Inception (2010)
Plot Summary:
Cobb, a thief who specializes in invading people's dreams, endangers his entire crew during a particularly delicate dream heist with his emotional baggage involving his ex-wife. Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
There's a lot of hostility surrounding this movie. It may not be at a fever pitch, like the hostility that Kanye West incites annually when he's about to drop a new album, but it's still there. I've had friends heap praise for the movie, but just as many sling an awful lot of hate at it. The hate had a familiar smell to it, too - the smell of bitter cynicism, with a pinch of movie snobbery. It's such a recognizable form of hate, because I indulge in it from time to time myself. You see, some people just hate it when movies are universally adored, because if so many people agree about one thing, well, there's just got to be something wrong with it. That's the seed, or inception if you will, that made me begin to doubt religion. It's that same sort of suspicion that I harbored when so many people were saying The Hangover was the funniest movie ever - a suspicion, by the way, that panned out to be true - it isn't the funniest movie ever. It's not even all that funny.
Still, as logical as such a thread of cynicism may be, it is pretty misguided. There are plenty of universally loved movies that absolutely deserve such adoration: The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Office Space, and The Dark Knight to name a few. So, when this movie hit, and began to sweep in a plethora of positive reviews, snarky self-styled critics were there to take it down a peg or two. Here's the thing - if you analyze a movie to death, you will find plenty of flaws, just as if you stand too close to the Mona Lisa, you completely miss the beauty of the entire picture. Ever since completing my Minor in Film Studies, it's always been difficult for me to just lose myself in a movie, and enjoy it for what it has always been for me - two hours to just forget how boring real life is. Period.
The criticisms that I've heard, from several sources, are:
- The characters are wooden and boring
- The movie is way too long
- The movie pretends to be smarter than it actually is
- The dreams sequences are not "realistic"
- The plot is way too convoluted.
The characters are wooden and boring
Of all the critiques, this is probably the only one I will reluctantly halfway agree with. Besides Leo's character, Cobb, we don't really get to know the rest of the characters. We have no idea who Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character is, his background, or his relation to Cobb other than that they work together. Ellen Page is introduced a quarter of the way in the film as a talented graduate student, who hesitantly joins Cobb's crew, but she is nothing more than a rather obvious plot device used as a way to explain to the audience how the mechanics of how the dream world works. She's also the only character who actively investigates Cobb's past, because she thinks it will endanger the mission.
So, essentially, everyone is there to supplement Cobb's story arc, and nothing more, but really, is that such a bad thing? The movie does hint that ALL OF IT could be Cobb's dream that he's never escaped from, and leaves this very ambiguous. So, if it were all just a dream, then the other characters don't really matter that much. Also, in the end, this movie is a heist film, and in such movies, the heist is the main character - it is a puzzle, and the characters are puzzle pieces. They all come together to support the main character. It doesn't matter who they are, just what purpose they serve to pulling off the heist. This isn't an ensemble drama or a character study, so any plot development that is non-conducive to the task at hand, which is "how do we rob this casino", or in Inception's case, "how do we invade this guy's mind and implant an idea so that he thinks it's his own", is irrelevant.
The movie is way too long
This is a criticism I'm quick to agree with, on most occasions, but not on this one. This movie, which clocks in at approximately 148 minutes, is exactly as long as it needs to be. More often than not, many movies do suffer the problem of being longer than it needs to be - this is especially a problem with comedies. A good comedy should be 90-minutes long, or shorter - no more. The reason being because of the very nature of comedies - most of them are farcical, and the plot is usually built on a foundation of misunderstandings that lead to humorous catastrophes, which become more unbelievable, and annoying, the longer a movie stretches it out.
The gravity of a movie's plot must sustain the time allotted to it. The Dark Knight is almost 3 hours long, but you don't feel the time going by at all, because the movie's story is so multilayered and full of enough rich, interesting characters to support the length. Then you have The Passion of the Christ, which is two hours long, and man those hours just drag like the cross on Jesus' back. This movie is too long because the subject matter doesn't support the time - two hours of watching a man being beaten, tortured, and eventually killed is, quite frankly, boring. By the 30 minute mark, you've seen so much brutality, your brain is numbed by it, and begins to starve for an actual story of some sort. The movie tries to interject flashbacks of Jesus hanging with his people, talking to his mom about how he invented the modern dinette set (which is in the Bible somewhere, I think...), in an effort to break the monotony, but it fails, because other than our familiarity with the Bible story, the movie does not attempt to connect to the audience on a deeper emotional level, other than visceral horror.
