Inception - on DVD/ BR now

Picked it up today from JB HiFi, as got the DVD/BR/DDL combo for $25. Already watched the special features on the DVD. Gonna watch the DVD later tonight.

 

The film is a subject of heated discussion in our office, where one of the temps has picked up the box set and not really let us stop hearing about it.

I tried to make him see that Inception is just a pretty straight forward heist movie, and nothing more special than that. It features a dead beat dad, trying to get back his kids after his junkie wife topped herself. Some corporate suits employ him to (and here's the special bit) not steal something but instead lead another emotionless suit to a location where he can pick up some bogus information.

Instead of plush hotels or mountain top lairs, we get (and here's the other special bit) locations that are in other people's minds! Except that the insides of their minds don't look all that different from those plush hotels or mountain top lairs.

And in the end we wonder if the "hero" managed to get away with his prize/out of limbo or, if we accept what I've been told is Nolan's version of events, that it doesn't matter anyway because it's all about whether Cobb is happy or not.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but I was left feeling like I felt after watching "There Will Be Blood". After the slightly too loud music is all done, is there anything left to enjoy?

 

Saw it for the first time, really good film...I'll be revising my best SF movie list i see.

RAMA

 

The setting, the premise, the mind-bending use of dreams and how they "work." Yeah there's a lot to miss and your overly simplified plot-synopsis seems to muddle some details. (Cobb, for example, wasn't a dead-beat dad. He was a dad who couldn't return home due to the murder charge and all.)

 

Inception in "real time"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHBlYJ-tKcs

 

Heh. Kinda nifty.

 

@The Squire of Gothos...I've never read or heard of your take on the movie before but as Trekker stated yeah it's a little simplified. Cobb was hardly a "dead beat dad" if he was he wouldn't care about getting back to them would he? You'd have to classify Cobb as a junkie too and not just label Mall as one since they were both hooked on their dream reality. I disagree with your notion that this is a straight heist film. There are too many complex notions and interesting character relationships for "Inception" to be labeled as one particular genre.

 

Hell, the entire cast are "junkies" under his interpretation.

Now, it seems the "idea" seems to be that dream-sharing is supposed to be a little bit of a "drug" this is mostly evident in Yusuf's lab where he talks about "sharp stuff", people coming there to "wake up." The idea being that it's something of an Opium Den. And the whole thing of the dream "sharing" is treated as such, giving Ariadne a "free sample" before she decides she has to come back for more, etc. But a lot of it is because the dream-world is "pure creation" and the vividness and lucidity of it all is powerful.

So I could see the "dream sharing as a drug" angle... Maybe. But it's still sort of dishonest.

But, yeah, Cobb wasn't a "dead beat dad" and their caper is a bit more complex than a straight-up heist. I mean they weren't breaking into th guy's mind to get secrets, to steal money or anything like that they were doing it to implant an idea in him and, further, they even made him part of the heist. So it's a bit more complex than a straight-up "heist movie."

So it has elements of a "drug movie" and "heist movie" but it also has all of these other elements in it that makes it a bit more wilder than that.

 

Yeah I think the dream machine it's self the PASIV device was like a metaphor for a heroin needle or something. That is an interesting aspect that hasn't really been touched as far as I know.

 

I don't know if anyone caught this but at the end Cobb's son said he was a building house out of dirt or something. Future architect maybe?

Also I was wondering about the plane flight. It's assumed everyone went to the bathroom(except Yusuf LOL)

It must have been a pretty messy airplane floor or everyone was rushing for the bathroom after waking up. Also there's restless leg syndrome and blood clots forming since they weren't moving around.




Also the music is fantastic. I already had "Mombasa" but then I got "Time"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibX4WbnFdHo

 

Zimmer's score is fantastic. Second favorite score of the year for me...until I heard "Black Swan". Anyways yeah I caught Cobb's son building a castle too...if that was meant as a subtle nod to being an Architect.

 

What you said invites the same question I asked him, what is so "mind bending" about it all?

I've seen guides online (such as this one) explaining how everyone is in one dream or another. Right. Ok. I get that. It's a complex scenario. Lot of ins, lot of outs. You have to pay attention. A lot of crime thrillers work like that. It's not unique.

Maybe this is where I'm diverging from the people who really like the film. Is it the idea that they go into someone else's mind, or how they go about doing it that's the exciting bit. I mean, is it simply that they're in someone else's mind, and just that fact alone, that has caught people's attention so?

So far as this is set inside a dream world, apart from some slow motion and zero gravity work (oh yes, and the "train of thought" ) you don't feel like you're in a dream world. You're just in another place. The Matrix and (dare I say it) eXistenz managed getting across the unsettling idea of slipping between realities so much better.

After all this, I'm not saying the film was bad. I'm not saying it was average. As I said to my coworker, great film, very entertaining, glad I pre-booked to see it on the big screen. But that's it. Having the whole thing wash over me, I'm done. I don't need to trod through the whole thing again. It's just not a masterpiece. I went away thinking, technically well done, but that's it.

