![“Inception”Written & Directed by Christopher Nolan; Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy and Ken Watanabe. Story: In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a single idea within one’s mind can be the most dangerous weapon or the most valuable asset.
Seen by Adam and Lars July 17, 2010
LARS:Christopher Nolan has it made. After “Memento” and two successful Batman movies, he got to make the film he’d been ruminating over for more than a decade. He and his co-writer and brother, Jonathan Nolan, have spent all this time thinking about how to bring the very cool concept at the heart of “Inception” to life. Oddly, they succeed and fail at the same time.The first hour of the movie is an extremely well-written and spectacularly produced introduction to the idea that you can enter another person’s dream. Dream-time moves slower than real time, so you can spend what seems like days in dream-time, but only hours will have passed when you wake up. So far, so fascinating and very successful. It’s obvious that many people will compare “Inception” to “The Matrix”, if only for the parallel ideas that you can live in alternate realities. But where “The Matrix” was content to be an unabashed action movie (it only grew delusions of grandeur in the sequels), “Inception” goes for a love story, albeit an untraditional one, as the emotional lynchpin around which the story revolves. To me that’s where the movie fails.[SPOILER ALERT – do not read on, if you’ve not seen the movie]Leonardo DiCaprio, doing a fine, if not remarkable, job as always, plays Cobb, an “extractor” whose job it is to find information in other people’s dreams. As we find out, he and his now-deceased wife (Marion Cotillard) created such an amazing dreamworld for themselves that she eventually lost touch with reality and killed herself in the belief that she was still in a dream (when you die in dreams, you wake up, as everyone knows). Yet she still haunts him in his dreams, especially when he goes several layers down (cue an elevator scene that was done to much greater effect in “Angel Heart”). Maybe I’m a cold-hearted bastard (yet I’m unashamed to admit I wept like a baby at the end of Toy Story 3), but I just didn’t buy into their romance and the way their story was told in the movie. Neither of them are portrayed as particularly sympathetic characters worth rooting for and there’s a shot of their two kids playing in the sun that’s used crassly over and over again. I guess it’s supposed to make me feel sympathy for these people because I feel bad for their, now orphaned, kids? I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it and it took me out of dream-time and into yawn-time over and over again during the movie.The other thing that doesn’t work in the movie is the perceived need for layer upon layer of complexity. The other core part of “Inception” is, at heart, a simple heist story. Instead of retrieving a dream from someone, the gang comes together to insert a dream/notion into someone. Heist stories are hellishly difficult to get right, but wonderful when they work. This one is serviceable and it’s not where the faults of the story lie. “Inception” uses a conceit that if you fall asleep inside a dream, you enter another layer of dream-time, and you can do that over and over again to get deeper and deeper into dreams. As anyone who’s had dreams where you wake up from sleeping only to realize that you’re still in a dream knows, this is a creepy experience. But that’s not what it’s used for here. Here it’s used to escape further and further from reality and deeper into dream-time to buy time. Sadly, it ends up, several dream levels down, as a bizarre rehash of “Where Eagles Dare” mashed up with the ski scene from the James Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only”. Not that it wasn’t visually engaging and entertaining, but it had become so far-fetched that I entered yawn-time again. So the overall conceit of the movie works perfectly and is fascinating, but the two parallel storylines never really gel or work to the standard that the Nolan brothers have set themselves.So that’s where the movie fails for me. Where it is wildly successful is in the visual world that Nolan conjures up. There are scenes of stunning beauty in the film and Nolan masters special effects like few other directors at this point. He also knows how to cast well and unexpected. I nearly yelled out in surprise, when Tom Berenger showed up all of a sudden. He doesn’t look like time has done him many favors since he was almost a movie star (remember “Shattered”?). Ellen Page’s part is basically to be exposition-girl, asking all the dumb questions about how it all works, so the audience understands the mechanics of dream-time. She does a decent job with an underwritten part. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is interesting as always, and it seems like Nolan asked him to not do his trademark smirk and he’s better for it. I barely recognized Tom Hardy from “Bronson” – see it if you haven’t already; it’s an acting tour de force. Here’s he’s the wily outsider who comes in to help with a crucial aspect of the reverse heist.For all its flaws, “Inception” is still the most interesting movie to come out this summer. It’s not a sequel, it’s not dumber than a bag of hammers, it’s not a comic book adaptation, and it’s not animated. It’s an actual original movie, written for the screen. Who knew they still made those?
