I just saw Inception. It was brilliant, and I’m astonished that it got made in Hollywood. It’s not a movie you can watch with your brain turned off – and that’s its glory.
Inception is brilliant on many levels. It works as a science-fiction movie, it works as a thriller, it works as psychological horror. What makes it a true science-fiction movie is that the writers play fair: everything you need to know to understand the mind-bendingly bizarre things that fly by on the screen is told to you in advance, but blink and you’ll miss the exposition. Effects follow causes; effects may come out of nowhere and slap you in the kisser but always, always, there is a terrible inevitability about them when the causes are revealed. And I speak of the psychological level of the action as well as the physical.
It works as a thriller, too. There’s enough gunplay and explosions and spectacular collapses and paranoid tension for the summer-movie crowd. In fact, through much of the movie the characters are in thrillerland on three different levels of unreality simultaneously. But unreality bites, oh yes. The obvious threat is that death in the movie’s deeper dreamworlds can kill you or leave you catatonic in baseline reality. But down at the bottom of the rabbithole…
…the deadliest enemy of all is far subtler, a simple and infectious idea that has already killed one victim and laid waste to the protagonist’s life. There are moments in this film that are epistemic horror. And oh, yes, you will see it coming. And it will move you to awe and pity and terror anyway when it arrives.
Props to the writers for not taking the easy way out. Cobb, our tormented hero, is led out of his coils by a pretty young woman named Ariadne, but not because they fall in love; they don’t. No, her intellect is what saves them both. And the question raised by the climactic moment of epistemic horror is never…quite…resolved. The screen goes dark before the top quite tumbles over.
If the movie has any weakness, it’s the leading man. Leonardo DiCaprio is no longer a fluffy prettyboy, but he is a few points shy of being able to do the kind of tormented intensity the role of Cobb really needed. His performance is credible, however, and he is backed by a strong supporting cast. Ken Watanabe is as always superb playing the Japanese industrialist Saito; Tom Hardy and Ellen Page (two actors I’d never seen before) are similarly excellent as Eames and Ariadne.
If this doesn’t cop next year’s film Hugo, there is no justice.
Here is another interpretation the movie:
http://halphillips.tumblr.com/post/822919795/inception
What do you think?
Interesting little coincidence re: casting critique: my favorite film critic in the whole world (literally – he’s in Russia though his English is nearly fluent), Sergey Berezhnoy, who specializes in sci-fi movies, just reviewed “Salt” and he complained in reverse (main character casting great, 100% of male supporting cast is WAY mis-cast).
Here’s the link to his review blog for anyone who’s able to read Russian – http://barros.livejournal.com/1058225.html
My favorite invention of his is the classification of assorted SyFi-channelish-“monster fish” “why-the-heck-do-you-even-bother-calling-it-sci-fi” movies as “seafood horror” – unfortunately most of his incredible humor gets lost in my ugly translation so I was afraid to even attempt to translate the “Salt” review.
Thanks for a wonderful thoughtful review lacking any spoilers whatsoever – a rarity!
[I assume spoilers are OK here.]
The very first thing about this film is that it is beautiful to look at. The dream-makers call themselves “architects” not without cause.
I was surprised at how well DiCaprio did here. He’s aged well since the only other movie he’s been in that I liked: Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, which he very nearly ruined.
As to the epistemology, two points:
First, Cobb’s insight that the Mal in his dreams was not the real Mal, because she was too perfect. I had the sense there that she was incapable of surprising him, too, which is something only reality can do. I am never surprised in my dreams. Things may take a weird turn, but they do not surprise. For example, I’m always embarrassed at finding myself naked in public, and I can’t figure out how I got that way — but I am not surprised.
Second, the absolutely perfect last shot of the film, which wakes up the audience and returns us to our reality. The key there is not whether not the top falls over; it’s that Cobb walked away from it, leaving it right out there in the open where anybody could pick it up. He had found a level he was satisfied with, that he found fulfilling.
As I’ve said elsewhere, “Cobb walks away from it to save himself from Mal’s crisis of belief. This is a situation where no test, no experiment can prove that Cobb has at last returned to the True Reality. His triumph is exactly that he no longer demands proof. Cobb’s walking away from the top, leaving it on the table where anyone could pick it up, and simply embracing his children and his life, is an act of amazing bravery, grace, and faith.”