I never thought it was in any way as clever as I'm told I'm supposed to think it was. I don't see why you can't say that's it's very well made but still boils down to something pretty straightforward, with a little tweest in the ending.

And yes, a Daddy who works as a thief and hangs around with a mentally unstable fellow junkie? He's a dead beat, no matter how hard he wants to be back with his kids.

 

We can't say that it is straight forward because it isn't...and everyone is entitled to their opinions. Nolan originally planned "Inception" as a horror flick but decided it would be much more fascinating to explore his idea as a heist film with a slight science fiction twang because of his ongoing fascination with dreams. If this film was so straight forward as you would have us believe (again I'm not attacking your beliefs or opinions on the movie I'm trying to give insight into the complexity of the film) then it wouldn't have taken Nolan almost ten years to bring his idea to fruition. Indeed I don't think this movie is a unique film since Nolan has admitted to have influences from "Dark City" "The Matrix" "The Thirteenth Floor" and his own film "Memento" (which is kind of like a warm up for "Inception".

 

I was puzzled when I heard about the long gestation period for the script, I figured he needed to wait for the right special effects to become available.

It was ages ago that I caught Memento, but I remember that being quite a clever film, without the massive budget that Inception required.

 

It probably "really" means something very different than how I treat it and even different than how others treat it but for me any movie that can get my imagination running in a manner that makes me think of time, space, reality and mentality is "mind bending."

The "Dream Time Dilation" thing I just love as it's just insane, crazy and just gets my mind spinning. To think that the entire last act of the movie takes place over a couple hours of "real time" (Yes it was 10-hour flight which was supposed to give them something like a week to do what they needed to do but the weaponized projections forced them to speed up their time table from a week to hours. Once the "mission" is over in "reality" everyone still had to hang around in the first dream-level for a week, avoiding the weaponized projections, to wait for the drug to wear off. It's my theory Cobb and Saito's time in "Limbo" did last the whole 10 hours which for Saito was for 200 years and Cobb was a few years. Killing themselves in Limbo allowed them to wake-up in the real world since all of the other dream levels were gone. Pure will and mental-strength allowed them to come out of the dream without their "brains going to jelly." I've theories on this, other aspects and even the above-posted link that I'll post later) but we pretty much see the action in "real time" from how everyone is experiencing it and then when the slow-mo drop of the van starts it's just nuts to me and I love that kind of stuff.

I liked the idea of manipulating "reality" inside the dream, the concept of Limbo, the concept of Cobb and Mal spending 50 years in Limbo, growing old together and then waking up with only hours having passed in Reality, the idea of implanting ideas in people (and the idea having to be very simple so the person thinks its their idea) how that idea caused Mal to question Reality and kill herself, why it has to be done so precisely (don't think of elephants), the Penrose Staircase (which I've a quibble about) and so much more.

Any movie that can make me just think and get my imagination running and think of different realities clashing with one another just bends my mind. To think that everything we see that happens in the last act occurs in the time it took the van to fall from the bridge and that, really, everything probably occured over a few minutes of flight-time.

Yeah. For me, that's enough to make a movie "mind bending" as it gets my mind racing and just thinking about how realities clash.

 

Anyone notice at times in this movie Ellen Page walks a bit strong-shouldered like she's a line backer?

 

I bought the limited edition Inception briefcase DVD, and it should arrive in a few days. I'm so excited!

 

Finally got around to seeing this. A very impressive film from a storytelling and visual effects standpoint. The score is also excellent. You'd have to chalk me up into the same camp that says it's a very straightforward movie, though. I went into this having virtually no spoilers, purposely avoiding them because I got the impression it would ruin the movie if I went into it knowing very much.

The mechanics of building and infiltrating dreams was all explained well enough that even the dimmest viewer could grasp it. I felt like the whole affair was a little too straightforward, and not nearly as much of a mindfuck as the buzz led me to believe. I guess people's standards are just really low for this sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching it and it's an exceedingly well-crafted film, but a lot of the alleged complexity appears to consist of people reading things into it that aren't really there.

One of the things it did do well was get me invested in the dream sequences, even down into the dreams-within-dreams. That's one of the neat tricks Nolan managed to pull: the vast majority of the movie takes place inside dreams, so there are not any "real" consequences to what's happening. Nobody can really "die" in there, for instance. And yet you get caught up enough in it that it is real, or at least as real as the "real life" segments of the film. I didn't wind up feeling as though the dream sequences were less important, which is a very real risk with a movie of this type. Let's face it, the "dream within a dream" shtick has been done to death, and I thought this was a pretty fresh take on it.

The last-second ambiguity as to the reality of Cobb's homecoming was a little eye-rolling to me, as it was so obvious a card to play. A small sin I can forgive in an otherwise good movie.

I enjoy movies that question reality, especially appreciating the irony that movies are false realities in themselves. In some ways, Inception is subversive of the conventions it employs, but its narrative was surprisingly straightforward and accessible given the subject matter. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I guess I just don't see all the depth and complexity others do.

 

People being confused or lost by this movie says more about them than the movie.

 

That's because it's not there. People are just dumb.