was inception really hard too understand?

[nothingspringstomind]

Inception is easy to understand, Memento takes two watches to get, but Primer takes a degree course to follow.

Ninja'd

I was going to talk about Primer as anyone who says they understood that first time through is either lying or a savant.

OT; Inception was an excellent movie that really tickled me intellectually but was nowhere near as confusing to me as people said it would be.

Then again, i have been spending the last two years reading some of the heaviest science fiction i can get my grubby little hands on so most sci fi seems "dumbed down" to me now.

It's not, i've just got my headspace somewhere where i expect detailed theoretical physics lectures halfway through a plot. (Steven Baxter, i'm looking at you. Yeah, you! And that Arthur C. Clarke bloke!)

 

[somethingprofound]

And here I was thinking he never escaped the dream him and his wife were in...

and Le Chien Andalou... eugh eyes and The Matrix stole something eh?

 

[Amphoteric]

The only thing I didn't understand about the film is how a Japanese Businessman can get murder charges dropped by the US in a single phonecall.

 

[frizzlebyte]

I made the mistake of listening to the hype so when I actually saw it I was expecting a whole lot more and inevitably ended on "that is it? come on now..."

It's a cool movie tho, I wish there were more like this but deeper.

I had a little bit of that thought myself. I loved the movie, but it was not exactly as great as the hype would have suggested it might be. I think I was expecting something more akin to the Matrix. While there were brushes of philosophy painted in the movie, it didn't go as deeply as i would have liked.

OT: No, I understood the movie just fine. If someone couldn't follow it, they really weren't trying. That, or they were on something.

 

[justcallmeslow]

1. If the "spinny thing" fell then each character was indeed a separate person.
2. If it kept spinning, all the characters in the movie were just projections of the protagonist (DiCaprio and they were just different aspects of his subconsciousness, representations of different parts of his personality.

Here's something to realize. He did something rather stupid partway through the movie: He explained how the mini-top worked to someone. The architect. So it's very real that it IS a dream, even if it functions normally as if he wasn't in one.

When he's just met the new architect and is in the warehouse with her you see the top fall over. It's shown that it will spin indefinitely in dreams. You see him get back to that base level, the same as the warehouse, after the job, so it's definitely NOT a dream.

 

[Booze Zombie]

I found it pretty straight forward. I can never tell if people are joking when they go "WITHIN A DREAM, WITHIN A DREAM, WITHIN A DR-", so I'm not sure on the general understanding of it all.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I thought it was pretty straight forward. It surprises me if people didn't understand what was going on, that counts for Sucker Punch aswell.

I have a suspicion that a lot of people don't really pay attention when watching films, rather than they are too stupid to understand or follow them.

 

[kasperbbs]

No, i had no trouble understanding whats going on, they spent a lot of time explaining everything, perhaps a little too much.

 

[AngelicSven]

To me, Inception was extremely straightforward if you paid attention. Though I had a friend who didn't get it, she had to watch it three times total.

I meant show those people Primer or Memento, though I didn't find those to be the movie equivalents of Quantum Mechanics either.

 

[SillyBear]

It had a completely straight narrative. Not one thing was hard to follow.

 

[TriggerOnly]

not even alittle.

 

[pearcinator]

I understood it but it was over-complicated. There was so much exposition the whole way through it that they even spurted out more plot during the action scenes. It was good but far from Nolan's best imo (The Prestige)

I thought Memento and Dark Knight were both better than Inception too. Inception also had one of those 'lol troll'd!' endings I despise so much...give me a fucking ending!

 

[Custard_Angel]

Inception was a dumb persons smart movie. That's why it was popular. Watch Primer if you're looking for a smart persons smart movie. Basically shit all is explained and it requires you to know stuff to be able to understand it all.

 

[Outright Villainy]

I guess it's confusing if you're not paying attention. But seriously, you're paying up to ten bucks to see it, surely everyone is going to be, you know, watching it.

I don't know anyone confused by it anyway, beyond the whole ambiguity at the end, which was pretty intentional of course.

 

[Dogstile]

Not the hardest thing to understand in the world. Dreams, projections if the spinny top span forever, real world if not. Time warps the deeper you go.

