Friday, July 16, 2010

Film Review: Inception

Last night I went to the midnight showings of Inception. I got to the theater at 10:30 so that I could get good seats and that just what I did. The seats were perfect. I was proud. There were a bunch of annoying people behind me that threw at least 25 beach balls around the theater, but even they shut up when the movie started. Also a trailer for a movie came on about people being stuck in an elevator and people seemed interested in it until it said "from the mind of M Night Shyamalan" Everyone in the theater groans and let out sounds of disappointment. Which makes me wonder.... could "The Last Airbender" be the end of his career? Anywayz so lets get into it...



Plot

The plot of this movie is very clever and original. If you are unfamiliar with what this movie is, it is about invading peoples dreams. This involves a matrix like system of "hacking" into a dream world that isn't real. There are differences such as if you die in the dream you just wake up. Thats all. Also physics can be bent but they never do it because that causes disturbances. Which is sad because they show some really cool scenes in the movie of manipulating the world of the dream on the spot but never use it in the actual mission. In the movie we learn that Cobb (DiCarprio) is a man who is skilled at breaking into peoples subconscious in their dreams and stealing information that is left vulnerable by sleeping. He is trying to get home to his kids because he is a wanted man in the US. So he spends his life jumping from country to country to try to get enough jobs to get back home. He then gets a job that involves the opposite of what he does. Instead of stealing an idea from the subconscious, he is asked to plant an idea in the subconscious so that upon the target's waking he will develop an idea that was placed there with out his knowledge and will do something he might have otherwise not done.

Pretty deep stuff.

It gets complicated when in order to do this they must create a dream within a dream within a dream. They have to get really deep so that he doesn't seem like the idea was told to him. He has to think that he had the idea and it wasn't given to him. In the dream time is slower and with three layers of dreaming it gets kinda confusing. Five minutes in the real world while you are asleep is an hour in a dream, and if you go three layers deep then lets do the math...

5 minutes in the real world is 60 minutes in the dream world. Inside that dream 5 minutes is an hour so the second layer of dreaming you would have 12 hours and then on the third layer you would have 6 days. So you could spend 6 days in that third layer of dreaming and only 5 minutes would have passed in the real world. That all comes into play because they have to leave someone in each layer of the dream to wake them up and take care of them. So it gets pretty crazy with seconds for one person being 30 minutes for another. Because there is so much dream in dreaming the characters all have what is called "totems," an object that only they are intimately familiar with that lets you know if you are dreaming or not. For example, Cobb has a top that he spins and if it never falls then he knows he is dreaming.

Narratively speaking, Inception isn’t a terribly complex tale. If at times it feels like it, that’s because it’s so heavy on exposition and rules that you’ll barely be able to keep track of all the information being thrown at you. Just when you think you have a solid grasp on what the possibilities and limitations of the world are, you don’t, because there are still more rules to learn, and these rules change those last rules in ways that are vital to understanding other rules that haven’t even been introduced yet.


Don't worry though. Everything is explained in great detail. The movie does a great job and not getting too "jargon-y" and hard to understand. They do a pretty good job of explaining how everything is done and the meaning behind it. Even though the movie is very technical I believe the average viewer will be able to follow and comprehend it fairly easily. This is done through because of the new comer, Ellen Page. She is new to this world so everything is explained to her and thus to the audience. The plot is very creative has plenty of twists and turns. It is a very suspenseful and creepy movie at times and will have you on the edge of your seat at the end.


The Characters

The actors in this movie are top notch. They all execute their roles very well and pull you into the movie. Unfortunatly the film focuses a lot on the the plot and dream world so you don't get to know the characters on an intimate level.

DiCaprio does a fantastic job in this film. His emotions and unwavering character are flawless. His character Cobb is the master mind. He is the one who knows the in's and out's of the human mind. He knows how to find the information that he needs.

Ellen Page is the Architect and resident cute girl. When I say architect, i mean that literally. Dreams are not all hazy and magical. They are almost exactly like the real world and have buildings and streets and everything. So the architect constructs the dream because In order to set up a persons dream the way they want it, they need a skilled imaginative person that can create the world of the dream to put the target into. Ellen has come along way from Juno. She is interesting and powerful at times. She is a new comer to this world of dreaming and is very eager to learn and fascinated by the ability of dream creation.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing Arthur to me feels a little out of place because I think he looks to kid like still but not enough to distract from the movie. He is quick tempered and all business ...mostly. Arthur plays Cobbs right hand man his job is to research the target and look really friggin cool in zero-gravity.

Tom Hardy plays Eames who is a jokester and has a powerful imagination. He is brought on to the team because he is able to imagine himself as different people and disguise himself in the dream. A very cool ability that I never would have thought of. Plus a British accent!

Dileep Rao plays Yusuf a chemist. His job is to create a chemical sedative that will knock the team out enough that they can get 3 dreams deep and to provide ethnic diversity. Normal dreaming isn't deep enough for the job. He is a jovial character and actually fairly minor as the team goes.

Cillian Murphy plays Robert Fischer, the son of Maurice Fischer, the CEO of a giant company and the target for the inception. Murphy does a terrific job in this film; he was probably my favorite character.

There is also Ken Watanabe who plays Saito, the financial backer for the operation.



Cinematography

This movie really breaks the mold, I think, on film making. It does a spectacular job with the visual effect with out resorting to that dreadful 3D. There is even a Penrose stairs in the movie! Blew my mind. The film doesn't rely on the visuals but really they work together to make a masterful work of art. The cinematography and special effects are appropriately epic; the editing flawlessly maintains the impetuous pace of the film’s latter half; and the score joins The Dark Knight and Sherlock Holmes as another masterpiece of excellence from Hans Zimmer.


I really don't have much to say about the movie right now because I am still kind of processing it all. It is something that one has to see to understand. It is very ingenious and amazing. I would recommend it to anyone. It has very little language if i remember correctly and no sex or nudity. It is violent but not hardly any blood. My advice... Go See It Now!

And incase you're wondering there is nothing after the credits.

Plot 10/10
Characters 8.5/10
Cinematography 10/10
Over All Score 10/10

Jeremiah

2 comments:

  1. So good dude! I really wanna go see it again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those beach ball peeps WERE annoying huh?
    also, I <3 Cillian Murphy.

    ReplyDelete