Inceptiooossnnbblllaeeerrggh
Jul. 23rd, 2010 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arf_she_saidAll Christopher Nolan's movies are about about reality, self-deception and our shadow-selves. Some of them are pretty great: Memento was just about a perfect movie, lean and purposeful with a conceit that doesn't feel like the joke's on you. As the years have passed his stuff has become more bloated, substituted thought and meaning for glossy cleverness. The more I think about The Dark Knight the more I resent how thin that patina of philosophical depth was, how little that movie had to offer on the nature of myth (which wouldn't be a problem except that's what the thing claims to be about).
I read as little about Inception as I could but I couldn't help seeing the effusive praise. I got pretty excited, and here are a whole bunch of words about how that excitement was justified. Just kidding! I need to try to break down the ways this movie failed because this thing could have been, and should have been, so much better.
The biggest problem with Inception is that it's a movie. These rich, cool ideas deserved at least five or six hours to breathe, to be elegant instead of inchoate, incoherent, and subtle as a train.
You got two McGuffins here: the technology itself, which gives you a heist movie; and the heist movie, which gives you a psychodrama about guilt and reality.
Already this is one more than a movie can support on its own. The heist I'll get to in a minute. The psychodrama is perfect Nolan material: dreams are a great way to examine guilt, and this works, this is elegant in the same way that Memento is: form fits content. The vehicle and the story reflect and enhance each other.
But to then load a pseudo-metaphysical debate about the nature of reality on top of that obscures those neat ideas with a mess of declarative "conversations" about whether something is real -- now? how about now? -- for the sake of a cheap "twist" at the end. It all still a dream? Did he choose the red pill or the blue pill?
Now if you're dealing with dreams, you're dealing with reality; and the nature of DiCaprio's guilt is obviously anchored in this duality. If they'd had a few more hours they could have done something meaty with it, but the way this is put together it is basically a Matrix fake-out with nothing interesting to say about choice, free will or reality, and there's no-one as charismatic as Hugo Weaving to keep us interested.
Heists provide a really strong and entertaining skeleton for movies. They have two basic pleasures: a team of interesting personalities and the planning and then executing some super-clever escapade. Inception hangs itself off this structure, but unfortunately delivers on neither pleasure.
The characters have no distinguishing personalities, they do nothing funny or caring. They don't even have identifiable roles. The chemist is a driver? The architect is a psychologist? The forger is an assassin? The... Joseph Gordon-Levitt is... a douche? These people needed spectacular, memorable introductions; they needed sharpening up, they needed to interact with each other. Page and DiCaprio were the only characters who actually talked, and they talked in stilted, emphatic, coma-inducing set-pieces that ground the movie to a halt maybe four times, and at the end we still have no idea how they feel about each other. Shouldn't DiCaprio be shitty with her for invading his privacy? Isn't Page shitty with him for withholding that information? Who knows? Who cares about these assholes?
Who cares about DiCaprio's bizarre, twisty, boring backstory when the resolution is telegraphed so clearly? Page tells him at the start -- how does she know this? -- he needs to forgive himself and get over his guilt, let his wife go. So there's your psychodrama climax shoehorned in, and it's utterly empty, because DiCaprio is not a character, he's something that steps through some set-pieces.
And then you've got tCillian Murphy. Whether or not he's meant to be a bad guy (who knows? There's nothing there but some poorly-drawn daddy issues) he is the purpose of the heist and he becomes totally irrelevant at the end. It's intimated that they succeed in implanting the idea, but wasn't the moral that implanting ideas is bad? And if they succeeded, doesn't that make them awful fucking mind-rapists?
This super-clever escapade has some super-great structural ideas. That it's completed on a ten-hour plane trip gives a perfectly simple arc for a drama: the people who land are not those who took off. Easy. But with 2.5 hours the only people we can say have changed are DiCaprio (he got in touch with his feelings) and Murphy (his daddy loved him after all (maybe?)). Bring a book.
And then you've got this amazingly neat trick of delving ever deeper, leaving a member of your team behind at each stage until you're left with something explosive, emotional, pared-back; until you reach and resolve the crisis of your protagonist; and then at the end, with perfect timing, spontaneous invention and a fuckload of luck you've got to snap back through intact. God, that is fantastic.
