No one else talks about these things, but I know some of you out
there have thought this too! You've seen your dad's dick,
you know what I'm talking about. It's the cornerstone of
childhood, up there with chasing the ice cream truck, ball pits, and
pitifully amateurish suicide attempts.
Hey, want a phenomenal book to read? Here,
go nuts. Also, highly recommend Too Loud a Solitude,
which I think is about half the length... if that even matters (I
don't know, maybe some of you have shit to do). Well, I'm
officially off my Hrabal kick, onto
Oe!
Oooeeeeeeooooooo...
Anyway, saw
Inception this weekend, posted a review on my blog. Here
it is again, because... you know... no one reads the blog anyway.
Spoilers ahead.
Inception:
A Case of Poor Conception
(Yes, I get to have titles, plus this one's kinda clever.)
I saw Inception this weekend with some of my film friends; they
loved it, I thought it was decent. That is to say, for a
blockbuster. Placed side by side with Transformers, Twilight, or
Harry Potter, Inception is a very decent, relatively intelligent,
piece of cinema. The visuals were outstanding, the fight
choreography unique and dynamic.
However, examined as a narrative work in the greater literary
tradition of story telling, I feel there were many places that the
film fell absolutely flat.
After watching the film, I'm left with a lot of really basic
questions:
1. Who is Leonardo DiCaprio?
Leo is a top notch dream-spy haunted by visions of his dead wife
which manifest in the overlap between his dreamscape and his
target's. She attempts to foil his missions and cause him harm, as
she embodies his guilt for her death and reflects his
self-destruction.
Alright... but... were they both dream-spies? Or did Leo start
dream-spying after her death? How did he get into the whole
dream-exploration business? We never really come to understand
who she is, as only one other character seems to have ever
had any interaction with her, that being Michael Caine, but we know
nothing as to the nature of their relationship. The entire
foundation behind his drive, what propels him through the narrative,
is presented in an aloof, imprecise manner and I'm left with only an
abstract idea of who he is.
2. Who is Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
Joe is Leo's right hand man. He's confident, focused, and
experienced. He's there to save Leo's ass and make sure everything
goes as it has to. His personality is... pretty much like Arnold
Schwarzenegger in the Terminator (the Terminator was a robot, mind
you).
...sooooo... how did Joe meet Leo? Where is Joe from? Is he also on
the run from the law? Why is he doing this? Why is he taking such
tremendous risks to aid Leo? What are his motivations?
3. Who is Michael Caine?
So he's either Leo's father or his father in-law, as he's the
grandfather or Leo's kids. I don't understand why this remains
ambiguous. He taught Leo everything he knows about
dream-exploration but disapproves of his using it for corporate
espionage. He introduces Leo to Ellen Page, a student of his whom he
claims has the capacity to be the best dream-architect yet.
Now it's unclear whether Caine invented dream-exploration or is just
really good at it. Joe explains, during Ellen's training sequence,
that this dream stuff is utilized by the military for training
purposes. Is Caine ex-military? Is he some guy who latched onto the
technology and did something completely unique with it? Did the
military take the technology from him?
What the fuck does he teach?
4. Who is Ellen Page?
What the fuck is she studying? Even though Caine is the dream-diving
master and Page is his best student, she's never even heard of the
process. So that can't be what he's teaching. Is she a psych major
then? I think it was Caine or Joe or Leo who said you need a good
imagination to be a good architect... which makes it even less clear
what the hell Ellen is doing.
I should note that someone pointed out to me that there are layouts
and designs behind Caine in the scene in his office, implying that
Page is literally an architect. But whether these are
designs of buildings or dream-construction practice or
whothefuckknowswhat, is never explicitly stated.
Not that it matters, since her role in the movie is more or less
limited to narrating Leo's motivations because, as all writers know,
a character should never merely announce how they feel ("I FEEL
GUILTY FOR MY WIFE'S DEATH!"). So instead Ellen does it for him.
You may be noticing a trend: none of the characters actually have
any dimension. They're just shallow plot devices meant to help Leo
achieve his mission and get his shit together... which he does, as
he confronts his wife in a climactic scene that feels unearned and
insubstantial.
Speaking of his mission:
5. What is the deal with dream-exploration?
By the end of Ellen's training montage--the sole narrative purpose
of which is to explain to us, the audience, how the film's central
mechanic works--we should know everything there is to know about the
process. We don't. Every five minutes, this dream bullshit is
expounded upon with new contrivances that are contradicted ten
minutes later.
You can't possibly delve three
dreams deep!
We'll do it.
Nothing can make someone that
unconscious!
Well, except this right here.
If you die three dreams deep, your consciousness goes into wacky
town.
Well, unless you die in wacky town... then you'll just wake up.
Also, the rules of wacky town are absolutely arbitrary. Leo's first
time there, his consciousness ages fifty years, his second... nada.
