short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Inception (2010, USA)

Maybe I just have Leo’s crazy dead wife fatigue (Shutter Island, anyone?), but Inception felt to me like a whole lot of wasted energy. Cool-looking and generally fun wasted energy, but apart from the main character’s aforementioned personal issues, Inception really is much ado about nothing – there is no central crisis for anyone but him. The mechanism of the entire plot hinges on whether or not Cillian Murphy’s (Hi, Cillian! Where have you been lately?) industrial scion continues an energy monopoly that Ken Watanabe is not a fan of, while simultaneously mending fences with his dead daddy. Or something. Really, that’s it. Murphy tries to sell it late in the game, but he has no foundation on which to build his big emotional moment. The characters not played by DiCaprio (including standout Tom Hardy, who seems to be enjoying himself on everyone else’s behalf) just go along with the plan for no concrete reason (apparently they’re getting paid, but this is fairly unclear). Perhaps Christopher Nolan should have made a decision at the outset – is Inception a movie about cool dream-infiltration technology that can make and unmake worlds, or is it about Leonardo DiCaprio’s tug-of-war with his crazy dead wife? I know which I’d rather watch.

Plot and story considerations aside, Nolan’s dream world is disappointingly pedestrian. Maybe I’m too much familiar with the dream landscapes of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, but if the most dramatic thing a mind can create to defend itself from intruders is a bunch of men with guns, then I’d say that mind isn’t trying terribly hard. Then again, perhaps this does come back to Inception's central problem – with everything concentrated so intently on DiCaprio’s struggle, there’s no room to really explore the complexities of the human subconscious. The subconscious instead is mostly relegated to a series of blank-faced pedestrians going about their daily business. I certainly hope that my subconscious is a bit more interesting than that.

(I don’t often do this, but I’ll share a link to A.O. Scott’s review of Inception, which I think is an excellent long-form dissection about Nolan’s technical proficiencies versus his conceptual and storytelling pitfalls.)

3 Comments:

Blogger Big E said...

have you read andrew o'hehir's review at salon? pretty scathing.

9:43 AM

 
Anonymous Sarah said...

I'm totally with you on the boringness of the dreams in this movie. If I had to kill some subconscious intruders, I'm sure my brain would come up with a big scary monster or a giant saw to get rid of them, not a crew of GI Joe commandos with machine guns. Also, I thought the world Cobb & his wife created was very sad. If I had the ability to create whatever world I wanted to live in with my beloved, I hope it wouldn't be a grey cityscape with no nature.

10:02 AM

 
Blogger molly m. said...

big e - ouch. o'hehir's comments on the dullness of nolan's dreamscapes and the fact that the movie often feels more like a video game are pretty spot-on, but i think i liked best his opinion that nolan has inherited all of the control-freak tendencies of hitchcock and kubrick without getting some of the good stuff, too.

sarah - again, i think nolan's analytical mind really shines through in the world that cobb & mal create, as much as with the commandos on other dream "levels". he seems either incapable or uninterested in passions other than meticulous obsession.

11:33 AM

 

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