Enough to make you wish someone had waited another 30 years to make a movie out of Urusula K. LeGuin’s ‘Lathe of Heaven’. Mind it would have required numerous and prolonged peek-throughs to reality and preceding events. I haven’t seen the A&E effort of 2002, which by all accounts is deficient to the story.
>Enough to make you wish someone had waited another 30 years to make a movie out of Urusula K. LeGuin’s ‘Lathe of Heaven’.
I wouldn’t care… ‘Lathe of Heaven’ was a fundamentally stupid book. I remember reading up to a certain point and realizing (a) dammit, LeGuin is a paid-up member of the Society for Projecting Your New-Age Fuzzy-Mindedness Onto Taoism, and (b) oh Ghu, in a couple of paragraphs she’ s going to compare the protagonist to an uncarved block and get it wrong. And she did, and it took all my self-restraint not to hurl the book at a wall with great force.
Actually, I don’t feel quite the same way. While it works very well as a thriller, I’m a bit non-plussed about the movie as science fiction. In particular, I found it lacked internal consistency (or I missed something). Typically, I felt the timescales in the various levels were wrong. Action on level three was quite far from being long enough compared to level two. Likewise level four to level three.
And I still can’t figure out how Saito got so old and Cobb didn’t, seeing as he dies after Cobb enters that level.
But maybe I just missed something.
My assessment: very good movie, but not excellent.
Only because you mentioned not having seen Ellen Page before, let me go off-topic a second and suggest (strongly) you see “Juno” sometime.
Don’t forget it works as a heist film as well, it’s got the typical planning, execution, and improvisation as seen in that time-honoured format.
Inception has great appeal in large part because it is cerebral and offers great mental exercise in addition to entertainment. Many people are focused on direct interpretation of the plot and ending, and the movie is certainly worthy of this creative appreciation. Just as there are many levels to the dream sequences, there are many levels of interpretation. (Spoiler Alert, read no further if you haven’t seen it).
As for the ending (top spinning uncertainty), at the first level, there is the seminal question of “Is Cobb still in a dream state or has he emerged back into reality?” At a deeper level, there is the broader question of “Does dream versus reality really matter if he has found happiness and proceeds of his own volition?” Then deeper still into the epistemic realm with the question of “Can you actually fool yourself in a dream?” All this, and we’ve only just scratched the surface.
Many moons ago, a topic such as this could easily turn into an all-night bull session fueled by beer, pizza, and unbound conceptuality. How I miss those days.
>Many moons ago, a topic such as this could easily turn into an all-night bull session fueled by beer, pizza, and unbound conceptuality. How I miss those days.
Get thee to an SF convention. They’re still like that.
> And I still can’t figure out how Saito got so old and Cobb didn’t, seeing as he dies after Cobb enters that level.
I took it as Saito going one level deeper than Cobb’n’Mal’s world. By the time Cobb makes it in, Saito’s been there a long, long time.
Levels: Real world (Airplane) | Van | Hotel | Mountain Base | Cobb’n’Mal | Saito’s home
I saw it last night. I’m still absorbing it, but my main thought on the film: god damn that score. Wall-of-sound oppression clutching its claws into me and never ever letting go till the lights came up. It drove me crazy until I realized what they were doing with it, but it didn’t stop being mind-numbing. Very few moments without the score playing; almost purely in the first moments of entering a new dream level. Never gives a time to sit back and breathe.
> I took it as Saito going one level deeper than Cobb’n’Mal’s world. By the time Cobb makes it in, Saito’s been there a long, long time.
No, belay that. New thought:
Cobb brings Fischer into his dreamworld limbo using his projection of Mal. When Saito dies, he falls into his own, parallel limbo. The trick is how Cobb manages to make the transition.
My thought while watching the movie was ‘this is Clever.’
How many crazy dead movie wives does Leonardo need, anyway? In 2010 alone there was this one and the one he had in Shutter Island.
