No, not returning to blogging, but lots of people are asking me what I thought of Inception so I thought I would record my thoughts in a central place where people could add their own thoughts.
I certainly enjoyed it (and, more importantly, have enjoyed thinking about it since), although I think I came out of both 'Memento' and 'The Prestige' with a more excited feeling. This may be that with those films Nolan was an unproven property, whereas Inception was almost a victim of Nolan's own record- certainly the 'OMG best evar' raves on the twitters perhaps built it up to be more than it was. The fact that it was a sophisticated heist film, I think, was perhaps a sign that Nolan was actually a little bit afraid to take the premise as far as it could have gone. I know it needed a 'hook' to hang the premise on, and as far as it goes that is a nice one, but you kind of felt by the end of it that, well, once Saito had been shot and was in danger of losing his mind in the real world, the premise was a little shot. "Oh so maybe Fisher will break up this energy company but meanwhile the guy who wanted that done is dead." seemed a little self-defeating.
One thing that bugged me a little bit was that the dream worlds were way too linear- they didn't seem dreamlike. The opening of the film seemed to get it right, the dream seemed strange, non-linear. People were in one place and then instantly in another. Someone was there and then they weren't. This is what dreams are like (for me), things just jump all over the place and you don't notice because you're dreaming.
(In fact I've often tried to convince people [I don't think I've ever succeeded, in fact I'm not 100% sure myself, but it's a theory] that dreams are actually just a series of ideas, as opposed to a series of visual images, and then your brain constructs the images around the ideas retroactively. It's a hard theory to test or prove, unfortunately.)
So it started out promisingly, but the heist dreams were extremely linear, which I think robbed the movie of a lot of it's potential. I mean, in a movie where you've established that a freight train can come careening down a highway (which was awesome and made me excited about the rest of the film), why are all of Fisher's psychological defences depicted as 'men with guns' (in all three dream levels!) which can be dispatched with... guns! I'm sorry, but I found the action sequences in the snow really odd, because it was a dream! Yet if you shoot this psychological projection with a gun... they die! Why? That's not how dreams work. It was almost as if the script started as a 'virtual reality' film and as some point they switched to dreams but kept the conceits the same.
The explanation for this is that dreams that are 'designed' by an architect are designed specifically to seem real (so that the person inside them doesn't clue in to the fact they are dreaming, although this rang false to me, since ridiculous things often happen in dreams and you still think it is real), and so seems more linear than other dreams by intention. This is pretty much the only explanation I can think of, but they should have made that explicit within the text of the film. But even with this being the case, why? Why make a film about dreams so linear and boring? Why waste the potential? There are heaps of films about guys with guns getting chased by more guys with guns*. That happens in the non-dream world. Why fill your infinite fantasy with, well, finite reality? Seems odd to think it was a money-saving venture, but that's what it felt like (it kind of reminded me of that episode of Deep Space Nine where O'Brien and Bashir go into Sloan's unconciousness and it looks like... surprise, surprise... Deep Space Nine!)
Also, I'm a little unsure as to how the Inception was finally executed. If the dad was part of Fisher's unconciousness, why did he say the very thing that was required to make him want to dissolve the company? I know there was a little psychoanalyzing about this in the higher levels, but it wasn't really clear to me why the catharsis with the father took place at all, and surely everything hinged on that?
Of course, all this nit-picking may be missing the point (although if it is, I think the film-maker is on board with me, since he populated his film with so much James Bond gunplay), given that the may not have been about Fisher at all, as explained below:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/inception_theory.html
This theory cuts immediately to the first question everyone asks after seeing it: Was Cobb still dreaming at the end- or to put it another way: "Did the spinning totem fall over or not?" (the moment Cobb said that in the dream the totem never stops spinning, I immediately knew that the closing shot would be of the spinning totem) and, if he was, was he still inside the dream that they initiated for Fisher (ie- he never returned from limbo with Saito) or was the entire film a dream (which would explain why the chase scene in Mombasa was so odd and dreamlike). There's a few other signs the final scene might be a dream- the editing returns to the odd editing of the beginning of the film- they jump very quickly from plane to airport to Cobb's house. Also the children are wearing the same clothes and have the same pose as they do in his memory. But as Dileep Rao says in the interview below- does it matter? What's important is that Leo doesn't look. There may not be a 'canon' answer to the question, and that may be the point. (although I will say: If he is still in a dream, wouldn't he of all people eventually figure it out?)
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/inceptions_dileep_rao_answers.html
In fact, it's interesting that Aiden and I just watched 'Shutter Island' on Friday, which was a film about Leo playing a man who had lost his wife to tragic circumstances, trying to work out what was real and what wasn't. Shutter Island was a bit of a disappointment to me because it could have had an open ending (very easily!) but they chose not to go that way and gave you 'the answer' at the end. I think the point of designing the ending so that it was open-ended means that both answers can be true and we don't need to know whether he woke up or not- or as the guy says in the opium den: "Who are you to say otherwise?"
All this said, the zero-gravity stuff in the hotel was really awesome and I thought it was a clever, enjoyable film, particularly for a summer blockbuster (as summer blockbusters tend to be mindless and, well, awful).
For further reading, here is an interesting article about the soundtrack:
and here is an interesting argument for the 'whole thing was a dream' theory:
http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/24477/1/NEVER-WAKE-UP-THE-MEANING-AND-SECRET-OF-INCEPTION/Page1.html
* this film totally failed the Bechdel test, btw. There were seven real people in the dream. Would have felt less like a sausage party if more than one of them had been female. Spluh!
This is a 