Inception Thoughts.
Jul. 16th, 2010 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
volterator Complicated movies don't hold together as a rule. Christopher Nolan's movies generally satisfy, yet fly apart under the stress of unsportsmanlike scrutiny. The Dark Knight reveals its plot holes shortly after the first viewing, but it's still a movie that was constructed with diligent care. I feel that Nolan is content to leave things out, to let things pass unexplained sometimes, in order to tell the story, at the expense of slapping Polyfilla on the plot. After seeing Inception I was struck by how it was a film where form was hugely important, and became interested in discussing what Nolan chooses to tell us and what he chooses to leave out of the narration.
If, like me, you try to avoid publicity on movies, which I do partly to avoid spoilers and partly because the media are the unfeeling architects of our exhaustion, then you know little or nothing about the movie's premise going in. A Christopher Nolan movie is, for me, a big deal. I was immediately delighted by Memento and have enjoyed to a high degree everything he's done since. Following on from The Dark Knight Nolan has reached a giant's status globally, so his follow-up was well on my radar even though I'd heard little of it besides the release date. So the premise goes like this: Leo Dicaprio plays a guy who can enter shared dreams and do stuff to them. Generically it's a hybrid heist movie/espionage/action/thriller.
Structurally it's complex. The balance of the movie takes place in a flashback, used as a framing device, and there are levels of setting nested in one another, like Russian dolls. What that entails is that it's The Matrix's real world/Matrix structure but reiterated until we reach a level a few strata deeper down; people dream within dreams. They dream of dreaming. This is admirable because it shows that Nolan respects an audience and is pressing the sophistication that comes built in with modern audiences. Our film literacy is immense as a culture, we have internalised byzantine constructions of rules and conventions, and can very easily assimilate new ones. Nolan uses this to his advantage, even though the film is complex, the narrative isn't especially overwhelming. The rules of how the shared dreaming works are rigorously explained and are logically internally consistent; just as impressive to me is the way that Leo's exposition of how the dreams work and how they feel to their inhabitants chimes with my real life experience of dreaming. When he explains that dreams always feel real when you're in them, it's true; when he explains that you start in the midst of events and are untroubled by how you got there, that's true too. In the end, it adds up to consummate cinematic craftsmanship, and is a rock solid basis for a genre story.
In this movie we have a world where people use the technology of shared dreaming for personal gain, and some people are trained to do this - it owes something to the Matrix, yet it sidesteps one of the most lazy things concepts from cyberpunk, which is that you're somehow at risk of dying in real life if you die in a dream. There's no black ICE evident, no-one drops dead like a marionette with cut strings - everyone knows that's bollocks, and Nolan is kind enough to use it. For dramatic reasons he comes up with a worst case scenario which results in something dramatically similar. It's great that he went to the effort and a clear sign that he's an imaginative and respectful storyteller. The dreaming itself won't kill you, though it might drive you mad, so Nolan installs some different, real-world sources of jeopardy on which the story hinges - a contract, and an outstanding arrest warrant. The jeopardy is ingeniously, judicially real.
What's the story about?: it's about a Classical antihero, which is to say, a man who has to succeed despite the obstacles his own flaws and mistakes throw in his path, not some wisecracking cockend who slaughters people left and right, which seems to be what people think antihero means, and successfully pull off a score and change someone's mind in the process. If I was to tell you the actual death toll in the film it'd surprise you - it's higher than an A-Team episode, but considerably fewer than The Matrix, to which it will inevitably be compared (so I'll carry on comparing it to The Matrix myself). Like The A-Team and The Matrix it's a has plenty of satisfying gunfights and car crashes. Now, my definition of 'death' here is couched in cunning legalese; plenty of people get shot. Hell, the action climax hinges on smashing a van around during a rolling shoot out; or I should say, one version of the action climax does. There's some serious Roger Moore-style cross-country ski-suit action in there too, so we're getting value for money, and I've not even mentioned the hotel level. Charmingly, the dream settings are called 'levels' within the film, and have to be constructed by architects, like game stages, and memorized by the participants. This is one of the clever wrinkles of what makes dream invasion possible.
