To wrap up her gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe explained away her supernatural trappings at the conclusion. Imagine a story that explains away its action in every scene. Hitchcock was heavy-handed when diagnosing Norman Bates and unmasking his own mystery; Nolan extends what the master of suspense couldn’t pull off in one scene. Sisyphean from the drawing board, Inception discusses its speculative universe so often that we don’t get a narrative, but a frustrated attempt at genre execution. Granted, we need some groundwork for a surreal filmic universe like this one, but writer-director Christopher Nolan has a device on his hands too dense for the medium. In fact, too dense for any narrative form, it’s better suited to a nonfiction work of pseudo-psychology. That medium is all description, with no concern for character.
Inception essentially delivers a Chinese box dream structure – and I wish the script could use such brevity. The film’s device, a means to enter one’s mind and dreamscape, is used to steal information in one’s memory. Easy enough. But the crux comes when a third party (Ken Watanabe) asks the technicians (led by Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio) if they can plant a fake dreamscape so to steal something already there, this being called “inception.” Now it gets as screwy as it seems clever. Characters must pause the narrative and explain all this, as they do countless times over for the plot to plod forward. At one point, well into the film’s (anti-)conflict, a newbie accomplice to Cobb, Ariadne (Ellen Page, an odd casting choice), lays groundwork with him over rapid gunfire – they can barely get out the explanations in between blasts. The shape of the scene is as odd as the choice to put them on what looks too much like Planet Hoth.
As for the Chinese box ‘o dreams: when the technicians enter the mind, they realize that a dream world may shift to another dream – a Philip K. Dick-ian pattern aiming to trap its viewers in wonder. But there’s no wonder – it’s just the “is this real?” conceit masked and worked over. See Wes Craven, circa 1994.
Leonardo DiCaprio wants to be the new guide to the antireal, even though he keeps falling into hands unskilled at such. He leads a heist to steal a safe combination from a wealthy heir, Fischer (Cillian Murphy, in a thankless role). To achieve this, Leo and co. must construct a dream environment they can manipulate. We get some thrill-ride visuals of city streets bending and folding over, but Nolan’s vision of the surreal goes no further than manipulating environment and architecture. (And there’s some nonsense with a falling car of dreamers that makes Joseph Gordon Levitt, part of Leo’s co., looking like a levitating bellhop who carts bodies. Sad note: he was likely cast for his slight size to suit this scene.)
Doesn’t psychology and identity shift in dreams? – i.e., ever see someone in a dream whose face you don’t recognize, but you still know? Aside from a couple of convenient disguises – yeah, that’s Tom Berenger as Fischer’s uncle – Inception‘s surrealism is just gassed up virtual reality. Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York reflect shifting identity without confusing the audience. But now we’re talking about an able surrealist versus a filmmaker out of his depth. Films like this should lay the groundwork early (and succinctly) and let the action indicate any adjustments. After all, stories should show, not tell, and Nolan keeps telling us that he can’t tell this story.
“But the crux comes when a third party (Ken Watanabe) asks the technicians (led by Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio) if they can plant a fake dreamscape so to steal something already there, this being called “inception.”
…
He leads a heist to steal a safe combination from a wealthy heir, Fischer (Cillian Murphy, in a thankless role).”
These are incorrect. The goal was not to steal anything. It was quite the opposite, actually. The goal was to implant an idea.
Just become some dreams involve shifting identities and just because it can be done well doesn’t mean it has to be included in every movie about dreams. I don’t think there’s a medium out there that could accurately capture everything that happens or is possible in a dream. Nolan had to pick and choose what aspects of the dream world to use or else the film would have become too bloated and lost its focus. He chose a few major phenomena that occur in dreams and went with those. And personally I found the architecture and environmental shifts fascinating, particularly because recently I began to wonder how it was possible for my dreaming mind to create environments I’ve never visited and do it so quickly and seamlessly.
Appreciate the review, but your writing style is all but impossible to follow. Slim down the over-sized words and sentences. Based on the previews, it is obviously a complex movie, and your review leaves the reader more confused than before they read this reveiw.
I love the title of this review. This confirms all of the problems I thought this movie would have. Christopher Nolan lacks the imagination to make a surrealist film.
