Inception

[Soulflame]

The more I think about it, I think he was out of the dream at the end.  The top was going to fall.

The previews I saw were Tron, the Gordon Gecko thing, The Town (Ben Affleck, auto miss there), some Facebook thing (wife says it's called Social Network), Schmucks for Dinnner.  Tron was the only one that I think I'd even be remotely interested in seeing, although the Gordon Gecko movie might be all right.

[LK]

Well, the kids weren't going to be in a daycare center or something. The location of them at the house, mirroring the dream state, and turning around instead of running off was meant to deliver the maximum emotional impact of the moment. That seemed to be the primary intent while "lol he might still be in the dream!" is the secondary.

[Cyrrex]

Saw it with the wife last night.  We both liked it a whole lot, and thought it was much, much better than we expected it to be (and I always expect Leo's movies to be good).

[Mazakiel]

[pxib]

I might just be making all of this up, but this is a movie that provides in-world reasons to mistake symbolism for plot and vice versa. Which is awesome.

[patience]

Nolan wasn't doing it for a cheap mindfuck. He was making a subtle point about reality.

[Kitsune]

I play with spinning random things like coins and dice on tables as an idle habit, and my spinny professional opinion is that the top was falling.  It had that shudder that spun things get in the instant before they tip; I've seen it hundreds of times.

[Vision]

[sickrubik]

Patience is right on.

More thoughts

[Ozzu]

[Vision]

[Ozzu]

[Vision]

[Engels]

[Ozzu]

[Ozzu]

Dileep Rao (Yusuf) answering some movie questions:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/inceptions_dileep_rao_answers.html

[Vision]

[Yoshimaru]

Nolan can do no wrong in my book after this movie.

[Velorath]

This is probably my favorite Nolan movie.
Deeper than TDK but not so far out there that I never want to watch again.

So much to think about.

It's also a welcome bright spot in what has been a fairly disappointing summer for movies.

[Jeff Kelly]

If I liked Memento, will I also like Inception?

[Cyrrex]

If I liked Memento, will I also like Inception?

If you like awesome movies, you will like Inception.  Seriously, I don't know who gives a negative review to a movie like this...you'd have to be a giant douche. 

[Teleku]

Saw this last night at imax.  GREAT film, really enjoyed it.  I agree with some of the minor knocks that they could have titened it up and some of the ending fight scenes were to long (and I mean seriously, was the British guy an SAS operative or something?  He took out all those people by himself, sort of broke immersion a bit..).  But thats about it.  Perfect film otherwise.

We actually had some decent trailers in front of the imax showing.  Tron Legacy, Mastermind, Harry Potter....and I think one more I can't remember.  Nothing looked outwardly bad though.

[proudft]

I've often had repeated dreams where I wish to be awake, so I dream that I'm awake, only to discover that I'm still dreaming. I've had one dream where I 'woke up' 3 times, each time I was convinced I was awake.

Haha, I hate that.  Mainly because each subsequent dream is 'boring' for a dream.  Hear the alarm, get up, take a shower, etc.  Repeat.

Ending:

[Stewie]

[LK]

Welp, that does it.

It's art.

[Hoax]

Thoughts not on the ending, only Bhodi has touched on this really.

Beside the arctic bit being too long and too pointlessly action blahblah did anyone else feel like the casting/characterization was the weak part of the movie? I felt like the forger and to a lesser extent Arthur and Saito stole the show. The girl was a complete deus ex machina with no explanation for why she cared so much why she always had the right ideas and why she was so good and Leo while he was good wasn't completely amazing because I didn't feel like this character was getting a unique treatment. I've seen him do that haunted but cold and cool character in other movies and he just didn't breath a new life into his character which was a shame because the movie was so cool.

 

[proudft]

Arthur was my favorite character by far, but I can't really figure out why.  His suits were just that awesome, I guess.

[sickrubik]

Watching Joseph-Gordon Levitt in Inception made me REALLY hope for the rumor of him being Riddler in the next Batman film is true. I think they could work very well together.

[Engels]

Holy crap, I thought it was my girlfriend breathing through her nose! She kept apologizing too! I'm in such deep shit.

[sickrubik]

Dora the Explorer in Incepcion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrYPJ4Yc31g

[Mazakiel]

[Yoshimaru]

Really interesting take on the movie that kinda blew my mind. Obviously, spoilers.


Edit: Spoilered for link name.

[Johny Cee]

Thoughts not on the ending, only Bhodi has touched on this really.

Beside the arctic bit being too long and too pointlessly action blahblah did anyone else feel like the casting/characterization was the weak part of the movie? I felt like the forger and to a lesser extent Arthur and Saito stole the show. The girl was a complete deus ex machina with no explanation for why she cared so much why she always had the right ideas and why she was so good and Leo while he was good wasn't completely amazing because I didn't feel like this character was getting a unique treatment. I've seen him do that haunted but cold and cool character in other movies and he just didn't breath a new life into his character which was a shame because the movie was so cool.