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

Inception was ridiculously simple to understand.
Yes - it is clever, and I'm not trying to take that away from the film or the writer/director, but Inception is very clever in a totally unpretentious way. It lays everything out nice and clearly without trying to confuse or mislead the audience, and much like the film's main action sequences and overall setup we can see layer after layer after layer as the director reveals them to us, and in that revelation we get the overall genius and intelligence of the film.

There is one tiny, tiny thing that annoys me about Inception though.
The spinning top at the end.
And the way that people obsess over it.
Just saying, but it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER if the GODDAMN SPINNING TOP falls or not - it is a CATHARTIC FUCKING ENDING for Cobbs character arc because he walks away. Cobb no longer cares, therefore, if the audience was following the film, they should no longer care about the stupid fucking spinning top.
It wasn't even his to begin with - so the point of it isn't to say "Oh this could be a dream", but instead to say "Look at where he is now - he has left his past, his guilt etc. behind him. This was his last job. The totem is no longer needed, his guilt is no longer needed, all that he wants is right in front of him now."

...

 

[Daveman]

It was a good movie and not all that complicated if you paid attention until they decided to pull the massive dick move at the end.

Inception was ridiculously simple to understand.
Yes - it is clever, and I'm not trying to take that away from the film or the writer/director, but Inception is very clever in a totally unpretentious way. It lays everything out nice and clearly without trying to confuse or mislead the audience, and much like the film's main action sequences and overall setup we can see layer after layer after layer as the director reveals them to us, and in that revelation we get the overall genius and intelligence of the film.

There is one tiny, tiny thing that annoys me about Inception though.
The spinning top at the end.
And the way that people obsess over it.
Just saying, but it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER if the GODDAMN SPINNING TOP falls or not - it is a CATHARTIC FUCKING ENDING for Cobbs character arc because he walks away. Cobb no longer cares, therefore, if the audience was following the film, they should no longer care about the stupid fucking spinning top.
It wasn't even his to begin with - so the point of it isn't to say "Oh this could be a dream", but instead to say "Look at where he is now - he has left his past, his guilt etc. behind him. This was his last job. The totem is no longer needed, his guilt is no longer needed, all that he wants is right in front of him now."

...

The thing is the spinning top at the end undoes all the good you said about it not trying to confuse or mislead the audience. It causes them to question the entire film. In fact, if it doesn't matter and we are meant to feel relieved and no longer care then why is it the last thing we see? I disagree with your interpretation although I think it would be a better movie (or at least one I'd prefer) if you were right.

The way I see it is that as we flash back to the top spinning before immediately going to a black screen we realise that the doubt associated with it has followed him back through the layers of the dream and he will never be fully settled as you say he is. If he had left it spinning and just walked away I would totally agree, but it flashed back at the end and that's why I think you're wrong.

I mean even Total Recall managed to get THAT part right and didn't deliberately force the viewer to question the film's entire plot.

 

[quancer]

I don't think the average moviegoer would've found Inception confusing if they weren't primed to be confused by critics and word-of-mouth. So instead of following the plot as they would intuitively, they perhaps looked too deeply into some of the more extraneous threads in the movie, or lingered too long on questions the movie itself had no answers for.

People should keep in mind that "edgy" movies are always marketed as complex and multi-layered, but that doesn't mean they are; it's best to just approach them like you would any other movie and not let your insecurities muddle the experience.

That said, I felt Inception was a clumsy movie, more interested in conning its audience into admiring its supposed brillance than winning its audience over by being engaging, interesting, or truly entertaining. The Hollywood hype machine is, of course, always complicit when it comes to pushing these sorts of movies, but critics really should've shown the courage to call the movie out on its narrative shortcomings -- shortcomings I believe Inception wouldn't have gotten away with if it had existed in a vacuum, without the "edgy and intelligent" hype at its back.

 

[Deverfro]

It wasnt complicated at all, Its just a little confusing. And the ending is ace.

 

[Nyce1]

The stupid spinning top thing in my opinion was about to fall over. Silly movie ended before we could see. WTB 10 more seconds at ending!