To say that I gave Inception the benefit of the doubt would be a huge understatement: I was expecting to get blown away by sheer genius awesomesauce. After finding The Prestige a really crafty, neat movie and Memento a masterpiece in its own right (and hearing all sorts of good things about the Batman movies), plus seeing how high reviews and what a fantastic reception Inception got, I sat down watching it with really high hopes.
And I am not a snob when it comes to movies, mind you! Most of my film experiences involve the mainstream movies broadcasted a few years ago (which would basically translate to an 11 year old watching Tango and Cash and alike), so not really a Fellini-filled, hardly graspable something. Now of course, given these movies and my age, some of you’ll probably just say „duuuh, you just don’t get it”. Well, I am not sure if I am going to be able to prove in a few paragraph that I am a highly intellectual person, but I’ll try.
Considering the fact, that I jumped really late on the bandwagon of Inception-watchers, I think it is unnecessary to explain the plot or even the basic setting of the film, those of you who are reading this probably know the whole thing by now. I am also going to stray away from the normal reviewing formula by stating my LOS (Luci Official Score) for Inception in advance before giving my reasons: 7/10.
Now, even judging by the major online movie sites, this would not be a low rating, but it is when we’re looking at the reviews this movie got. I don’t say either that Inception was a bad movie, by no means! I think I wouldn’t give The Prestige a higher rating, either, maybe half a point more, and that wouldn’t be because I find that film better, it would be because of my problems with Inception.
I wouldn’t even call them problems, in fact, these are just… things. Minor gripes. Whatever.
Let’s get an important compliment out of the way soon: everything that was not story-related was stellar in my opinion. From the direction to the sets, from the soundtrack (I have a sweet spot for Hans Zimmer anyway due to Broken Arrow, which is a movie I have a major nostalgic love for) to the acting, there was not a problem whatsoever in my opinion (I’ll get back to the acting later). The story is, as it is, a really ingenious thing as well… but I’d rather say stories here, and this is my major problem with this thing. Not that I’d have any problem with either of the stories (e.g. the inception plan and Cobb’s personal story), it’s just that despite the movie being over 2 and a half hours long, they couldn’t fit together, and by the difference in nature of the two stories, it was impossible for them to seamlessly blend together anyway.
Let’s start with Plot 1 – the inception thing. This is the one I have a serious gripe with, and I am really sad that I have that, because I really wanted to love this story. So we have it established that this thing is impossible, okay, just „impossible”, okay, just really goddamn difficult. We get to learn the basic ways of dream architecture, the ways of the extracting. We establish rules and a really clear system about this thing, and we find some loopholes in order to be able to do the inception – and none of that feels arbitrary! It is all awesome! We’ve got a really interesting situation with really great characters and acting performances, and we’re all ready to go! Let’s try to do this really, really hard thing!
…
Now comes the problem. The characters begin their attempt. The inception is already a really difficult, almost not accomplishable feat. And despite that, the movie starts to stack up the odds even more. Which is okay, and to a point, necessary, but after a while, we do reach the usual Hollywoodian state of „nah, they cannot fail”. Not this plot thread, that is.
I’ve mentioned something like that in my review of the FreeSpace campaign "Homesick" as well, stating that the art of modern storytelling really needs more story endings like Homesick’s, which is a bad ending. We cannot care about the main characters and their goals if we know that by the nature of the plot, they cannot fail – or at least cannot fail yet (particularly because the other plot is yet to be finished or even fully explored).
What do I mean when I say that the movie stacks the odds up? Well, first it turns out that the mind of the heir is trained against that sort of thing. Not mentioning the usual complaint of „where the hell do they get weapons from”, this would be the thing that I could accept, understand and find fitting and integral to a plot. This one, I can. The fact that the heroes then deal with a whole army of soldiers in the third dream level, I can’t. Remember how much of a panic it caused when it turned out that there are mere gunmen around in the dream? Guess they pose a much greater threat than soldiers.
But it isn’t just that. Apart the constantly raising stakes/implausibilty of the stronger and stronger brain-defenses, we have the constant disturbances of Codd’s state of mind as well. I really had to suspend my disbelief about the idea that no one has noticed these things before about him, about the stuff that happens when he is in a dream, his reasons that he cannot see the layouts (I think that would have been easy to figure out for, hmm, Arthur?), about his „experiments” – seriously, no one ever asked him what he found out during those? Wasn’t he ever, ever confronted about this thing? Hasn’t a big-ass train ever arrived before during an extraction? Never? It never popped up before?
So apart from the fact that the original plan itself was really difficult to carry out, add thatabout half a dozen „inceptors” manage to successfully evade/combat such a strong and competent force in the third dream level (which was, again, something I really could not take seriously, especially when all we’ve had was Eames accompanied by the injured Saito who only had a gun and a grenade against a whole army!), AND they had to deal with – in one form or another - the constant disturbances caused by Codd. Despite all these, which made the awesome action scenes basically tensionless (you know, the Conservation Of Ninjutsu), the characters manage to carry out a plot that was goddamn difficult to start with and continued with the odds stacked higher than the Mount Friggin Everest.