Did... did i just go on a rant about The Passion out of nowhere? Sorry, let's get back on track. At no point, during Inception, did I feel time dragging. The story was well paced, and although it did take more time than was maybe necessary to explain the dream mechanics, it was still enough of a fascinating concept to keep me interested. Any good heist movie takes time to set up the heist, and then use the rest of the time to execute the heist. In a movie like this, where the heist in question is rather unorthodox, then a lot of explanation is necessary to ensure the audience isn't left wondering what the hell is going on.
The movie pretends to be smarter than it actually is
So, how "smart" does a movie have to actually be to pass a MENSA test exactly? I have difficulty responding to this one, because it's kind of a silly criticism. Would we prefer all of the summer blockbusters that get released be Michael Bay level idiotic? Inception is a smart enough movie that is was not only a critical hit, but a box office hit as well. People generally enjoyed this movie, and though it may not be as cerebral as Mulholland Drive, I find it optimistic that a film like this, which attempts to be more intelligent than the usual blockbuster, can be a hit. Besides, the movie doesn't pretend to be smart at all - it's a fucking heist movie! It puts on no more pretenses of being cerebral than the Ocean's 11 remake. The movie didn't start with a caption which reads: "Warning - You will need a college degree to view this film." You see, when a movie attempts to be smarter than what it is, that is called being "pretentious". Wes Anderson movies, for example, are a great example of a movie that is pretentious. Inception is about as far removed from being pretentious as any movie could be.
The dream sequences are not "realistic"
The words "realistic" and "dream" should never be in a sentence together. The person who told me this further explained how the movie's portrayal of dreams was way too linear, when in real life, dreams are usually much more random. This movie is not about exploring the nature of dreams - once again, it's a heist movie, but one that utilizes dreams as an angle that sets it apart from other heist movies. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, the dreams are a bit linear, but they use a machine to fabricate the dreams, so why wouldn't it be linear? How effective would this tech be if the dreams that they invaded were a chaotic hodgepodge of random things and events? Plus, it would have made the plot more incoherent and difficult to follow, especially in what is supposed to be a mainstream movie.
The plot is way too convoluted
I hear this one mostly from people who say that they watched only 5-minutes and then stopped the movie because they didn't get it. First of all, this is a terminally retarded reason to not like this movie. No, really, it is, because you would have to be retarded to think this plot is "convoluted". A plot is only complicated when the movie doesn't bother to tell you what the hell is going on. This movie holds your hand all the way through, carefully explaining everything that is happening. Sure, the movie doesn't explain immediately, within the first 5 fucking minutes, but sorry if you need a Star Wars like title crawl to explain everything at the onset of a film - not every movie is like that. If the big ol' bad movie is too hard for you, go watch Cop Dog or something, idiot.
Sorry if you're reading this and thinking I'm being an asshole, but this really pisses me off. It's the same kind of bullshit I would have deal with when people would bitch about how they hate Lost, because it never answers anything. My stock answer would always be: how about you calm down and wait until the next fucking season?? When you read a mystery book, do you throw it in the garbage if it doesn't reveal who the killer is within the first chapter? No. That would be the stupid. So, stopping a movie at 5-minutes, because it hasn't explained what is happening yet, is equally as stupid. Sometimes I think movie theaters should hand out Adderall to people, in case their attention span has been too deteriorated from years of reality television consumption.
Yes, the plot of this movie is a little complicated, but it's supposed to be - the formula of any good heist movie is that it takes the time to set up the pieces of the puzzle so that they come together in a way that makes the audience think some kind of trick was pulled on them.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on the film. I will add that the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer was outstanding. I've been listening to a couple of my favorite tracks for the past couple of days, "Dream is Collapsing" and "Time". I'll end this review by embedding both for your ears' enjoyment:
Verdict: Fucking Awesome
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