Spoilers Ahead:
I saw Inception this weekend with some of my film friends; they loved it, I thought it was decent. That is to say, for a blockbuster. Placed side by side with Transformers, Twilight, or Harry Potter, Inception is a very decent, relatively intelligent, piece of cinema. The visuals were outstanding, the fight choreography unique and dynamic.
However, examined as a narrative work in the greater literary tradition of story telling, I feel there were many places that the film fell absolutely flat.
After watching the film, I'm left with a lot of really basic questions:
1. Who is Leonardo DiCaprio?
Leo is a top notch dream-spy haunted by visions of his dead wife which manifest in the overlap between his dreamscape and his target's. She attempts to foil his missions and cause him harm, as she embodies his guilt for her death and reflects his self-destruction.
Alright... but... were they both dream-spies? Or did Leo start dream-spying after her death? How did he get into the whole dream-exploration business? We never really come to understand who she is, as only one other character seems to have ever had any interaction with her, that being Michael Caine, but we know nothing as to the nature of their relationship. The entire foundation behind his drive, what propels him through the narrative, is presented in an aloof, imprecise manner and I'm left with only an abstract idea of who he is.
2. Who is Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
Joe is Leo's right hand man. He's confident, focused, and experienced. He's there to save Leo's ass and make sure everything goes as it has to. His personality is... pretty much like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator (the Terminator was a robot, mind you).
...sooooo... how did Joe meet Leo? Where is Joe from? Is he also on the run from the law? Why is he doing this? Why is he taking such tremendous risks to aid Leo? What are his motivations?
3. Who is Michael Caine?
So he's either Leo's father or his father in-law, as he's the grandfather or Leo's kids. I don't understand why this remains ambiguous. He taught Leo everything he knows about dream-exploration but disapproves of his using it for corporate espionage. He introduces Leo to Ellen Page, a student of his whom he claims has the capacity to be the best dream-architect yet.
Now it's unclear whether Caine invented dream-exploration or is just really good at it. Joe explains, during Ellen's training sequence, that this dream stuff is utilized by the military for training purposes. Is Caine ex-military? Is he some guy who latched onto the technology and did something completely unique with it? Did the military take the technology from him?
What the fuck does he teach?
4. Who is Ellen Page?
What the fuck is she studying? Even though Caine is the dream-diving master and Page is his best student, she's never even heard of the process. So that can't be what he's teaching. Is she a psych major then? I think it was Caine or Joe or Leo who said you need a good imagination to be a good architect... which makes it even less clear what the hell Ellen is doing.
I should note that someone pointed out to me that there are layouts and designs behind Caine in the scene in his office, implying that Page is literally an architect. But whether these are designs of buildings or dream-construction practice or whothefuckknowswhat, is never explicitly stated.
Not that it matters, since her role in the movie is more or less limited to narrating Leo's motivations because, as all writers know, a character should never merely announce how they feel ("I FEEL GUILTY FOR MY WIFE'S DEATH!"). So instead Ellen does it for him.
You may be noticing a trend: none of the characters actually have any dimension. They're just shallow plot devices meant to help Leo achieve his mission and get his shit together... which he does, as he confronts his wife in a climactic scene that feels unearned and insubstantial.
Speaking of his mission:
5. What is the deal with dream-exploration?
By the end of Ellen's training montage--the sole narrative purpose of which is to explain to us, the audience, how the film's central mechanic works--we should know everything there is to know about the process. We don't. Every five minutes, this dream bullshit is expounded upon with new contrivances that are contradicted ten minutes later.
You can't possibly delve three dreams deep!
We'll do it.
Nothing can make someone that unconscious!
Well, except this right here.
If you die three dreams deep, your consciousness goes into wacky town.
Well, unless you die in wacky town... then you'll just wake up.
Also, the rules of wacky town are absolutely arbitrary. Leo's first time there, his consciousness ages fifty years, his second... nada. Though Ken Watanabe's character does. I have no idea why the inconsistency. We've never witnessed any sort of time-skip dream mechanic.
The feeling of falling wakes the dreamer up, allowing the explorers to return to the real world. The drug they use to knock Cillian Murphy out doesn't affect the inner ear, so they can still be waken up by falling. Simple enough. But get a load of this: if you're three dreams deep (that is, a dream within a dream within a dream), the second-level dreamer incarnation of you can fall, and that'll pull you out of the third dream.
