Because I know you were waiting! Just kidding, you weren’t, but here are my thoughts anyway.
I really loved it — I don’t think I have been as impressed and, really, gripped by a sci-fi movie since The Matrix. And though I realize that this is around the time that the backlash to the past week’s backlash is supposed to kick in, I’m not trying to rehabilitate Inception for those who didn’t find it lived up to the hype; more and more frequently, I feel like there are pop-cultural products that we all feel the need to take sides on, as though a movie or a TV show were a sports team or something — before Inception, it was Lost — and so even though I liked Inception a lot, I’m not going to sit here and call the people who didn’t “haters” or anything. Is there anything more pointless than getting into an opinion fight? No. This weekend, though, I’ve been reading some of the issues people have had with the movie, and wanted to respond — but, again, not to try to change anyone’s mind, because why would I? (Warning: spoilers!)
1. The love story wasn’t convincing. Wasn’t that sort of the point? When Dom and Mal meet again, at the end, and she tries once more to persuade him to join her in what she’s convinced is reality, he tells her (and reminds us) that she’s not his wife: she’s just a projection of his own subconscious, and even he can’t recreate the real Mal in all her complexity. We arguably haven’t seen the “real” Mal at any point in the story — she’s been dead since before the events of the film take place (with the exception of the scene when Dom tells Ariadne the story of Mal’s suicide, but as to whether or not even THAT is real, see point #3, below) — so in order for Dom to be able to focus sufficiently to do this one last job and get back to his children, he needs to accept that Mal is truly gone, that the version of her still reviving his guilt over her suicide isn’t really “her” at all. So if we in the audience feel that their relationship, as portrayed, seems kind of off, I feel like that’s because we in the audience are arriving at the same conclusion Dom finally does.
2. The characters spend too much time explaining the rules of this world. (That’s also in Will Leitch’s review, linked above.) I have to say, after all those seasons of Lost that, in the end, pretty much added up to a variation of “IT WAS ALL A DREAM,” I appreciated that the Nolans had thought through their conceit and realized it was important for the audience to get it. You know how, in the Lost episode “Across The Sea” (the one with the Jacob/Man In Black origin story), Mother says that each question will just lead to more questions, and what a cop-out that was? Of course that is true of any kind of story — there’s always another “why?” But personally, I didn’t feel with Inception that the Nolans had just arbitrarily decided to tell us some aspects of how shared dreaming and coyly hold others back, which I think Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof did on Lost, kind of a lot. For me, Inception did what was required to establish its internal logic, so that as the film went on, I felt like the story conformed to that logic.
3. Wasn’t the entire story a dream? This is going to seem like a cop-out given point #2, but this is the very question I thought overlaid the whole movie and made it more artistically compelling than just a sci-fi genre film: a lot of the observations Inception characters make about dreams are also true of movies themselves. For example, when Dom tells Ariadne that, in a dream, you can never remember how you got to wherever you are — that elision (necessarily) occurs in movies, too. Or when Mal tries to make her point that Dom’s “reality” isn’t actually real by pointing out to him the preposterousness of his being chased around the world by shadowy figures — is it any more ridiculous a premise than that of…well, Salt? In Inception, the Nolans invent some kind of briefcase device so that the characters can engage in shared dreaming — but isn’t film itself the device by which all of us in the audience engage in a kind of shared dreaming? OR DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I enjoyed it but haven’t quite figured out what I think of it as a whole. I want to see it again since I usually like Nolan’s movies more after a second viewing.
Anyway, I definitely think it’s commenting on movies in a number of ways. The projections are basically the audience: if you screw around with the established world, they notice. Do it too much and they come after you. (Projections are fandom. There, I said it.)
Oh, interesting! I like that interpretation.
Here’s something else off-topic: what is “Mal” short for? I really doubt a French parent would name a child just “Mal” (which in French means “bad” or “evil”).
You don’t want to get into an opinion fight? This is the Internet! Curses! Name calling! Irrationality! Backhanded compliments!
Ahem, so: as I said on @ reply, I kind of agree with you on all of this. The love story wasn’t convincing because it wasn’t supposed to be convincing. The exposition downloads were there so we wouldn’t get lost (no pun intended). And I think both of those things worked well. And, yes, I think that even though it felt like Vertigo, this was Nolan’s Rear Window in that it was a total commentary on watching movies.
And yet, none of that gets to my main problem — something I wrote entirely too many times in my hastily constructed review: I just did not care. About any of it. It was cool, at times it was fun; it was awesome, at times it was breath-taking. But in the end, it just added up to nothing. I forget which snarky critic said this, but: Inception was a dream because when it was over you barely remembered what even happened.
I’m seeing it again this week, maybe I’ll feel different on viewing #2.
Mal is Mallorie, I think? I believe he (or maybe Caine) says her full name at some point.
To add to my pretentious analysis: just noticed that the tagline is “Your mind is the scene of the crime.” As opposed to his mind.
It’s funny because in the movie I kept thinking her name was “Moll”, as in short for “Molly”. Then after the movie I told my boyfriend, “You know, I’m not convinced his love for his wife was supposed to be read as a good thing. She seemed more like a malevolent force than anything else.” And yet I never made the “Mal” connection.
One of the complaints I’ve heard is that the movie doesn’t really resonate with you emotionally. I think that argument has merit. I feel like most of my brain cycles were taken up making sure I was getting all the rules of the world they were tossing out and trying to follow the action. So I wasn’t really able to form an emotional connection to any characters. However, this makes me want to see the movie again right away, to see if I feel more emotionally moved because I know where the plot is going (much in the way that Memento is even more crushing the second time you see it, because the lies and traps are known to you).
How about you? Do you feel like you’d like to see this film a second time? Do you think that perhaps the movie will come across completely differently in repeat viewings?
Chris, I take your point on the shallow characterizations. Maybe this is reverse snobbery on my part, but I don’t usually have very high expectations in that regard when it comes to sci-fi movies. (TV is different, because those producers get more time and space to flesh out their characters — in Battlestar Galactica, for instance.) When the story comes pre-loaded with so much stuff, I don’t anticipate that the characters will evince the kind of psychological realism as, say, what I saw last Tuesday when I went to The Kids Are All Right.
You have a good poin abou cinema being a shared dream.