Well, the C4 and the CGI were explosive, but the final two stages were ridiculous, fruitless, meaningless. The snowy hideout was just a place, and a place where everyone was dressed the same as each other and the background and ran around with no purpose. Not only was the concept and consequence of limbo ambiguous, there was no clarity as to whose limbo we were in or even how many we went through. This isn't to say we needed more exposition; we needed more time to turn the overload of exposition (that was often lost in the thunderous, self-important soundtrack) into something meaningful.
Because of and on top of these fundamental problems we get just careless craftsmanship: a script consisting entirely of people giving speeches about what they have to do, and dreams, and what they're doing, and reality, and what happened ages ago, and dreams, and who they are, and reality, and what they're feeling, and blah blah ad nauseum. Every piece of dialogue is someone aggressively or depressedly asserting something that apparently the audience needs to know. Apparently some stuff we need to know five or six times.
None of these excellent actors are able to deliver these lines with any conviction, because these lines are stock shit that people only ever say in movies. "Inception is impossible. It can't be done." "I can do it. Because I have done it before." and "The shores of subconsciousness" and "This last job." and "You are talking about dreams." (The trailer for The Town ran before the movie and is even more egregious when it comes to this. Looks like a total yawn-fest.)
Nor is the look of the thing particularly captivating: The Cell has more memorable illustrations of the interior of someone's mind. But Inception wants to be able to talk about reality, so both reality and people's dreams are kind of a drab clinical Toronto nowhere/notime, drawn in blues and greys, or a boring hotel, or said random icy fortress. The shots of DiCaprio's kids fail to sunshine glow with any emotional vibrancy; the hearth-home is Ikea mod mahogany, not a contrasting warm orange.
Sure some crazy things happen in the dreams, like cities bending back on themselves (because it looks cool) and giant mirrors appearing out of nowhere, (because...mirrors are deep?) but the only time the effort is really worth it is for Gordon-Levitt's zero-gravity creativity and fighting, which really is just awesome and clever as fuck, and goes on too long.
What you are left with then is the impression that this movie was made because the action spectacle would look really cool but Transformers 3 wasn't a classy enough idea.
Maybe a half hour or more was cut for theatrical release, but this mess needs hours more time to accomplish what it wanted to accomplish. Its abject failure is infinitely frustrating because each individual element is so exciting and full of potential, but Nolan just piles them atop each other until the poor overloaded monster explodes and collapses in an endless CGI orgy of destruction.
I read as little about Inception as I could but I couldn't help seeing the effusive praise. I got pretty excited, and here are a whole bunch of words about how that excitement was justified. Just kidding! I need to try to break down the ways this movie failed because this thing could have been, and should have been, so much better.
The biggest problem with Inception is that it's a movie. These rich, cool ideas deserved at least five or six hours to breathe, to be elegant instead of inchoate, incoherent, and subtle as a train.
You got two McGuffins here: the technology itself, which gives you a heist movie; and the heist movie, which gives you a psychodrama about guilt and reality.
Already this is one more than a movie can support on its own. The heist I'll get to in a minute. The psychodrama is perfect Nolan material: dreams are a great way to examine guilt, and this works, this is elegant in the same way that Memento is: form fits content. The vehicle and the story reflect and enhance each other.
But to then load a pseudo-metaphysical debate about the nature of reality on top of that obscures those neat ideas with a mess of declarative "conversations" about whether something is real -- now? how about now? -- for the sake of a cheap "twist" at the end. It all still a dream? Did he choose the red pill or the blue pill?
Now if you're dealing with dreams, you're dealing with reality; and the nature of DiCaprio's guilt is obviously anchored in this duality. If they'd had a few more hours they could have done something meaty with it, but the way this is put together it is basically a Matrix fake-out with nothing interesting to say about choice, free will or reality, and there's no-one as charismatic as Hugo Weaving to keep us interested.
Heists provide a really strong and entertaining skeleton for movies. They have two basic pleasures: a team of interesting personalities and the planning and then executing some super-clever escapade. Inception hangs itself off this structure, but unfortunately delivers on neither pleasure.