Does that make sense? There is a symmetry between physical you and dream-you and dream-you and second-dream-you. If you fall in real life, you cease to dream. If dream you falls in the dream, you cease to secondary-dream and you 'awake' into the primary dream.
This makes absolutely no sense as the dreamer's physical self isn't falling, their actual inner ear isn't being stimulated in this manner. So what does it matter if the drug impairs inner ear function? The explorers' dreamscape versions retain some manner of physicality, it seems, and the operate within the physics of the dream. That is, whatever your actual organs are doing doesn't matter, as (and try to bear with me here), tertiary you can feel the sensation of falling, but secondary and primary you do not, yet you all share the same physical ear.
The physics of the real world also affect the dreamscape. If your body is tumbling, the gravity of the dream-world shifts. Fair enough. But if you're two dreams deep, and in the first dream, your body spins, gravity will shift in the secondary dream world regardless of what your physical (non-dream) self is doing. The sole purpose of this mechanic is to provide justification for some awesome fight choreography, but it doesn't make any sense. All the dreamscapes are arbitrary constructions, subject to the sensations of the physical body... but why are sub-dreams affected by the illusory physicality of a dream body? And moreover, why is it limited? In one scene, the characters' actual bodies are still, their primary dream bodies are spinning, their secondary dream bodies experience shifting gravity, but everything is normal for their tertiary selves.
That's contradictory. If tumbling in the primary makes the secondary kooky, then why doesn't secondary kookiness have any effect on the tertiary?
Sorry if this whole rant's devolved into absolute convolution, but the mechanic itself is just a sloppy pile of bullshit.
Further, what can and can't you do in the dream realm?
In one scene, Joe is shooting at some random bad guys with an automatic rifle he conjured (note, these bad guys populate Cillian's mind as a defense mechanism, providing fodder for action sequences that are both cool and kind of pointless). Tom Hardy approaches him, tells him to stop being a pussy, and conjures a grenade launcher. In a later scene, Joe is wrestling with a dream-bad guy for a gun. Why couldn't he just conjure one? Why couldn't he conjure attack dogs to just deal with the bad guys so he didn't have to even worry about it? Attack eagles?
Also, if the defense mechanism is the subconcious' awareness that the subject is dreaming and his dreams are being invaded, and it can summon such out-of-place objects as a big 'ol train in the middle of the city... why can't it summon totally weird shit? Dragons, or giant robots, or... Terminators...
These are elements of the dream mechanic that are just kind of underwhelming. At one point, in the secondary dreamscape, Leo tricks Cillian into aiding him and consciously entering the tertiary dreamscape. All the dreamscapes typically have to look convincingly real because the subject shouldn't know they're dreaming, but here he clearly does. So why are our heroes transported to a snowy military base (which Metal Gear fans will surely recognize as Shadow Moses) and not... fuckin' rainbow road crazy town? You assholes are mega-dreaming and I'm watching this shit in IMAX, I want to feel like I'm tripping on the kind of acid Jesus would deal.
Honestly, all of the mechanics of dreaming seem like contrived ass-pulls. Dream time moves ten times faster than real time and this is compounded in sub-dreams also the subconscious mind manifests its defenses as perfectly rationally planted extras and there are safes that your brains fills with secrets also if you get hurt in a dream you really feel it and time moves only linearly and while your subconscious populates the landscape it only does so with objects encountered in reality and not strange whatthefucks.
And the end... there's a phrase I heard recently that I really like, "deep as dirty water". The ambiguity of the ending, which I wasn't invested enough to even appreciate, was a really cheap way to make the film deceptively deep. Suddenly, all of the inconsistencies and flaws in the script could be hand-waved away by a 'twist' everyone expects from the first scene.
Look... you will probably love this movie. Everyone will probably love this movie. This is probably the smartest shit you've seen in a movie theater in ages, so I suppose that's worth something. But it's not a brilliant movie. It's a brilliant looking movie, for sure, but I think Nolan, like many other directors, would be better off directing someone else's script for a change. Often directors' own talent is overlooked or marred by their reluctance to work on anyone's material but their own, just look at Lucas and Shyamalan as examples. Or at least give it a second draft, please.
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Fuckin' brilliant writeup. Counterpoint - doesn't the elephant paradox serve as a warning to the viewer as to what's coming? They say the plot mechanics aren't going to work like they did for solving the first extraction... but the viewer tries to follow the same logic solving the second one and takes it up the wahoo for doing so.
ReplyDeleteThe final shot is the I told ya so.
