Inception

- Overrated, but not that bad.

I'm sure you were all thinking "Why doesn't he go and see Inception so he can tell me what he thought of it", well you might like what I have to say about it. If you have seen it then get ready to bicker with me, if you haven't seen it go to the £3 screening of it on a Tuesday. I'd be slightly adverse to paying full price for it.

Brief synopsis? Enter a world much like our own except a device was created by the military that allows people to "Dream Share". That is multiple people can experience the same dream and explore various levels of consciousness. Leonardo DiCaprio and his friends - some English guy, the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun and some random guy that gets taken away from everyone else earlier on in the film work as their own organized company of dream data protection. You know how big companies hire trained hackers to test their network security and find ways to improve it, well these guys pretty much do exactly that except they train CEOs, etc. do militarize their dreams so that if anyone illegally dream shares with them and tries to steal secrets and information kept in the subconscious, their efforts are foiled. DiCaprio as we learn pretty early on in the film is wanted for murder of his dead wife and desperately wants to get back to his kids. Ken Watanabe offers him the chance to return to America and see his kids undeterred by law enforcement if he has an inception. The movie title refers to going into someone's dream and carefully causing the dreamer to develop an idea. In this case Watanabe's character wants Cillian Murphy to disolve his father's company to avoid a superpower energy corporation from forming.

We are to believe this has never been done before or if it can be done it's very difficult. The first half of the film we see the team being assembled, it's like the scene is being set and we get to see the dynamics between each character. Because this is done so quickly, it's almost as if it's a little forced. "How can we show this guy knows his shit in a thirty second montage". Whilst all of the actors are good, I found it kind of difficult to see the characters as characters, more often we're seeing them as the actors or the characters they've been in previous films - "Oh look, there's Ken Watanabe, DiCaprio, Juno, the kid from 3rd rock from the son, Michael Caine, Scarecrow". That's partly because of such an all star cast being used, the fact that pretty much everybody has already been in a Christopher Nolan Batman film and because of the sound in this film. In true Nolan style there is an orchestral score going through pretty much all of this film. I don't remember anything other than strings, trumpets and bass. The latter led to such a wobble of the speakers sometimes it was a little off putting. Whilst it didn't mean the dialogue was hard to make out, it did however mean that you were slightly distracted by the music as the characters spoke. Meaning that their names were lost in the aether pretty early on.

As far as the story goes, it's quite good for a while. It's a pretty novel science fiction idea that Philip K. Dick probably should have thought up. It's got the sort of Existenz/Matrix/Ghost in the Shell plug yourself into another reality with the classic DesCartes message of "I think therefore I am" philosophy built in. The film also tries to work on multiple levels of the subconscious and "projections" appear - characters or places that are brain pieces together without our control. Leo's wife almost acts as an antagonist to the characters because she just pops up there causing him to act like a dick without him being able to stop her. Yes there's an emotional and sentimental reason as to why this happens but often enough I was just thinking "Would somebody just shoot the dumb bitch". The script is reasonably well written but at times it gives me a bit of a *sigh* moment. As if it was a little too laboured/maybe borderline pretentious. Partly that's because of the humourless nature of the entire film. When I go to see a big budget action movie, I like to at least have a chuckle from time to time. It's why the Arnie films are still good to watch. That's not to say you have to cover the thing with melted mozarella but throw a good one liner in the dialogue to mix it up. Tom Hardy almost grants a chuckle here and there but it's barely enough to even give a half smile. Nolan would do well to remember that Batman Begins had a great dynamic between Bruce and Alfred. If you're going to have Michael Caine in your film for little to no reason, you may as well have him use the word bloody.

The second half of the film when they're in the dream starts off pretty well. There's some gun fights, a car chase with a train in it and some mastery with a rocket launcher. There's a constant tension within the dream because of whats at stake if someone dies within the dream (I'll not spoil this bit) and the action is pretty good. The characters all have to go deeper than the dream itself, into several states of dream within dream. Some stay on some level, some on another. Whilst there is a strong level of intelligent script writing in doing this, at times the camera seems to constantly cut between the mutliple dreams, so we're constantly reminded of what's going on but it's almost setting out to be a mind fuck. Ever seen the "I'm the Juggernaut bitch!" voice over of the 90s x-men cartoon. This is what parts of these scenes reminded me of, I felt like yelling out "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FALLIN?!". The slow-mo sequences at times became a little tedious. My friend sitting right next to me at times was yawning and laughing at things he shouldn't have been laughing at. The multiple dream idea also had an element of "Ok we've got three mediocre plotlines, what should we do with them? YES! I'VE GOT IT! COMPOUND THEM ALL TOGETHER! IT'S A MASTERPIECE!" I think what part of this film pulls it down is it's determination to explain everything in retrospect. You have a glimpse of something important and we're supposed to be wondering why so that we can have our questions answered somewhere later on in the film. It's kind of why I never got into Lost. Usually I have a curious and inquisitive nature but in certain circumstances it's just plain irritating to have this mandatory notion of intrigue.
Even right through to the end we have moments were the film tries to pull a Donnie Darko on us and go "I wonder what the hidden meaning behind this is? What's really happened?" In simple terms, it's an action film that's trying to force us to think. Is life just a dream?

There's a few thing it really delivered on. The effects were pretty good. A gravity shifting fight scene was very nice to watch. Yet a lot of the other effects will date really badly. Go back and watch the Matrix. A lot of it just doesn't seem as slick by today's standards, yet it was a huge milestone in the industry. Inception is going to suffer in the exact same way down the line, yet instead of having a wooden Reeves that we can laugh at we've got a super serial hench as fuck DiCaprio to endure.

It's arguably overly long too, which is kind of typical for a Nolan film. After a few times watching the Dark Knight, you kind of question "Do I really need to have another twist to add another thirty minutes to this plot line?", Inception does this from the start. From the moment you have time distortion explained within dreams, you know there is going to be a way to drag things out.

Lastly what really bugged me is why are the dreams so constipated? In the dreams that we wake up and remember, stupid shit happens. They're kind of like acid trips. Waking Life does this tremendously. Yes, it does go on a mutliple tangents about existentialism but with a blunt smoked you're prepared to go off on these tangents, questioning your own reality. At least if you had some sort of trippiness, you could have got the laughs in. "Why is the Queen of Spain in a hot air balloon?" "Whats with all these cartoon bears?" "The Blue meanies?! Noooooooo!"

Now I will have plenty of people prepared to argue with what I've said about this film but all I'm saying is, it's not perfect. Of course, it's a better film than the A-Team but it's not half as much fun and that to me is the film's problem. It's clever but it's not fun enough. The damn film almost made me cry too. Stupid talking to father on death bed scenes, that's not even fair. Cunts.