Inception

[Mikeyfell]

This topic might seem dated but stick with me it's going somewhere.

Not to long ago I was having a rather heated conversation about Inception. Everyone I've spoken to seems to love it and it sits resolutely in their "top ten" favorite movies or whatever. I didn't like it one bit and feel that it's giving Avatar a run for it's money as the most over rated thing of all times. The friend I was having the discussion with was rather interested in my reasons for the dislike.

and there are 3 reasons

1) Ellen Page's character basically reads a Clifnotes version of the script to the audience

Spoiler: 2)

The massive physical plot hole where the first layer projections loss of gravity causes the second layer projections to lose gravity, but the second layer's loss doesn't effect the third or fourth layer. That pissed me off to no end.

3) there are no character arcs and maybe 2 instances of character development in the whole movie.

His rebuttal was "How would you do it better."
And I have an answer.

I realize that my first and third reasons for disliking the movie were it's greatest strengths. So I'd say run with that and turn Inception into a fake documentary. If Chris Nolan wants to create this scenario and see how people deal with it while it goes horrifically wrong without letting little things like plot or characters get in the way of his fun. I'd tell him to have a blast with that. Make the whole movie like a interview with Leonardo DiCaprio. Or someone finds out that he Inceptionized What's-his-name and gets arrested and put on trial for it. Then there would be a half decent framing device for the million explanatory information dumps that Nolan just couldn't live without. They could even use some sort of dream scanning device to use footage from the movie as evidence.

That's how I'd make Inception better, short of hiding it under the sofa and watching Dark Knight again.

So thoughts?
Opinions?
Flame?
Death threats?
Anything?

 

[DefunctTheory]

Inception was a concept movie. It was about an idea: not necessarily the characters in the movie.

If you went into the movie expecting anything else, of course you're going to be disappointed.

This, compared to Avatar, which failed miserably at everything it claimed to be.

EDIT: A lot of movies suffer from this. People wanted something from the movie that it was not designed to give. For example: T4. Everyone wanted a second T2, denying what most people recognized: There CAN'T be another T2, because T2 was just too great. T4 was made to be an action movie that pushed the Terminator storyline along. Honestly, if you look at T4 as a successor to T2, you'll be disappointed. Look at it as a pure action movie, and it's actually pretty good.