action scenes.

It's sad because the film had the potential to be a real masterpiece, but there were too many flaws on it. Oh well, at least is for sure a refreshing premise, an ambitious film with imagination that's not afraid of not following the plot/story rules of big summer blockbusters, and for that alone deserves to be watched by everybody who is interested in cinema.