I thought it was brilliant.
What was the elephant paradox?
ReplyDeleteSUCK ON YOUR DADDY'S DICK.
ReplyDeleteIt was the reason inception can't be done that Gordon explained to Saito in the helicopter.
ReplyDeleteHe said, "If I tell you not to think of elephants, what are you going to think of?"
"Elephants."
(paraphrasing) "So at that ideas inception, I put that in your head. You didn't come up with it on your own. And you know this, so it can't be done."
I think I've done a poor job explaining the conversation but in the film it makes sense. Nolan plays a track on the viewer, tells you he is going to do it, and the viewer falls for it anyway. That's the whole spin on the movie - to see if inception can be done. It can't, but the viewer tries to make sense of it any way because they figured out the first extraction (trying to get in to Saito's vault). They then try to solve the second extraction the same way but it is a paradox that goes on forever. It can't be done!!!
I don't understand because Leo said he had previously preformed inception, and this was demonstrated. And, in Cillian's mind, they didn't attempt, really, to plant the idea as much as to lead Cillian towards it.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the notion of "solving" the extraction. I didn't see the sequences as puzzles presented to me, but as demonstrations of a process they'd been explaining for half the movie. When you say you can't solve the second extraction as you did the first... what does that mean? How did you "solve" the first extraction?
An odd review.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the questions you ask either don't matter whatsoever to the story that Nolan was telling (Who cares what Michael Caine actually teaches? Who cares why Arthur does what he does?), was explained to some degree in the film and really doesn't take all that much brain power, which you clearly have, to fill in some of the gaps (i.e., Leo wasn't a dream thief until after he had to flee the country for being blamed for his wife's death, he explains this in the exchange with Michael Caine) and, as for all the dream sequences bits, I thought it made plenty of sense and for the bit of inconsistencies here and there... Ever dream, yourself? If so, then you know things don't always make sense in a dream.
I could answer a lot of your questions point-by-point, but I really don't have the time or inclination to do so.
The movie's logic and all wasn't air tight. There were some holes and flaws, but the movie was so great and the concept so cool and interesting, that I just didn't let them bother me.
I will answer one point. The Forger. We know he can take the shape of someone else in a dream whom he studies. As for "conjouring" things, that's debatable. He does have that line "you need to dream bigger" when he pulls out the gernade launcher. You're only assuming, however, that he conjured that weapon out of nothingnes. Who is to say that Ariadne, who constructed the dream, didn't put guns in the safehouse and that Arthur pulled a assault rifle to use and Eames grabbed a gernade launcher and the "dream bigger" line wasn't something to be taken literally? You recall, Arthur and Eames had an early discussion about Arthur not being "original" enough. So, you're just assuming (incorrectly, I believe) that Eames has the ability to conjure something up in a dream out of whole cloth.
Even if he could conjure something, maybe he needs time to do it. He needs to concentrate. That seemed to be the case when he turned into the other guy. Also, maybe he needs to be very familiar with what he conjures. In the warehouse, he had the time to concentrate to conjure a gernade launcher, a weapon that he is, perhaps, familiar with in the real world. In the snow sequence, maybe he didn't have the time concentrate to conjure something and/or has no way to conjure something he's not at all familiar with like attack eagles or dragons or what not.
Oh, another thing, that big ole train wasn't summoned by Robert's subconcious to defend himself. That was Cobb's subconcious attacking Cobb and they talked A LOT about how dangerous it was to enter the dream world with the kind of guilt and subconcious demons that Cobb was carrying around with him. The train was a manifestation of that. It didn't appear as if any of the other characters had anything near that kind of baggage on them to pull something like that.
Come on, man. You're clearly smart. You should try to work with Nolan and the film, as opposed to working so hard against it.
Use your intellect for good, not evil!
Nothing really indicated that the train was something summoned by Leo and not be Cillian's subconscious. Look, stories, films included, are constructed with very particular consistencies in mind--visual, thematic, etc. Leo's subconscious interference is ALWAYS his wife and kids manifesting in the dream, never random trains. The train rammed through at exactly the same time the gunmen appeared, so I thought it could pretty intuitively be interpreted as part of Cillian's defense mechanism.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, while character backgrounds may not have any material impact on how the plot unfolds, it's a critical part of emotional investment. If I feel like the protagonist is a real person, with real dimension, I'm more inclined to feel the weight of the stakes at play. If I'm watching caricatures, I don't care. And I didn't care; when Leo finally confronts his wife, in what felt like an undeserved resolution ("I will now paraphrase what Ellen Page has been telling me..."), I was unaffected, emotionally.