Everything I’ve heard indicates that Abre los ojos (1997) is a superior take on this premise. It is a personal homework assignment of mine to see its American adaptation, Vanilla Sky. Inception treats the dreamscape mainly as a plot device to enable far more explosions, car wrecks, and gunfights than is practically and legally feasible in a real city; and the movie as a whole suffers for it. There are all sorts of arbitrary rules for “how dreams work” that don’t have much basis in reality. Why must our subconscious defenses take the form of guys with guns, anyway? Why not Barney or Mega Man or something even more fantastic? It wouldn’t be any weirder than what many people dream about and accept as perfectly normal in the dream. (It’s only when we awake that we go “Whoa, that’s fucked up.”)
Oh, and I’ve gone down to three levels of dream-recursion before — without so much as a Unisom let alone the magic plot-device sedatives from the movie. The dreams get shorter and vaguer the deeper you go.
On the upside I’ve started to really like Ellen Page no matter what movie she’s in. She looks cute in a suit.
Jeff Read:
> Why must our subconscious defenses take the form of guys with guns, anyway?
He’s the scion of a megacorp, probably with his own legion of very real armed guards. Seemed perfectly logical to me.
If the attacker is setting the rules of the engagement, they are going to try to keep the defender from realizing it is a dream. Thus, as real as possible. Defender’s mind will react in a way that is realistic to the setting, thus the armed guards.
Though, I admit I would have liked to see the environments get more in on the action.
> Oh, and I’ve gone down to three levels of dream-recursion before — without so much as a Unisom let alone the
> magic plot-device sedatives from the movie. The dreams get shorter and vaguer the deeper you go.
Can I read that as “bah-humbug?” : )
Speaking of movies that you just can’t watch with your brain turned off .
Eric, what do you think about David Lynch’s Lost Highway?
ESR says: Haven’t seen it.
I was gonna say “it works as a caper movie, too”, but Ian beat me to it. He’s right; that’s its basic plot framework, and it hits all the points.
My feeling, coming out of the theater, was that I had just seen Dark City, Blade Runner, The Dark Knight, and The (first) Matrix all laid over each other and welded to seamlessness. This was the most cerebrally taxed I had felt at the beginning of a film in some time; I found myself having to focus intensely on everything said for the first 30 minutes. The ability to relax and enjoy the explosions in the middle actually came as a relief. I’m also quite agreed on the point of epistemic horror. The best horror, IMO, is horror you can really feel long after the movie is over.
I’m liking Joseph Gordon-Levitt more; he’s aged well since 3rd Rock. Seeing Ellen Page here makes me want to see Juno more. Knowing Christopher Nolan wrote and directed this makes me want to see Memento more. (As the story goes, he first started working on Inception’s story while he was finishing Memento.) Tom Berenger turned a nice trick of “that guy… he looks familiar, and yet…”. And while I’ve liked nearly all of Hans Zimmer’s soundtracks, and enjoyed the music on Inception, I didn’t even realize he was the man on this one too until the credits rolled.
Overall, very well-crafted art. Other sci-fi directors could learn a lot from Nolan’s pictures, particularly how to tell the difference between something you should just present as “magic” and not waste time explaining, and something worth dwelling on.
It even has a little light humor. “I bought the airline… it seemed neater…”
Just ran across Cathy’s entries on this, and it reminded me to add: this was another one of those movies that struck me as being much, much better than the trailer indicated. Examples of this are rare enough for me to be notable:
My Cousin Vinny
The Hangover (from what I’ve heard; I’ve not seen it yet)
…Seriously, that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Curiously, both are comedies; this is the first one touted as a sci-fi thriller.
Add Sherlock Holmes to that list. Some movies just need better marketing. OTOH, contrast that with movies that are a disappointment compared with their trailers: too many to count. Seems you could get people to see a movie about watching paint dry if you make the trailer sound good enough:
*Don LaFontaine voice*: “In a world…where change happens…very slowly….but the results….are extraordinary. Watching Paint Dry will!…..leave!…..you!….breathless!”
I was tempted to shell out the bucks to see Inception just so I could comment, but then my inner Scotsman (my grandmother always said we had Scotch-Irish ancestry, to refer to another thread) came up with a cheaper solution. I look forward to the DVD release.
Yours,
Tom
Morgan: indeed, the trailer exceeds the movie so frequently that I come to expect that. In fact, I accept it as rational; it’s advertising, after all. And that’s why trailers that are overshadowed by their films stick out like sore thumbs.
(Come to think of it, I’d add Dark City, too. And The Arrival.)