 

The girl's name was Ariadne....  In Greek myth, Ariadne was the one that gave Theseus a ball of yarn he could use to guide his way out of the labyrinth when he went in to face the minotaur.  With that name, Nolan was announcing that the character was far more than what she seemed.


I like the idea that there actually was no job...  a team was sent into Cobb's dreams to try and get him over the paranoia and guilt that had trapped him.  They used a Mr. Charles ploy, and presented the case of Robert Fisher as a counterpoint for Cobb to come to terms with his wife's death.  It was still inception, but they were giving the idea to Cobb so that he could begin to function again.

I'm not sure if this is true, but the top?  Every time Cobb tries to use the top on screen he is interrupted before he can tell if the top is going to stop or not.  At the end of the movie, it doesn't matter anymore since he has stopped living in his memories and paranoia.  He's made the resolution to move forward.  Even if he is trapped, that seems like a good first move towards eventually awaking.


As a side note, I find Ellen Page (played Ariadne, lead in Juno, and Kitty Pryde in Xmen) to be fucking disturbing.  She's in her mid-twenties and looks like she's about 12.  Also, when did Tom Berenger get old? 

[LK]

I like the interpretation, I think the director left enough hints for it through film-making techniques, and all that comes through, but the single distinguishing thing I can think of to counteract the "It was all a dream" thing is the fact that the movie follows more than Cobb and that events happen outside his purview that we are witness to. Moreover, the people in the "real world" do not act like the "dream state" projections. It's movie-logic. It's very difficult to explain. I imagine the shit they are going through is like a character in a movie trying to come to grips that he is in a movie and cannot do it because everything is real to him. Only the audience knows better, but we're on a layer of reality above the movie.

I can accept that it was "all a dream" of Nolan's, but not Cobb's. It's meta vs. movie logic.

Nolan is a fantastic director. I wish he was doing Warcraft. That would be... amusing.

[Johny Cee]

I like the interpretation, I think the director left enough hints for it through film-making techniques, and all that comes through, but the single distinguishing thing I can think of to counteract the "It was all a dream" thing is the fact that the movie follows more than Cobb and that events happen outside his purview that we are witness to. Moreover, the people in the "real world" do not act like the "dream state" projections. It's movie-logic. It's very difficult to explain. I imagine the shit they are going through is like a character in a movie trying to come to grips that he is in a movie and cannot do it because everything is real to him. Only the audience knows better, but we're on a layer of reality above the movie.

I can accept that it was "all a dream" of Nolan's, but not Cobb's. It's meta vs. movie logic.

Nolan is a fantastic director. I wish he was doing Warcraft. That would be... amusing.

I think you could argue that Fisher is a projection of Cobb's subconscious, and the inception is the team inserting an idea into the subconsious to come to terms with loss...  which is reflected by Leo consciously letting go of Mal a layer deeper, although Ariadne's derision of the plan (playing up the father at the cost of Fisher's opinion of his godfather) should be weighted against that.

Finding Saito is Cobb coming to terms and announcing that he is ready to live again.

Really, though, it's not a movie with a right answer.  Any interpretation I can think of has a pile of pros, but it also has a pile of contradictions. 

- Cobb is awake and a fugitive.  That means there are actually faceless corporate goons out to get him in Africa, and Saito mysteriously shows up at the right moment to save him.  And his kids are actually sitting in the same place, in the same position, in the same clothes, at the end of the movie.  The very idea of outlaw dream extractors working corporate espigionage angles seems... a little far fetched.  And it makes the timeline all screwy, since the kids couldn't have aged more than a year or two...  so Cobb's grand odyssesy is really a year or two real time?

- Cobb is stuck in a dream.  The Fisher plot then seems to make much less sense, if the rules we are told at the beginning of the movie are true.  It does better explain how Cobb's subconscious can project Mal into the dream when Fisher is supposed to be the one populating the dream with his subconscious.  It also better explains the Storm Trooper projections, when none of the team had any idea that extraction defenses had evolved to that point.

I find it easier to believe that Cobb's subconscious is projecting armed murderous thugs from his store of self-loathing and paranoia.  The fact that Cobb is conflicted about wishing harm on his "team" would explain why all the thugs (except for Mal) are so ineffective....  They miss because he doesn't really want his friends hurt.


I think you can choose whichever interpretation you want.  Both have major arguments for and against.  I'm not sold on the movie as allegory for film-making, though...  sure, there are parallels.  But that interpretation devalues the entire carefully constructed whole. 

The action parts weren't amazing, except for the rotating hallway section.  I think the point was to break up the flow, and spice up what would otherwise be a bunch of people talking at each other for 2 1/2 hours.  They didn't work well as action scenes, but they did work as palate cleansers to keep the audience engaged.  It's the same as a teacher stopping a lecture to ask the class questions about what has been covered.