As for dreams not making any sense, that's right, they often tend not to. But the film attempted to create some rule set to how dreams function, a rule set that both felt arbitrary and was not very well adhered to.
Nolan doesn't need me to defend him. He will make more money off of this film than I will probably ever see. That being said, I feel that blind, acritical (if that's even a word...), adoration of this film isn't productive. There's real art out there, real intelligent stuff written by intelligent people who are trying to say some pretty complicated stuff (emotionally, philosophically...). Confounding decency among mediocrity with actual brilliance is a disservice to real artists.
The rules were adhered to better than you think, actually. It was clear from the first dream sequence, that when you're doing the "dream within a dream" thing, the "kick" from the level above is what wakes you, NOT a kick in the real world.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, that "kick" sensation they described is something that everyone's felt in a dream. I know I have many times. And it's never because I am actually falling in the real world. It's always as a result of something that happened in the dream.
Also, the train was clearly, obviously Cobb's creation that I am bit puzzled by your refusal to accept it. The train was taken directly from Cobb's Limbo. Remember the riddle about the train? And how he used the train to kill him and his wife in the Limbo world to send them back to reality? The train that crashed through that dream was THAT train. Cillian Murphy had NOTHING to do with that train. That was 100% pure Cobb's subconscious at work. It had always been his wife up until that point. Then the stakes were raised. Which isn't surprising given the level of stress that Cobb was under and what was at stake. His emotions, both conscious and subconcious, were running at all time highs.
As for what you felt emotionally, that's your own thing, man. I felt it packed enough weight. I bought into it. I understood and accepted the characters well enough. I felt like Cobb was very much a real character with real emotions. While his wife might have been less well defined, that was part of the point, no? Cobb explicitly said so.
I am not saying that one cannot or should not be critical of the film. I am also by no means accpeting "blind, acritical adoration" of the film. It's just a lot of your criticisms seem grounded in a desire to have a backlash against the film and lack a willingness to see things evenly or accept quite reasonable explanations, though since you didn't comment on my thoughts on the Eames conjuring issue, I think you're coming along, Padawan. :)
I think the lack of character depth, for all those characters who aren't Cobb, is a valid complaint. I think there are some inconsistencies out there, but not as many as you think. The film wasn't perfect. But it was damn, damn good and entertaining.
It's definitely on par without a doubt to, say, The Matrix. (The first one, the sequels aren't worth discussing). In my world, that puts Inception in excellent company. Is it "brilliant"? I dunno. That's quite a subjective word. In terms of filmmaking, not just summer blockbusters like "Transformers", "Twilight" or "Harry Potter", it stacks up pretty well against some of the better ones, Bladerunner, Alien, Aliens, 2001, you name it, and that's just sci-fi.
That's a solid point about the train, and that makes sense. I guess I didn't put two and two together at first because there wasn't any kid or dead wife cue.
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to be contrarian for its own sake, I just legitimately felt it was a weak script. I felt that it lacked a certain humanity to it, a particular emotional or intellectual depth, instead focusing on novelty and convolution. Sure, Leo's emotions are 'real', Ellen Page narrates all of them, that doesn't mean the exploration of those emotions was particularly skillful or poignant.
And that's often the trouble with the scifi genre, like many of the films you listed. I'm not particularly fond of Philip K Dick or Isaac Asimov, much less more popular, contemporary scifi authors, because they're often more dedicated to justifying, or expounding a concept than they are in exploring... well, the human condition. Which I know is a pretty canned, borderline meaningless term. Kurt Vonnegut is, in my opinion, pretty successful, as Cat's Cradle, for instance, has a very simple scifi premise which serves as a mere backdrop for real philosophical discussion.
Inception was certainly more Asimov than Vonnegut, and that's the problem I had with it. Not to say all scifi has to be poignant, but there are certain foundations to story telling and character building that one author does better than the other.
Aegon, 2001 was a giant tuuuuuuuurd.
ReplyDeleteI could easily see where if you didn't get emotionally invested in Cobb's character or his plight, then there would be no emotional core to the film. The other characters certainly didn't provide it. There was no conflict or arc for any of them really. It was pretty much all about Cobb and his struggle with the guilt over the death of his wife.