I am, of course, discounting arthouse films, documentaries, and other films that are understood as having narrow appeal (whether or not they actually do). I’m speaking specifically of films where marketing clearly and aggressively tried to convey to the average movie lover that they should come down to the theater on opening night and shell out their $10, and bring a friend if they can. And yes, pretty much anyone from this short is an indicator that they’re trying.
There seems to be certain aspects of a film that marketers treat as trailer candy – SFX, big names, quotable quotes. All are hung on a 1-3 minute version of the story. In the case of Inception, marketing clearly didn’t know what to do with the plot. In general, they have a hard time handling anything sufficiently high concept. It’s easy to show aliens, robots, and wizards, but a film with a novel idea has to rely on critics and word of mouth.
Tom: I heartily encourage you to persuade your inner Scotsman to see it in a theater. :-) One of my favorite moments of the film was the final blackout; the entire audience gasped. I think I did, too. Occasionally, the group experience is worth the trip and the money.
I am curious, ESR. What do you think of Dark Knight?
ESR says: Have not seen it. After “Inception”, am now more interested.
Didn’t Warhol do that once?
Paul Brinkley,
> Occasionally, the group experience is worth the trip and the money.
I hadn’t even considered the group experience. I was only thinking screen size.
Yours,
Tom
I haven’t seen Inception yet, but here’s a little more visual/cognitive overload.
You’re probably thinking of Sleep, which is 321 minutes of Warhol’s friend doing exactly that.
Hey! Don’t look at me like that! I grew up in a family of artists.
Wow! That just sounded sooo wrong!
> You’re probably thinking of Sleep, which is 321 minutes of Warhol’s friend doing exactly that.
I am a fan of the twist ending: he doesn’t wake up! Oooohh!
Empire was a little lofty for me, and Kiss left a bitter taste in my mouth.
Ya ya sorry sorry. Not a fan of Warhol. Brakhage, Anger, Deren, Mekas, Snow, and others… all way more interesting.
…
What?
I believe he also made a movie consisting of nothing but footage of someone’s ass — yes, just like in Idiocracy.
Watching paint dry sounded Warholian enough as a film subject that I just had to make that quip.
> Get thee to an SF convention. They’re still like that.
I am. ReConStruction, NASfic’10. Raleigh Convention Center. Wheels up 0925 tomorrow. :-)
> Occasionally, the group experience is worth the trip and the money.
Airplane.
Blazing Saddles.
[more spoilers]
other things that make it clear he’s still in a dream at the end include:
* the kids being the same age, wearing the same clothes, in the same position and posture as in his memory despite the passage of time
* dear old dad being at the airport to meet him
If we buy the Hal Phillips theory that the whole thing is an inception on Cobb, one possible idea being introduced is simply that Cobb should stop what he’s doing – break up up a successful dream-worker business and retire. But it’s hard to imagine a real-world level in which inception would be the most practical attack to accomplish that goal. So maybe Hal’s right and rescuing Cobb from the loony bin is the goal. In which case the motivation for so doing would probably be to bring him out of retirement for some *other* “last job” that needs his special skills.
Glwn Raphael:
> other things that make it clear he’s still in a dream at the end include:
I’m fairly certain that’s beside the point and not particularly important. The ambiguity is deliberate in a clever way. The spinning top at the end is actually the _audience’s_ anchor, not Cobb’s, particularly as he’s walked away from it. The audience is waiting for the top to ‘drop,’ waiting for both Cobb and themselves to be pulled out of the dream, and then the REAL drop, the sudden black-out, ends it.
I considered the inception-on-Cobb theory when I was in the theater, but decided it would be ultimately too disappointing if that were the case. It would lose a lot of strength if it really WAS ‘just a dream all along.’ Nolan is doing a hell of a lot more than just telling a story; he is performing a mindfuck of a high caliber on the viewer.
Yup, great movie and great comments, Eric. One thing I really liked was that I could actually follow the movie – it would have been so easy for them to turn this into something almost incomprehensible in complexity.
[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]
>the kids being the same age, wearing the same clothes, in the same position and posture as in his memory despite the passage of time
Go see it again. There _is_ a flash repeat of the scene of the kids on the lawn that we’ve seen several times, but when they turn around, they are older and _wearing different clothes_ (note in particular the girl — she goes from wearing a pinkish dress to wearing a white blouse and a jumper).
Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not dreaming, but the ambiguity is a bit more subtle. ..bruce..
I’m SO wanting to see The Expendables. I don’t have much hope for the plot. I’m just expecting a romp. But it should be a fun romp.
And yes, Inception was well done. And yes, the timelines didn’t work out for me. Too many things happened exactly when they needed to.
re: bwwebster
[spoiler from the credit]
Yep they actually cast TWO different sets of children to play Cobb’s kids. One from the day he had to make the decision to run, and one for the last scene.
I take the subversive hint at the end to be “Maybe our physical waking reality is no such thing, but a dream, a simulation, or some other sort of false creation.” That’s more or less the inception that Descartes planted in Western philosophy with his idea of the evil demon that imposes an illusion on him, so that everything he knows or perceives is wrong (a theme that Heinlein drew on in “They”). Philosophy ever since then has been driven by Cartesian doubt, which is almost impossible to escape from once you’ve been infected with it: not focused skepticism as a scientific tool applied when the evidence suggests doing so, but comprehensive skepticism applied as a universal solvent of all belief and all evidence. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty,” for example, spends an entire short book desperately struggling to reach a point of being willing to believe that when he sees his own hand his own hand is really there . . . and not being quite able to convince himself. Inception ends, not with an assertion of Cartesian doubt, but with a hint at the possibility of Cartesian doubt . . . the possibility that our entire world is an illusion and that we have never reached the level of reality, and perhaps (as Kant thought) never can reach it . . . and also hints at the horror of that idea, to which academic philosophies have grown not merely inured but habituated.
And yes, it was also a brilliant caper film.
I’m a little bothered by the science, though, and so I think it falls a little short of being fully effective science fiction (though not more so than a fair number of classic sf novels). In the first place, the multiple layers of speedup make no sense: Okay, you put a waking person under and their brain works more efficiently and they get Nx speedup, but when you put their dream self under you are not really putting their dream brain into a second order dream state, because they don’t actually have a dream brain . . . they still only have the waking self’s brain, which has already been speeded up. It was a clever idea, but it’s ultimately as silly as quidditch. And the basic premise seems not to be true: I’ve seen actual research psychologists write that we do actually use all of our brains, and that they don’t have any idea why anyone could have thought otherwise. Somehow that “10% of the brain” figure got into sf urban folklore long ago, and has lived on there on its own.
But as I say, sf novels often are equally scientifically shaky, or more so. I certainly think this one is Hugoworthy.
I thoroughly enjoyed Inception, but was disappointed that it failed to give even lip service to the moral aspects of implanting an idea in someone’s head. As a heist movie, perhaps this is OK. But in a movie that deals nearly exclusively with the manipulation of dreams, some discussion of this should have taken place. At least by Ellen Page’s character.
>I thoroughly enjoyed Inception, but was disappointed that it failed to give even lip service to the moral aspects of implanting an idea in someone’s head.
…which the movie then proceeds to subvert by making the inception a genuinely therapeutic experience for Fischer, enabling him to resolve his relationship with his father. The message I got (which also casts new light on Mal’s madness) is that, incept what you will, the mind of the subject will probably fit the implanted idea into some endogenous development that was going to happen anyway.
> I thoroughly enjoyed Inception, but was disappointed that it failed to give even lip service to the moral aspects
> of implanting an idea in someone’s head.
Did you miss Cobb’s entire character arc? I think the results of his tinkering re: his wife acted as quite a bit more than just lip service.
No, I caught that. Thanks, though. I did not see anybody in the movie seriously object to the proposal of tricking Fischer into reinterpreting his entire relationship with his father, and making a decision that would inexorably alter a mega-corporation, affecting many many thousands of people.
That would have been particularly germane. Though it does also support the theory that the entire movie was part of a dream.
Note that the dreams are populated by projections from the dreamer’s subconscious. The city/hotel/fortress stack are ostensibly Fischer’s dreams while he’s asleep on the 747. The only way Cobb’s family start showing up in those dreams is if everything we see is part of Cobb’s dream — i.e. Mal is right.
