Inception (Film Review)
Aug. 5th, 2010 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakYes, I watched the film of the hour. It left me entertained, but not enthralled.
At it’s best, it works as a meta about storytelling. Not as a straightforward mystery/suspense movie. I mean, were you genuinely surprised at the final image revealing that Cobb is still dreaming? The film made that blazingly obvious from the moment he wakes up in the air plane, and come on, since the entire premise is the questioning of realities, the dominance of dreams, so there had to be a punchline like this. Also, if your constructor of labyrinths and guide through them is called Ariadne of all the possible names, chances are you’re dreaming already, so the moment she turned up and was named, I didn’t think there was such a thing as a “real” narrative level anymore. (BTW: I’ve seen people state “Ariadne the spinner/weaver” – wrong Greek myth. That one was Arachne. Ariadne was the daughter of Minos who guided Theseus through the labyrinth with her red thread but ended up left by him on Naxos.)
In his final confrontation with Mal, Cobb says that she’s only ever a part of the real woman because he can’t manage to project/reconstruct the layers and the complete personality his wife had. It’s as neat a self-justification by a scriptwriter/director as you can find, because all the characters in this film strike one as these kind of surface projections. (Ditto for Mal’s challenge to Cobb that what he deems real life feels like a generic paranoid fantasy.) They don’t give me the sense of having an inner life of their own, a history of their own; the one character whose inner life and backstory is a plot point, Fischer, has the most generic history of all in the world of American movies and tv shows, a father/son conflict. This works if you assume that Cobb is dreaming throughout the film and all the characters are projections of his subconscious. (Who might or might not be based on real people.)
The downside of this is that this meant I did not emotionally connect to any of the team. And yet I can’t say I was indifferent; I found the whole film a truly interesting response to the first Matrix movie, because it basically rejects not only the idea that there is something like a real life to which one has to wake up, hard as it is in comparison to the virtual one, but also that to wake up is the “right” goal. The one part of Inception that really managed to emotionally connect with me and downright sucker punch me was the way it revealed, in several steps, what exactly had happened to Mal. It was almost the kind of horror I felt at the final image of the Carnivale episode Take a Number, which one must not spoil.
The scene where Ariadne makes Paris fold on itself excepted, the imagery of the film was surprisingly conventional for a story that takes place in the subconscious. What I mean: my favourite BTVS episode is Restless, which also almost entirely takes place in dreams, and is breathtakingly cinematic on a tv budget. Purely in terms of getting across what dreams feel like in a visual way and also to connect this to character exploration, it wins the comparison easily, in 45 minutes versus three hours. Otoh, in Inception world you’re not supposed to notice at once you’re dreaming, which isn’t a question in Restless, plus there is only one person whose reality is certain versus four of them in the Buffy episode.
I’ve seen that the film already engineered some fanfiction, but honestly, the only fanfic I’d care to read at the moment would be a Sandman crossover where some Sandman characters find themselves in those messed-up dream worlds and end up calling Dream (whether or not he’d intervene is up to debate), and so far all the summaries I’ve spotted seem to be Arthur/Eames. Sorry, a few lines of character B needling character A about being uptight does not make a pairing for me; as mentioned before re: the characters in this film not Cobb, both Arthur and Eames struck me as paper thin.
And yet: back to the storytelling meta again. The story Cobb finally ends up believing is the one the film itself tells the viewer, and you could say it ends with a question: do you suspend your disbelief to accept it, or can't you? Personally, I haven't made up my mind yet.
At it’s best, it works as a meta about storytelling. Not as a straightforward mystery/suspense movie. I mean, were you genuinely surprised at the final image revealing that Cobb is still dreaming? The film made that blazingly obvious from the moment he wakes up in the air plane, and come on, since the entire premise is the questioning of realities, the dominance of dreams, so there had to be a punchline like this. Also, if your constructor of labyrinths and guide through them is called Ariadne of all the possible names, chances are you’re dreaming already, so the moment she turned up and was named, I didn’t think there was such a thing as a “real” narrative level anymore. (BTW: I’ve seen people state “Ariadne the spinner/weaver” – wrong Greek myth. That one was Arachne. Ariadne was the daughter of Minos who guided Theseus through the labyrinth with her red thread but ended up left by him on Naxos.)
In his final confrontation with Mal, Cobb says that she’s only ever a part of the real woman because he can’t manage to project/reconstruct the layers and the complete personality his wife had. It’s as neat a self-justification by a scriptwriter/director as you can find, because all the characters in this film strike one as these kind of surface projections. (Ditto for Mal’s challenge to Cobb that what he deems real life feels like a generic paranoid fantasy.) They don’t give me the sense of having an inner life of their own, a history of their own; the one character whose inner life and backstory is a plot point, Fischer, has the most generic history of all in the world of American movies and tv shows, a father/son conflict. This works if you assume that Cobb is dreaming throughout the film and all the characters are projections of his subconscious. (Who might or might not be based on real people.)
The downside of this is that this meant I did not emotionally connect to any of the team. And yet I can’t say I was indifferent; I found the whole film a truly interesting response to the first Matrix movie, because it basically rejects not only the idea that there is something like a real life to which one has to wake up, hard as it is in comparison to the virtual one, but also that to wake up is the “right” goal. The one part of Inception that really managed to emotionally connect with me and downright sucker punch me was the way it revealed, in several steps, what exactly had happened to Mal. It was almost the kind of horror I felt at the final image of the Carnivale episode Take a Number, which one must not spoil.
The scene where Ariadne makes Paris fold on itself excepted, the imagery of the film was surprisingly conventional for a story that takes place in the subconscious. What I mean: my favourite BTVS episode is Restless, which also almost entirely takes place in dreams, and is breathtakingly cinematic on a tv budget. Purely in terms of getting across what dreams feel like in a visual way and also to connect this to character exploration, it wins the comparison easily, in 45 minutes versus three hours. Otoh, in Inception world you’re not supposed to notice at once you’re dreaming, which isn’t a question in Restless, plus there is only one person whose reality is certain versus four of them in the Buffy episode.
I’ve seen that the film already engineered some fanfiction, but honestly, the only fanfic I’d care to read at the moment would be a Sandman crossover where some Sandman characters find themselves in those messed-up dream worlds and end up calling Dream (whether or not he’d intervene is up to debate), and so far all the summaries I’ve spotted seem to be Arthur/Eames. Sorry, a few lines of character B needling character A about being uptight does not make a pairing for me; as mentioned before re: the characters in this film not Cobb, both Arthur and Eames struck me as paper thin.
And yet: back to the storytelling meta again. The story Cobb finally ends up believing is the one the film itself tells the viewer, and you could say it ends with a question: do you suspend your disbelief to accept it, or can't you? Personally, I haven't made up my mind yet.