ReplyDeleteFor me, it worked. I bought it. I didn't mind that Ellen Page was the one to tell me what Cobb was feeling, because (1) it was pretty obvious and (2) Ellen Page is delightful and I could listen to her read from a phonebook and still enjoy it. :)
Cobb was clearly repressing his anger, guilt and what not and was never going to express it himself, which is why Mal kept manifesting herself as malevlont force in his dreams. That's not the kind of guy he is. He represses, broods, and that kind of thing.
I could see where it wouldn't work for some people, I suppose. I'm glad it worked for me, because it was a great movie-going experience for me from begning to end. As for all of the dream logic and what not, while I couldn't explain it to you now, it all seemed to make sense and work logically when I was watching the movie, but the whole thing was so well constructed and impeccably paced, that I didn't find myself with too much idle time to dwell on things.
I can see where you're coming from. It reminds me a bit of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". It's a great movie. Not quite as complex as Inception as far as "rules" go, but it's got layers and what not. While I appreciate the movie, for some reason I never quite bought the love story between Winsley and Carey. It just didn't do anything for me. I didn't get the attraction there, so there was no real emotional investment in the characters and thus a lot of what happened in terms of trying to capture the "magic" of the relationship was lost on me, because I never saw the "magic" to begin with.
Nolan really didn't seem to set out to make a movie with a big philosophical point. There are a few in the film to be sure, but he didn't really dwell too much on the whole philosophical/moral issue of "inception" or "extraction". What it really means to plant an idea in someone's mind and the moral implications. That was all on the side, but that's fine.
I think one philosophical the end raises is this. At the end of the movie, Cobb gets home and spins that top. In every other scene when he did that, he always waited to watch it fall. Always. In the last scene, however, he spins it, watches it for a second or two, and then goes to see his kids. He doesn't seem to care at all whether it's a dream or reality. And, if he doesn't care, what difference does it really make? Unless, of course, it is a dream and, at some point, like in that long dream with his wife, he realizes it's all just a facisimile and it starts to crumble/drive him mad.
Also, to address another point you raised earlier in terms of why Saito was old and Cobb was still young. One take of the ending, of course, is that neither Saito or Cobb ever made it back to reality. In that case, it's possible that the old man Saito was just a projection in Cobb's mind. Granted, Saito died in Dream World 1 (and all the others) a bit before Cobb decided to stick in Limbo land, so it's possible, given the super accelartion of time, that he grew old fast, whereas Cobb didn't. But, it's also possible that old Saito was just a projection of Cobb's and he created that encounter with Saito to make it more believable to himself that he got Saito back, Saito honored his part of the bargain and Cobb got got to "go home." Maybe that was his way of performing an "inception" in his own mind. He gave himself the idea that he succeeded in his task and, thus, gets his reward.
ReplyDeleteThat sort of mirror's Nolan's protagonist's actions at the end of "Momento", where he uses his "ability" - short term memory loss - to deliberty trick himself into believing he was still looking for his wife's killer to give him purpose, because, with out that, he would be lost.
The top thing could be that he no longer cares whether he's dreaming or not, or it could signify that he's free from the burden of having to confirm his consciousness. I read some interpretation that said the whole top at the end was meant to reflect the idea placed into our own minds (via the film's inception) that his dead wife planted, that is it's all really just a dream. Which is kind of interesting.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about some other theories though, like Leo imagined the old version of Ken to rationalize his delusion... there's just too much conjecture there. If we agree that Nolan knows what he's doing (and we may not even agree to that) then I think it would follow that everything we need to know is right in front of us. That's why I don't buy theories like Ellen Page is Michael Caine's projection into Leo's mind to help him get over the death of his wife or prove his innocence or whatever because it's just not there. These ideas are divorced by too many logic jumps from the actual content of the film.
Sorry if I'm losing cogency, I just got back from the gym and am kinda tired, but stepping back:
Maybe the film lends itself so well to these various interpretations and theories because there really is an insufficient amount of information presented to make sense of the plot. Maybe it's just too ambiguous.
I like the guy who told you to suck a dick. I think he's on to something.
ReplyDeleteHe is on to something. He's on to Polkster's mom!
ReplyDeleteGood to know somebody else feels this way about Inception. It was definitely too shaky, Nolan had a bad ego trip. And if you ever get a hold of that Jesus acid, let me know pronto.
ReplyDeleteAnd for the record, I'm sick as fuck of Leo. I just could not take the man seriously in this, maybe that's why Inception sucks so much.