The characters have no distinguishing personalities, they do nothing funny or caring. They don't even have identifiable roles. The chemist is a driver? The architect is a psychologist? The forger is an assassin? The... Joseph Gordon-Levitt is... a douche? These people needed spectacular, memorable introductions; they needed sharpening up, they needed to interact with each other. Page and DiCaprio were the only characters who actually talked, and they talked in stilted, emphatic, coma-inducing set-pieces that ground the movie to a halt maybe four times, and at the end we still have no idea how they feel about each other. Shouldn't DiCaprio be shitty with her for invading his privacy? Isn't Page shitty with him for withholding that information? Who knows? Who cares about these assholes?
Who cares about DiCaprio's bizarre, twisty, boring backstory when the resolution is telegraphed so clearly? Page tells him at the start -- how does she know this? -- he needs to forgive himself and get over his guilt, let his wife go. So there's your psychodrama climax shoehorned in, and it's utterly empty, because DiCaprio is not a character, he's something that steps through some set-pieces.
And then you've got tCillian Murphy. Whether or not he's meant to be a bad guy (who knows? There's nothing there but some poorly-drawn daddy issues) he is the purpose of the heist and he becomes totally irrelevant at the end. It's intimated that they succeed in implanting the idea, but wasn't the moral that implanting ideas is bad? And if they succeeded, doesn't that make them awful fucking mind-rapists?
This super-clever escapade has some super-great structural ideas. That it's completed on a ten-hour plane trip gives a perfectly simple arc for a drama: the people who land are not those who took off. Easy. But with 2.5 hours the only people we can say have changed are DiCaprio (he got in touch with his feelings) and Murphy (his daddy loved him after all (maybe?)). Bring a book.
And then you've got this amazingly neat trick of delving ever deeper, leaving a member of your team behind at each stage until you're left with something explosive, emotional, pared-back; until you reach and resolve the crisis of your protagonist; and then at the end, with perfect timing, spontaneous invention and a fuckload of luck you've got to snap back through intact. God, that is fantastic.
Well, the C4 and the CGI were explosive, but the final two stages were ridiculous, fruitless, meaningless. The snowy hideout was just a place, and a place where everyone was dressed the same as each other and the background and ran around with no purpose. Not only was the concept and consequence of limbo ambiguous, there was no clarity as to whose limbo we were in or even how many we went through. This isn't to say we needed more exposition; we needed more time to turn the overload of exposition (that was often lost in the thunderous, self-important soundtrack) into something meaningful.
Because of and on top of these fundamental problems we get just careless craftsmanship: a script consisting entirely of people giving speeches about what they have to do, and dreams, and what they're doing, and reality, and what happened ages ago, and dreams, and who they are, and reality, and what they're feeling, and blah blah ad nauseum. Every piece of dialogue is someone aggressively or depressedly asserting something that apparently the audience needs to know. Apparently some stuff we need to know five or six times.
None of these excellent actors are able to deliver these lines with any conviction, because these lines are stock shit that people only ever say in movies. "Inception is impossible. It can't be done." "I can do it. Because I have done it before." and "The shores of subconsciousness" and "This last job." and "You are talking about dreams." (The trailer for The Town ran before the movie and is even more egregious when it comes to this. Looks like a total yawn-fest.)
Nor is the look of the thing particularly captivating: The Cell has more memorable illustrations of the interior of someone's mind. But Inception wants to be able to talk about reality, so both reality and people's dreams are kind of a drab clinical Toronto nowhere/notime, drawn in blues and greys, or a boring hotel, or said random icy fortress. The shots of DiCaprio's kids fail to sunshine glow with any emotional vibrancy; the hearth-home is Ikea mod mahogany, not a contrasting warm orange.
Sure some crazy things happen in the dreams, like cities bending back on themselves (because it looks cool) and giant mirrors appearing out of nowhere, (because...mirrors are deep?) but the only time the effort is really worth it is for Gordon-Levitt's zero-gravity creativity and fighting, which really is just awesome and clever as fuck, and goes on too long.
What you are left with then is the impression that this movie was made because the action spectacle would look really cool but Transformers 3 wasn't a classy enough idea.
Maybe a half hour or more was cut for theatrical release, but this mess needs hours more time to accomplish what it wanted to accomplish. Its abject failure is infinitely frustrating because each individual element is so exciting and full of potential, but Nolan just piles them atop each other until the poor overloaded monster explodes and collapses in an endless CGI orgy of destruction.