Though Ken Watanabe's character does. I have no idea why the
inconsistency. We've never witnessed any sort of time-skip
dream mechanic.
The feeling of falling wakes the dreamer up, allowing the explorers
to return to the real world. The drug they use to knock Cillian
Murphy out doesn't affect the inner ear, so they can still be waken
up by falling. Simple enough. But get a load of this: if you're
three dreams deep (that is, a dream within a dream within a dream),
the second-level dreamer incarnation of you can fall, and that'll
pull you out of the third dream.
Does that make sense? There is a symmetry between physical
you and dream-you and dream-you and second-dream-you. If you
fall in real life, you cease to dream. If dream you falls in
the dream, you cease to secondary-dream and you 'awake' into the
primary dream.
This makes absolutely no sense as the dreamer's physical self
isn't falling, their actual inner ear isn't being stimulated in this
manner. So what does it matter if the drug impairs inner ear
function? The explorers' dreamscape versions retain some
manner of physicality, it seems, and the operate within the physics
of the dream. That is, whatever your actual organs are
doing doesn't matter, as (and try to bear with me here), tertiary
you can feel the sensation of falling, but secondary and primary you
do not, yet you all share the same physical ear.
The physics of the real world also affect the dreamscape. If your
body is tumbling, the gravity of the dream-world shifts. Fair
enough. But if you're two dreams deep, and in the first dream, your
body spins, gravity will shift in the secondary dream world
regardless of what your physical (non-dream) self is doing. The sole
purpose of this mechanic is to provide justification for some
awesome fight choreography, but it doesn't make any sense. All the
dreamscapes are arbitrary constructions, subject to the sensations
of the physical body... but why are sub-dreams affected by the
illusory physicality of a dream body? And moreover, why is it
limited? In one scene, the characters' actual bodies are still,
their primary dream bodies are spinning, their secondary dream
bodies experience shifting gravity, but everything is normal for
their tertiary selves.
That's contradictory. If tumbling in the primary makes the
secondary kooky, then why doesn't secondary kookiness have any
effect on the tertiary?
Sorry if this whole rant's devolved into absolute convolution,
but the mechanic itself is just a sloppy pile of bullshit.
Further, what can and can't you do in the dream realm?
In one scene, Joe is shooting at some random bad guys with an
automatic rifle he conjured (note, these bad guys populate Cillian's
mind as a defense mechanism, providing fodder for action sequences
that are both cool and kind of pointless). Tom Hardy approaches him,
tells him to stop being a pussy, and conjures a grenade launcher. In
a later scene, Joe is wrestling with a dream-bad guy for a gun. Why
couldn't he just conjure one? Why couldn't he conjure attack dogs to
just deal with the bad guys so he didn't have to even worry about
it? Attack eagles?
Also, if the defense mechanism is the subconcious' awareness that
the subject is dreaming and his dreams are being invaded, and it can
summon such out-of-place objects as a big 'ol train in the middle of
the city... why can't it summon totally weird shit? Dragons,
or giant robots, or... Terminators...
These are elements of the dream mechanic that are just kind of
underwhelming. At one point, in the secondary dreamscape, Leo tricks
Cillian into aiding him and consciously entering the tertiary
dreamscape. All the dreamscapes typically have to look convincingly
real because the subject shouldn't know they're dreaming, but here
he clearly does. So why are our heroes transported to a snowy
military base (which Metal Gear fans will surely recognize as Shadow
Moses) and not... fuckin' rainbow road crazy town? You assholes are
mega-dreaming and I'm watching this shit in IMAX, I want to feel
like I'm tripping on the kind of acid Jesus would deal.
Honestly, all of the mechanics of dreaming seem like contrived
ass-pulls. Dream time moves ten times faster than real time
and this is compounded in sub-dreams also the subconscious mind
manifests its defenses as perfectly rationally planted extras and
there are safes that your brains fills with secrets also if you get
hurt in a dream you really feel it and time moves only linearly and
while your subconscious populates the landscape it only does so with
objects encountered in reality and not strange whatthefucks.
And the end... there's a phrase I heard recently that I really like,
"deep as dirty water". The ambiguity of the ending, which I wasn't
invested enough to even appreciate, was a really cheap way to make
the film deceptively deep. Suddenly, all of the inconsistencies and
flaws in the script could be hand-waved away by a 'twist' everyone
expects from the first scene.
Look... you will probably love this movie. Everyone will probably
love this movie. This is probably the smartest shit you've seen in a
movie theater in ages, so I suppose that's worth something. But it's
not a brilliant movie. It's a brilliant looking movie, for sure, but
I think Nolan, like many other directors, would be better off
directing someone else's script for a change. Often directors' own
talent is overlooked or marred by their reluctance to work on
anyone's material but their own, just look at Lucas and Shyamalan as
examples. Or at least give it a second draft, please.
--End Transmission--
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