ADAM:Okay, okay. I jump into this review of Christopher Nolan’s film “Inception” with the knowledge that Lars and I will probably be more apart in opinion than usual. It’s a weird feeling; not only do we usually agree on the films we review, our parallel tastes as cinephiles go very deep — through the 90’s, 80’s and way, way back. It’s almost scary. Still, sometimes you say potato, I say onion ring.Also: I’m going to try to keep this as general as possible and devoid of spoilers.This was probably the movie I was most excited to see all year, with the TRON sequel and the next Harry Potter close behind. I’m a huge Chris Nolan fan. And as much as I love and respect Nolan’s Batman films, it’s the more complex, more cerebral, noir-y Memento that made me a fan of his for life. Give me a thinking man’s movie, sprinkle in a little gunplay and I’m a happy clam.Going in to the theater I was only apprehensive about one thing. This film is about dreams and the ability to enter the dreams of others, at first to protect or steal secrets. So many movies have tried — and failed — to create a workable story within the dream construct. Tackling this problem and succeeding would be a major achievement in my mind.Walking out of the theater I had a different feeling. Not only did I think Nolan did as good of a job creating and abiding by rules for the “dream” movie genre, but I think he solidified himself as a torch carrier for dark, action-filled, cerebral films the way I classify Michael Mann. In fact, I believe if Michael Mann could wrap his head around the kind of abstract thinking involved in writing Inception, the film I saw would be very close to what he’d produce.There’s no question that the first half of the film is better than the second — Nolan does a great (if a little too expositional) job of setting up the rules of the game we’re about to witness. We meet Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), a man with a troubled past who works as a type of black bag operative, hired by shady scions of big business to infiltrate the minds of their adversaries and enemies through dreams. Cobb and his sidekick Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) specialize in ferreting out the secrets people hide in their deepest subconscious. When a Japanese tycoon named Saito (Ken Watanabe) makes Cobb and offer he can’t refuse — a chance to overcome his shady, troubled past, Cobb enlists the help of a young up-and-coming Architect, Ariadne, played by Ellen Page. That ‘external storyline’ — the inception itself — planting an idea inside of someone’s head is a bit thin. But I liked the balance between that story and Cobb’s inner struggle about his wife, Mal (Marianne Cotillard). Nolan knows flawed heros, understands pace, is brilliant at visualization and mood and knows how to build suspense. The “levels of dreams” can be a bit exhausting, but Nolan needs these shifts of time and locations to literally buy himself time to tie off loose ends and make the story work. And it does work.He gets very good performances across the board, from DiCaprio and Cotillard as expected, Page makes her job in Juno look not like a fluke, Gordon-Levitt continues to improve and may be at he is best here surrounded by better class horses than usual, and Tom Hardy as Eames gets the best lines and shows why he’s still one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood. Michael Caine, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy and Lukas Haas have little to do in essentially cameos, and Tom Berenger is good in his role, but may actually look worse alive than Postlethewaite does dead.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5s0z4zsWB1qaw4plo1_400.jpg)
“Inception”
Written & Directed by Christopher Nolan; Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy and Ken Watanabe. Story: In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a single idea within one’s mind can be the most dangerous weapon or the most valuable asset.
Seen by Adam and Lars July 17, 2010
LARS:
Christopher Nolan has it made. After “Memento” and two successful Batman movies, he got to make the film he’d been ruminating over for more than a decade. He and his co-writer and brother, Jonathan Nolan, have spent all this time thinking about how to bring the very cool concept at the heart of “Inception” to life. Oddly, they succeed and fail at the same time.
The first hour of the movie is an extremely well-written and spectacularly produced introduction to the idea that you can enter another person’s dream. Dream-time moves slower than real time, so you can spend what seems like days in dream-time, but only hours will have passed when you wake up. So far, so fascinating and very successful. It’s obvious that many people will compare “Inception” to “The Matrix”, if only for the parallel ideas that you can live in alternate realities. But where “The Matrix” was content to be an unabashed action movie (it only grew delusions of grandeur in the sequels), “Inception” goes for a love story, albeit an untraditional one, as the emotional lynchpin around which the story revolves. To me that’s where the movie fails.
[SPOILER ALERT – do not read on, if you’ve not seen the movie]
Leonardo DiCaprio, doing a fine, if not remarkable, job as always, plays Cobb, an “extractor” whose job it is to find information in other people’s dreams. As we find out, he and his now-deceased wife (Marion Cotillard) created such an amazing dreamworld for themselves that she eventually lost touch with reality and killed herself in the belief that she was still in a dream (when you die in dreams, you wake up, as everyone knows). Yet she still haunts him in his dreams, especially when he goes several layers down (cue an elevator scene that was done to much greater effect in “Angel Heart”). Maybe I’m a cold-hearted bastard (yet I’m unashamed to admit I wept like a baby at the end of Toy Story 3), but I just didn’t buy into their romance and the way their story was told in the movie. Neither of them are portrayed as particularly sympathetic characters worth rooting for and there’s a shot of their two kids playing in the sun that’s used crassly over and over again. I guess it’s supposed to make me feel sympathy for these people because I feel bad for their, now orphaned, kids? I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it and it took me out of dream-time and into yawn-time over and over again during the movie.