I don’t entirely agree with your assessment of the film – it is a largely cerebral film and also confusing at times but as a mainstream spectacle I think it does succeed in exploring a range of ideas. And yes, your right though, Hoth and Bond come to mind in the final climax.
But I’ll bet you like Rififi and countless other heist films that lay out the plot for you as the film moves along. Yes, there is alot of exposition in this film. It also happens while stuff IS being shown to you. It’s never just characters talking. Things are happening around them.
I’m afraid the point in your review at which you said “[Dom Cobb] leads a heist to steal a safe combination from a wealthy heir” was the point at which I realised you weren’t paying even the slightest attention to the plot. How can you criticise Nolan for over-exposition when it’s apparent that you needed it and *still* failed to follow what was actually a pleasingly constructed linear narrative?
Huh? He wasn’t stealing a safe combination… I mean… I guess I could understand how someone might think that. But, were you even paying attention? Maybe I’m off the mark here, but wasn’t the whole point to trick him into making a secure place in his mind? Didn’t they say that like, in the first 10 minutes of the movie?
If I had to summarize the movie I wouldn’t say it is a “Chinese box of dreams” cause that is really just the “setting” I guess. The movie is about planting ideas. Manipulating things around someone to make them think something. I guess everyone will interpret it differently… it’s just, I think a lot of people probably interpreted the way I did, no?
Anyways, the film is not perfect (is there such a thing?), but I still think it was damn good…
“Films like this should lay the groundwork early (and succinctly) and let the action indicate any adjustments. After all, stories should show, not tell, and Nolan keeps telling us that he can’t tell this story.”
I agree completely with this and I didn’t like the film for this reason (among others), but you have so much of the plot wrong, I have to wonder if you were paying attention. It really isn’t difficult to follow.
If memory serves, the safe combination theft is the first premise in the film, before they shift over to talk about planting an idea. The verbosity begins here, where my irritation began, and I settled for just the initial premise in my review (I believe — we’re talking really verbose). If you think this does the film’s plot an injustice, then my apologies. I don’t feel I was setting up a straw man, and to dismiss my review on this claim is like dismissing a film for one bad scene. I heard tons of comments on this elsewhere, so thank you for addressing them here. I am, however, still awaiting someone to take on my actual claims. Hitchcock couldn’t do over-expos in one scene — why would Nolan try it? Isn’t this film more like virtual reality than surrealism? That film movement died in the 90s. Simple fact: the guy’s done much better.
Omar and Jeremy — I know that we are in the gray area of viewer bias. I feel that a plot like this must maintain momentum, and “laying pipe” on screen, for me, does just the opposite. Thank you for your comments, though! I’m sure you’ll agree with some of my pieces in the future. I’m not so sure about the Nolan worshippers (as if the guy would want blind worship, anyway).
PS: Wasn’t anyone else annoyed with Levitt as a floating bellhop for what seems like forever?
Of all the reviews I have read of this film, yours is most in line with my own impressions. I thought this film had an interesting concept, but like you, I felt that it was clumsily told. I agree that it tells, rather than shows.
Reviewers are fond of comparing it to the work of Kubrick–why, I’m not sure. The excellent weightless sequences? The bad old-man makeup? The big difference is that Kubrick was not afraid to tell his story with pictures, even if it meant leaving some of his audience behind. 2001 explains almost nothing. You have to figure it out for yourself. If you can, it’s rewarding. If you can’t . . . well, you’re at least left with a sense of wonder and awe. I was just bored out of my mind with this–and not because I couldn’t follow it. It was because I could, and I was pretty much able to predict where it was going.
I agree, the weightless hotel sequence just felt interminable. It was so repetetive! How many times can I watch plastic-explosive charges being stuck to the walls?
Outside of DiCaprio, the characters in this film are given nothing. Nothing! Even DiCaprio has basically one thing to do: pine for his lost wife and children. That’s an actor’s bonanza compared to what the rest of the cast gets: No back story, no banter, no distinctive traits, no conflict with each other, no investment in the outcome (up until the moment they’re all told they might be lost in Limbo) of this story.
To me, the premise of this movie is so complex that there is no room left (even in a full 2½ hours) to do anything but explain it.
And it’s not as if I’m not a Chris Nolan fan. I loved The Prestige and Insomnia. And I also liked Memento and the Batman movie. But here, he really stumbles.
