Movie Review: Inception

[More Fun To Compute]

Inception

Inception is the latest Science Fiction blockbuster from from Christopher Nolan, the Director of Memento and Batman Begins. Like a Batman movie it is not lacking in production values but sadly as a human drama with a novel twist based on a strange quirk in the human condition it falls far short of Memento. While you might expect the theme of dreams to be a well researched foray into the realms of the really weird things that happen when your head hits the pillow, it instead delivers an all to familiar adventure into the realms of hyperreality and well worn heist movie conventions. In this way it comes across as a cyberpunk movie with characters who wear expensive suits instead of trenchcoats.

Special Effects

Inception is far from a bad movie. While the science is pure nonsense it does great things visually in terms of showing a video game like hyperreality. When I say hyperreality, I mean that the concept of the movie swings around a concept that dreams can be built like architecture blueprints and by using a almost Cronenberg style device the characters can enter these dreams. Unlike real dreams the movie dream worlds are vivid in ways that real life is not. Rain is more rainy, buildings twist are like photoshopped pictures of buildings with features from abstract paintings, explosions are more explosive.

No REM for the wicked

It's a heist movie, except the twist is that bank vault is in somebodies mind.

The main character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, has personal issues that must be resolved by the end of the movie. He must recruit a team of specialists including a newcomer who happens to be a an unusually empathetic and attractive young woman. There must be a part in the movie where the complexity of what is going on is pushed just a little further than the characters expect. There must be action sequences with only seconds left before the time runs out that seem to last for hours.

It doesn't really have enough of what the cyberpunks call EDGE. The science is too wishy washy to consider this film a proper Science Fiction movie. The schizophrenic doubt about the nature of reality isn't strong enough to match an adaptation from a Philip K Dick story such as A Scanner Darkly. So at the end of the day we have a good, if sometimes by the numbers, heist movie with high production values that inexpertly dabbles with concepts from these other influences.

Thumbs up.

Worth it for the special effects and the quality tailoring.

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

A decent review, if somewhat short. I'll concede that scenes like the assembly of the team and some of the more mundane action bits do feel somewhat by-the-numbers, but the concept of layering dreams, the zero-gravity sequence and the notion that the goal of this heist is not to steal something but rather to leave something behind elevates it above the realm of mediocre or even good movies. That's just my opinion, however.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

A decent review, if somewhat short. I'll concede that scenes like the assembly of the team and some of the more mundane action bits do feel somewhat by-the-numbers, but the concept of layering dreams, the zero-gravity sequence and the notion that the goal of this heist is not to steal something but rather to leave something behind elevates it above the realm of mediocre or even good movies. That's just my opinion, however.

Thanks. I guess I have a short attention span or don't like going into too much detail.

I wanted to write it in a way that didn't include too many spoilers so I left out the details of the inception concept. I don't think that the idea of implanting thoughts makes it stand out that much apart that much and it only really seems like a special idea because they build it up as being something impossible in the fiction. Recently Dollhouse dealt with the idea much better on TV and in fiction it goes back to the Manchurian Candidate at least. I think that breaking in to plant things or to trick people into think you breaking in to steal something when you are just trying to influence them makes it more like a spy/undercover police plot so it didn't mix things up that much to me.

The stand out aspect of it to me seemed to be the creation of a man made reality that is more psychologically convincing than the real thing and how well it presented that cinematically. Thinking about it, I would have mentioned the anti monopoly theme and how the motivations and personalities of the business leader characters were presented as I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of the film. Layering dreams was something that seemed to work for the movie but I never really got the impression that it stood for anything other than a way to say that dream felt more real. Like a hypnotist saying, you are going deeper, now you are even deeper, and so on.