The other thing that doesn’t work in the movie is the perceived need for layer upon layer of complexity. The other core part of “Inception” is, at heart, a simple heist story. Instead of retrieving a dream from someone, the gang comes together to insert a dream/notion into someone. Heist stories are hellishly difficult to get right, but wonderful when they work. This one is serviceable and it’s not where the faults of the story lie. “Inception” uses a conceit that if you fall asleep inside a dream, you enter another layer of dream-time, and you can do that over and over again to get deeper and deeper into dreams. As anyone who’s had dreams where you wake up from sleeping only to realize that you’re still in a dream knows, this is a creepy experience. But that’s not what it’s used for here. Here it’s used to escape further and further from reality and deeper into dream-time to buy time. Sadly, it ends up, several dream levels down, as a bizarre rehash of “Where Eagles Dare” mashed up with the ski scene from the James Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only”. Not that it wasn’t visually engaging and entertaining, but it had become so far-fetched that I entered yawn-time again. So the overall conceit of the movie works perfectly and is fascinating, but the two parallel storylines never really gel or work to the standard that the Nolan brothers have set themselves.
So that’s where the movie fails for me. Where it is wildly successful is in the visual world that Nolan conjures up. There are scenes of stunning beauty in the film and Nolan masters special effects like few other directors at this point. He also knows how to cast well and unexpected. I nearly yelled out in surprise, when Tom Berenger showed up all of a sudden. He doesn’t look like time has done him many favors since he was almost a movie star (remember “Shattered”?). Ellen Page’s part is basically to be exposition-girl, asking all the dumb questions about how it all works, so the audience understands the mechanics of dream-time. She does a decent job with an underwritten part. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is interesting as always, and it seems like Nolan asked him to not do his trademark smirk and he’s better for it. I barely recognized Tom Hardy from “Bronson” – see it if you haven’t already; it’s an acting tour de force. Here’s he’s the wily outsider who comes in to help with a crucial aspect of the reverse heist.
For all its flaws, “Inception” is still the most interesting movie to come out this summer. It’s not a sequel, it’s not dumber than a bag of hammers, it’s not a comic book adaptation, and it’s not animated. It’s an actual original movie, written for the screen. Who knew they still made those?
ADAM:
Okay, okay. I jump into this review of Christopher Nolan’s film “Inception” with the knowledge that Lars and I will probably be more apart in opinion than usual. It’s a weird feeling; not only do we usually agree on the films we review, our parallel tastes as cinephiles go very deep — through the 90’s, 80’s and way, way back. It’s almost scary. Still, sometimes you say potato, I say onion ring.
Also: I’m going to try to keep this as general as possible and devoid of spoilers.
This was probably the movie I was most excited to see all year, with the TRON sequel and the next Harry Potter close behind. I’m a huge Chris Nolan fan. And as much as I love and respect Nolan’s Batman films, it’s the more complex, more cerebral, noir-y Memento that made me a fan of his for life. Give me a thinking man’s movie, sprinkle in a little gunplay and I’m a happy clam.
Going in to the theater I was only apprehensive about one thing. This film is about dreams and the ability to enter the dreams of others, at first to protect or steal secrets. So many movies have tried — and failed — to create a workable story within the dream construct. Tackling this problem and succeeding would be a major achievement in my mind.
Walking out of the theater I had a different feeling. Not only did I think Nolan did as good of a job creating and abiding by rules for the “dream” movie genre, but I think he solidified himself as a torch carrier for dark, action-filled, cerebral films the way I classify Michael Mann. In fact, I believe if Michael Mann could wrap his head around the kind of abstract thinking involved in writing Inception, the film I saw would be very close to what he’d produce.
There’s no question that the first half of the film is better than the second — Nolan does a great (if a little too expositional) job of setting up the rules of the game we’re about to witness. We meet Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), a man with a troubled past who works as a type of black bag operative, hired by shady scions of big business to infiltrate the minds of their adversaries and enemies through dreams. Cobb and his sidekick Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) specialize in ferreting out the secrets people hide in their deepest subconscious. When a Japanese tycoon named Saito (Ken Watanabe) makes Cobb and offer he can’t refuse — a chance to overcome his shady, troubled past, Cobb enlists the help of a young up-and-coming Architect, Ariadne, played by Ellen Page. That ‘external storyline’ — the inception itself — planting an idea inside of someone’s head is a bit thin. But I liked the balance between that story and Cobb’s inner struggle about his wife, Mal (Marianne Cotillard). Nolan knows flawed heros, understands pace, is brilliant at visualization and mood and knows how to build suspense. The “levels of dreams” can be a bit exhausting, but Nolan needs these shifts of time and locations to literally buy himself time to tie off loose ends and make the story work. And it does work.
He gets very good performances across the board, from DiCaprio and Cotillard as expected, Page makes her job in Juno look not like a fluke, Gordon-Levitt continues to improve and may be at he is best here surrounded by better class horses than usual, and Tom Hardy as Eames gets the best lines and shows why he’s still one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood. Michael Caine, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy and Lukas Haas have little to do in essentially cameos, and Tom Berenger is good in his role, but may actually look worse alive than Postlethewaite does dead.