The spinning top is an unreliable totem. Cobb acquires it in the trashed hotel room just before Mal jumps, and this scene is part of his dream. The movie gives us another method of distinguishing dreams from reality: the ‘how did I get here’ test. We’re given a big clue when Cobb suddenly wakes up on the plane before he and Saito kill themselves in Limbo.
Ariadne’s job is to lead Cobb back to the ‘real’ world (I’m basing this entirely on her name — Ariadne led Theseus out of the Labyrinth). When he tells projection-Mal that he’s kept his promise because they have already grown old together, Ariadne realises he needs to do the same with his children. He couldn’t see his children’s faces before because it was taking so much of his imagination to recreate Mal. (‘Do the children miss me?’ ‘I can’t imagine.’) Once he is free of his guilt he can be with his children, but only in the dream-world, because they aren’t real either.
Just saw the movie today, and have to second ESR’s comments. It’s one of the most insidious horror films I’ve seen in a long time. Not cheap ‘cat scare’ horror, but stuff that lasts. What TVTropes likes to label ‘Fridge Horror’.
What really make me cheer is that Chris Nolan has finally learned how to shoot an action sequence. “Batman Begins” and “Dark Knight” had near-incomprehensible fight scenes, although to be fair DK was a little better than BB. But the zero-gee fights in the hotel from “Inception”…while I was watching, I realized thet I had the same big goofy grin on my face that I’ve had while watching Jackie Chan in his prime.
And with regards to the end, I’ve never been as on the edge of my seat waiting for a little simple item to do a little simple thing…
I saw this today on your recommendation.
What I ended up interpreting the movie as:
The highest level is effectively real, but that’s not the layer we see in the ending. Cobb & Saito are stuck in Limbo, and the ending is Cobb “waking up” into another dream layer. We don’t see what happens to the rest of the crew.
I think the advantage of this interpretation is that I think it involves the least amount of second-guessing while being internally consistent without a simpler explanation involving higher layers, and that’s what I’d use as our own best definition of “real”.
Though, I did think of the top as merely continuing to spin rather than “perhaps about to stop”.
Also, simultaneously the best and worst part about SF is that the work’s assumed premises open up so many crazy derived uses. Please tell me I’m not the only one that thought “my god, it’s full of processing power”.
And if you haven’t seen “Memento” yet, also go see that (by the same director). Almost as much brain porn.
just saw inception tonight-what was amusing was that the film uses ‘nested loops’ and ‘stacking reality’, which are well known nlp techniques for creating and deepening trance.
FYI:
There is a strange Russian book (Dream Hackers, ru: Хакеры Ñновидений, bg: Хакери на Ñънища) by Andrei Reutov (ru: Ðндрей Реутов) that deals with the same ideas (entering people’s dreams, searching for information) borrowing from Carlos Castaneda…
There are Russian Mafia, FSB & other dream hackers after their trails and quite allot of action (including guns :))… The story follows a young man who is recruited by “white dream hackers” after they discover his “dream hacking” potentials.
See also Satoshi Kon’s ‘Paprika.’ Similar initial themes, though it takes a whiplash-inducing turn from SF to fantasy in the third act. Beautiful film, though.
I personally feel Cobb never left the dreamworld.
There was something a little too perfect about the final scene.
That was why Decaprio played him so low-key he could never leave the dreamworld he had died too many times he was forever in limbo.
But that didn’t matter he had found what works for him. His peace.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Right. In case anyone missed it, Cobb’s wife committed suicide because Cobb had implanted the idea that in her head that reality was a dream, which is why she committed suicide. Much time in Cobb’s character arc is spent with Cobb dealing with that guilt.
“We’re given a big clue when Cobb suddenly wakes up on the plane before he and Saito kill themselves in Limbo.”
No, we aren’t. We aren’t shown that they kill themselves, but I took no indication from that to one side or another.
Dunno if you saw someone’s clever twitter summation of the film–
If you run a VM in a VM in a VM in a VM in a VM… it’ll be really slow.
I didn’t like the huge plot hole. I mean the whole concept there is invading someone’s dreams for the purpose of industrial espionage, but you need actual physical access to an important target to accomplish this. If you already have that person in your custody; than there are alternatives to invading that persons dreams in order to acquire that information. The only way this makes sense is that your target would be unaware of the loss of information. But how easy would it be to gain physical access unbeknownst to the target and his/her security detail?