But you know what? I understand the presence of Mal in this whole thing: she was necessary to advance Plot 2. On their own, I am sure that both Plot 1 and Plot 2 would have made into a fantastic movie, and I think that the only reason that their combination didn’t work for me was the fact that we lacked time.
Not that the characters ever were in a hurry or something. Eames is like three dream levels in, the clocks are ticking madly, but he just walks. That was another thing that really threw me off: I am sure that „real people” in these situations would be frantic as hell and would hurry more than as if a hornet nest would charge towards their ass, but here – apart from the action scenes – everyone had sooo much time. Okay, not sooo much but still too much for my personal taste. It really threw me off track and by disbelief sensors started to tingle maniacally.
So Plot 1 goes off without a hitch, and since we’ve had Plot 2 next to it, the characters were pretty much destined to go through with their plan despite anything that came their way. As for Plot 2, the „Mal-saga”, I have one thing to say:
CUT ME A BREAK FROM THE FRIGGIN EXPOSITION!
It is either Ariadne or Cobb who fills the huge gaps of Plot 2 after every scene that is related to it. I have no problem with that in general, hell, all the black-and-white scenes in Memento were basically nothing but exposition, but here, it always followed the formula of [Ariadne experiences something related to Cobb]-[she or Cobb gives a long explanation as to what is behind that]. The fact that it’s usually Ariadne who does that was what made me think about the fact that Arthur really should have figured out at least part of this whole thing by now. Again, don’t get me wrong, I personally considered Ellen Page’s character and act to be the top of this parade (this probably has something to do with the fact that it is probably a bit easier for me to relate to a twenty-something year old female that is clever as hell and has more than enough in the looks department as well than to DiCaprio), but this issue was clearly due to the lack of time. Of course, this wasn’t nearly as bad as in, say, the Star Wars prequels, but it was a bit annoying here. Not because of the fact that we’ve had exposition – but because we’ve followed this same formula at least five times during the film! The last time being the supposed big reveal at the end of the film!
Now I’ve said „supposed”, but this is a subjective thing: personally I wasn’t that much engaged in Cobb’s internal things (this is NOT due to the fact that he is, in fact, not a female, I reject the accusation; Leonard Shelby wasn’t female either), or to rephrase that, I was, but I didn’t care about Cobb himself, I did not sympathize with Cobb. Mainly because I didn’t get to experience his suffering, I didn’t get to experience his loss, only at the end of the film and even then it was only partially so! Unlike Memento, where narratively the same thing happens but due to the reverse nature of the film I do get to learn Lenny’s tragic past in time to be really involved emotionally in the ending (or to be more precise, „middleing”). And again, by that point I cared more about Ariadne’s welfare. And I don’t get carried away by female characters only due to the fact that they are female.
By the ending of the film, it seems as if the inception was the „rim” of the Mal-saga, and the latter was the „main” thing. However, due to the fact that it was almost impossible (and sadly, Nolan failed to accomplish the impossible) to seamlessly blend these two plots, and I could swear that the first had more „screen time”, I could not care about that one that much. Again, it was a really good and interesting plot as well, but it would have needed more time in my opinion, or even better, a separate movie. As it was, even the ending didn’t matter to me that much, because Plot 2 was something that we didn’t get to see from the start, we’ve jumped in in medias res and we didn’t even get to see the end of it due to the fact that we can’t be sure if the last scene was a dream or not.
I was actually expecting some sort of a twist in the narrative though, like a scene turning out to be a dream that we thought that it isn’t. Yes, we had those, but none of them were integral to Plot 1 or 2 nor to their alleged facade which we would’ve probably had if we would be talking about a twist now. But apart from the very end – which wasn’t a twist either, just a big question mark or, depending on who you ask, a giant FOOK YOU (I support the former, mind you) – the narrative of the inception and the „Mal-saga” is untoppled.
All in all, I really liked this movie, please do not forget that. In an array of sky-high expectations it is a movie that deviates from the Hollywood norm and I do believe that we need even more and more of such thinkers’ films, but in my opinion Inception didn’t go far enough. Maybe due to the top-rate predecessors as Memento, The Prestige or the Batman films, but Inception isn’t a leap above the earlier accomplishments of Nolan as the above examples are for me.
You know what I would have done? I would have made two movies. The first would have featured an excellent cast of characters ranging from DiCapro to Page and Levitt, and would have been about the extractors carrying out various assignments, and in the end, doing the seemingly impossible: the inception. I would have named that movie Inception.
The second would have been about a genius who figures out these ways of controlled dreaming, who tragically gets stuck in this loop, manages to get out but loses his wife in a sad process. Later he meets a young, promising talent called Ariadne and introduces her to the secret art. As time progresses, the eager and curious young girl figures out more and more of this sad story and in the end necessitates Cobb to face his inner demons, and in the end the viewers would learn about the fact that Mal’s death was, in fact, due to Cobb’s inception. In the end Cobb gets home but we can never be sure if the top topples or not, leaving a whole generation of film-goers with an exciting topic to chew about.
I would have called this movie… hm… Inception.
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