Ken Watanabe plays Leo's benefactor, his most valuable ally and his enemy. After gaining leverage on Leo, whose character's name is Cobb, he sets him on a mission to infiltrate the mind of a rival and enact some jiggery-pokery. To do it Cobb has to put a team together, and a mindbending heist is born. I was amused that Watanabe's character seems to be a hangover of Nolan's writing Bruce Wayne - he's the billionaire enabler character, something between Hubertus Bigend and M.
It's a movie with a lot of stuff going on, which is why the things Nolan misses out - how did Cobb get into the mindbending business? What're the backgrounds of his team? What is the legal status of what they do? The social repercussions are only touched upon, but I feel these omissions are vitally important to the integrity of the film - because, objectively, IT CANNOT BE. It is a construct, a fictional artefact that if taken into the real world collapses like a subsiding building: one of the central visual motifs of the film. And it is a film; entirely. It borrows and alludes and stitches together so many things to make its whole. Watch it and have fun with it, though whether it lifts its skeleton from The Matrix, which some people will tell you, is contentious. That it thankfully jettisons any mystic or messianic guff completely isn't at all. It's Matrix-like at times but it's a lot better of a film, if not quite as much fun. My favourite allusion to another movie is to 2001. Dave's deathbed makes an echoed appearance, with a cheery monolith-coloured floor.
It's totally good, everyone's good in it, Tom Hardy and Ellen Page included, though I'm coming to realise that Shinzon from Star Trek was a blight on Hardy's otherwise strong career. I haven't even mentioned Marion Cotillard's character, who is immensely significant, and whose role I won't spoil, for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's good, it's auteurist, apparently taking a decade to perfect the script, it was made with real craftsmanship. It's a masterclass in writing a screenplay with the proper sleight of hand, because it doesn't necessarily make sense and during it you won't likely care. It's also oddly austere and humorless despite being really genuinely startling, and after all the action and lavish set pieces are said and done. I wish I could say it was chilly in the way of Kubrick, but it isn't. The main emotional buttons it pushes will resonate most strongly with those who have ever been separated from a loved one, and who perhaps had a complex relationship with their fathers.
So yes. Words on a blog.
If, like me, you try to avoid publicity on movies, which I do partly to avoid spoilers and partly because the media are the unfeeling architects of our exhaustion, then you know little or nothing about the movie's premise going in. A Christopher Nolan movie is, for me, a big deal. I was immediately delighted by Memento and have enjoyed to a high degree everything he's done since. Following on from The Dark Knight Nolan has reached a giant's status globally, so his follow-up was well on my radar even though I'd heard little of it besides the release date. So the premise goes like this: Leo Dicaprio plays a guy who can enter shared dreams and do stuff to them. Generically it's a hybrid heist movie/espionage/action/thriller.
Structurally it's complex. The balance of the movie takes place in a flashback, used as a framing device, and there are levels of setting nested in one another, like Russian dolls. What that entails is that it's The Matrix's real world/Matrix structure but reiterated until we reach a level a few strata deeper down; people dream within dreams. They dream of dreaming. This is admirable because it shows that Nolan respects an audience and is pressing the sophistication that comes built in with modern audiences. Our film literacy is immense as a culture, we have internalised byzantine constructions of rules and conventions, and can very easily assimilate new ones. Nolan uses this to his advantage, even though the film is complex, the narrative isn't especially overwhelming. The rules of how the shared dreaming works are rigorously explained and are logically internally consistent; just as impressive to me is the way that Leo's exposition of how the dreams work and how they feel to their inhabitants chimes with my real life experience of dreaming. When he explains that dreams always feel real when you're in them, it's true; when he explains that you start in the midst of events and are untroubled by how you got there, that's true too. In the end, it adds up to consummate cinematic craftsmanship, and is a rock solid basis for a genre story.
