It's what happens when you have a great, imaginative concept, which is brought to life in a thrilling and emotionally compelling way.
It starts of rather confusing, but it explains the workings of its world clear enough, whilst maintaining its intelligence. The build-up is also terrific, and makes the 2 1/2 hours fly by.
The only major thing I didn't like were the heavy action scenes. While the special effects for the dream worlds were impressive, the constant shootouts and explosions that littered the movie gave me nothing but a headache. I appreciate there was a reason within the story for them, but it just looked like the director had a lot of money to burn and went ahead with some "blockbuster" scenes, which felt largely unnecessary.
But overall another great entry for Nolan and Di Caprio.
As for the ending...I also though it indicated it wasn't a dream. The story had been building up to a somewhat hopeful conclusion, which wouldn't work if he was still trapped.
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Sorry but I'll be the devil's advocate & say Inception isn't a favourite Nolan film for me.
It's not an original concept, as already mentioned. I think Cronnenberg played with the idea better in ExistenZ...characters trapped inside a virtual game inside another game.
Then you have BladeRunner & dreams being the key element of whether you're a clone or not...
My biggest gripe or what bored me with Inception were simply the dreams weren't surreal enough. The 1st being a car/van chase. The 2nd a hotel lobby & the 3rd a high tech bunker in the snow.
I mean in the directorial hands of Gilliam, Del Toro, Cronnenberg, Burton we've have fantastical creatures & demons...but alas it's just buildings & streets that twist & morph...where's the dark sexual fantasies that prevail in our sub consciousness???
Inception was a grand movie to watch but seriously lacked imagination when dealing with the theme of dreams.
That would have defied the point of the basic concept of the dream, remember when Cobb was saying "Dreams feel real while we're in them, right? It's only until after we wake up when we realize something was strange."
Being imaginative on the scale that you believe it should have been not only would have been inappropriate for a modernized heist film, it would have ruined the movie. Nolan's aim with his portrayal of dreams was to distort the boundaries between dreams and reality, and to make the audience have to pay attention more to realize when Cobb is in a dream and when he's not.
There is a definitive answer, it just forces the audience to really think this one over and decide for themselves.
Cobb was already in limbo. He found Saito (who was old in limbo because he had died some time before on the first dream level) and convinced him to kill themselves - a leap of faith - to wake up because by now the sedative has already worn off.
The top isn't even his true totem; this was asserted in the movie as soon as he said it once belonged to Mal when confessing to Ariadne what happened when they were on the first dream level. As soon as someone else knows the heft or physical properties of your totem it will behave like they expect it to, because their mind projects the percieved properties of that totem within a dream.
I'll agree with you DarkC when you mention that Nolan's aim was to focus on a modernized heist movie rather than a fantasy laden one.
In that sense, he did well.
Besides the spininig top in the end, whether it's wobbling or not....wasn't there also an issue with Cob's children...?
They didn't seem to age from whether it was a flashback or wandering in Cob's dreams to the very end when Cob is finally reunited with them. Also they seem to always wear the same clothing throughout the film.
How many times does this have to be said? The children did age, and in fact the kids at the end were played by older children than the kids shown earlier. Also, the clothing designer said in an interview that the he made the clothing slightly different in the last shot than in the earlier shots of the kids.
__________________
Greg Oden: The future of the Blazers. The future of the NBA.
Phillipa was played by sisters Clare Greare and Taylor Greare and James was played by their brother Jonathan Greare as well as Christopher Nolan's son, Magnus.
When asked if he used the second set of kids only at the very end or if he interchanges the two sets somewhere else in the film he says, "I don't want to specify too much… I was attempting to portray somebody trying to visualize something that they can't visualize. It's a combination of memory and imagining and dream, and all the different ways in which we as human beings are able to visualize things. The way in which kids appear throughout the film is a strenuous attempt to play with that."
Nolan also says the clothes on the two sets of children are "very similar but not the same", as did the clothes designer as pointed out above.
His children were ugly as hell, Cobb obviously wasn't dreaming, and Ricky Gervais was the best character. If you still don't understand this movie, you're ****ing retarded
This is a bold, striking feature impossible for technical wizardry. It also has a tendency to be about as mentally stimulating as the lecture at the university. This is the architecture of the film, at every level: narrative, conceptual, symbolic, visual.
KMC Community Forums
Jan 6th, 2011 08:09 AM
I tend to agree on this part,they could of been a lot more imaginative in the dream department then they were