In this movie we have a world where people use the technology of shared dreaming for personal gain, and some people are trained to do this - it owes something to the Matrix, yet it sidesteps one of the most lazy things concepts from cyberpunk, which is that you're somehow at risk of dying in real life if you die in a dream. There's no black ICE evident, no-one drops dead like a marionette with cut strings - everyone knows that's bollocks, and Nolan is kind enough to use it. For dramatic reasons he comes up with a worst case scenario which results in something dramatically similar. It's great that he went to the effort and a clear sign that he's an imaginative and respectful storyteller. The dreaming itself won't kill you, though it might drive you mad, so Nolan installs some different, real-world sources of jeopardy on which the story hinges - a contract, and an outstanding arrest warrant. The jeopardy is ingeniously, judicially real.
What's the story about?: it's about a Classical antihero, which is to say, a man who has to succeed despite the obstacles his own flaws and mistakes throw in his path, not some wisecracking cockend who slaughters people left and right, which seems to be what people think antihero means, and successfully pull off a score and change someone's mind in the process. If I was to tell you the actual death toll in the film it'd surprise you - it's higher than an A-Team episode, but considerably fewer than The Matrix, to which it will inevitably be compared (so I'll carry on comparing it to The Matrix myself). Like The A-Team and The Matrix it's a has plenty of satisfying gunfights and car crashes. Now, my definition of 'death' here is couched in cunning legalese; plenty of people get shot. Hell, the action climax hinges on smashing a van around during a rolling shoot out; or I should say, one version of the action climax does. There's some serious Roger Moore-style cross-country ski-suit action in there too, so we're getting value for money, and I've not even mentioned the hotel level. Charmingly, the dream settings are called 'levels' within the film, and have to be constructed by architects, like game stages, and memorized by the participants. This is one of the clever wrinkles of what makes dream invasion possible.
Ken Watanabe plays Leo's benefactor, his most valuable ally and his enemy. After gaining leverage on Leo, whose character's name is Cobb, he sets him on a mission to infiltrate the mind of a rival and enact some jiggery-pokery. To do it Cobb has to put a team together, and a mindbending heist is born. I was amused that Watanabe's character seems to be a hangover of Nolan's writing Bruce Wayne - he's the billionaire enabler character, something between Hubertus Bigend and M.
It's a movie with a lot of stuff going on, which is why the things Nolan misses out - how did Cobb get into the mindbending business? What're the backgrounds of his team? What is the legal status of what they do? The social repercussions are only touched upon, but I feel these omissions are vitally important to the integrity of the film - because, objectively, IT CANNOT BE. It is a construct, a fictional artefact that if taken into the real world collapses like a subsiding building: one of the central visual motifs of the film. And it is a film; entirely. It borrows and alludes and stitches together so many things to make its whole. Watch it and have fun with it, though whether it lifts its skeleton from The Matrix, which some people will tell you, is contentious. That it thankfully jettisons any mystic or messianic guff completely isn't at all. It's Matrix-like at times but it's a lot better of a film, if not quite as much fun. My favourite allusion to another movie is to 2001. Dave's deathbed makes an echoed appearance, with a cheery monolith-coloured floor.
It's totally good, everyone's good in it, Tom Hardy and Ellen Page included, though I'm coming to realise that Shinzon from Star Trek was a blight on Hardy's otherwise strong career. I haven't even mentioned Marion Cotillard's character, who is immensely significant, and whose role I won't spoil, for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's good, it's auteurist, apparently taking a decade to perfect the script, it was made with real craftsmanship. It's a masterclass in writing a screenplay with the proper sleight of hand, because it doesn't necessarily make sense and during it you won't likely care. It's also oddly austere and humorless despite being really genuinely startling, and after all the action and lavish set pieces are said and done. I wish I could say it was chilly in the way of Kubrick, but it isn't. The main emotional buttons it pushes will resonate most strongly with those who have ever been separated from a loved one, and who perhaps had a complex relationship with their fathers.
So yes. Words on a blog.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 02:47 am (UTC)I like your reviews. Let us continue to read them.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 06:47 am (UTC)I accept that my blogs don't tend to flow too well, and move on. More pending.