I find that the things that bothered you had no such effect on me, and in some cases, I can’t even see them from the same angle that you do.
For instance, the casting (Leo, JGL, Michael Caine, et al.) was clearly done on the merit of previous roles… these are all the stars involved in the noir-thriller resurgence. Leo earned this part with his intense performances in The Departed, Shutter Island, and Revolutionary Road (you can see traces of all three performances here), and JGL basically reprises his roles from Brick and The Lookout. It’s a neo-noir megacast, which is perfect for a heist film reconstructed into a psychological thriller.
Your complaint that the film isn’t successful as surrealism shows a dangerous projection of your expectations. The dreams were never meant to be Freudian or poetic dream-realms a la Lynch/Malick/et al, and the film wasn’t meant to be an absurdist reverie. They were meant to be constructed realities, built around the subliminal requirements of cognitive espionage and sabotage, and “dreaming” was the best platform for playing out this idea. The fact that it doesn’t perfectly match our experience of dreaming is beside the point.
As far as Exposition goes, it would have been great if all the technicalities of such an endeavor could be shown, or explained quickly or succinctly, but the film simply required an occasional guiding voice. Even the best science fiction is prone to doing this, because it’s inevitable that certain plot developments will depend on things that are the inventions of the storyteller. Dune, Neuromancer, Star Wars, you name it… whenever a movie strays into genuinely speculative territory, some things have to be spelled out.
Also a side-note: it’s true that Arthur and Eames are basically ciphers, but people who say there’s no characterization tend to overlook the three primary emotional forces in the film: Cobb, whose guilt and anxiety lend him some solid, complex motivation; Ariadne, whose character is developed in the course of the film (brilliant, protective, intensely curious, and addicted to exploration of the dream-world that’s opened up to her); and Mel herself, though she’s just a projection: she’s motivated by love and desire for Cobb, but it drives her to deception and betrayal, ostensibly for their benefit as a couple. This is further complicated by her paradoxical love and ambivalence toward her children, whose reality she can’t accept.
Thanks for your thoughts on the film. I know this has turned into a kind of counter-review; I enjoyed this film, and it continues to occupy my brain tenaciously. A defense was the best service I could render it at the moment.
I agree with this review partly, though the film was supposed to be a little confusing, I dislike that there were many unexplained parts (instead, just constant action). There are other things to criticize other than confusing plot or characters, but that’s for someone else to do.
Oh, and subconscious isn’t psychology, it’s nothing really apart from popular culture originated from Freudian belief.
(subconscious is an empty, now meaningless word.)
I had an old prof who would say that before you can properly analyze, you must be sure of the facts. Watch the movie again and you will find that the safe combination heist was a cover to make the dreaming heir believe he was being kidnapped in the real world as opposed to dreaming on a plane.
Also, keep in mind ALL the movies we have seen in which character development has either a deleterious effect on the plot or becomes the movie.
As in Memento, here, character development WAS the movie. In order to understand the dreamer, we had to understand the dream. Writing off the movie as an “over-expo” without absorbing basic plot undermines your ability as a critic.
There was nothing inept about this movie, save a few (critic)al exceptions.
PS check out these fun links!
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/inception-comic.html
http://www.pasivdevice.org/
Well, hang on that point in my review if you wish, Joe. The plain fact is that all that set-up is part of the film’s ponderous onscreen narration. Even you’re description of it sounds overstuffed.
Noisy, chaotic, NOISY, CHAOTIC, thin thinking, emotionally 1-D, and showing almost no IMAGINATION, ironically, the essence of DREAMS.
Don’t any of these pedestrian imagineers in the movie biz understand that dreams are not just reality with some ESCHER-ish tweaks, but can be a place where all possibilities can erupt, allude, twist, insinuate, surprise and startle?
Nothing shown by Nolan was an improvemnent on CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON meets JOHNNY MNEMONIC.
William Gibson trod all this conceptual ground in his cyber-novels in the 1980′s already. (He invented the “matrix” and interior industrial-espionage thief notions in several book, from NEUROMANCER to MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.)
Bunuel and Dali’s silent film “An Andalusian Dog:, from the late 1920′s was more surrealistical dreamlike and effective than this car-chase, gun fight, witless exercise in CGI “wizardry”. A mish-mash of The Thomas Crown Affair/ Topkapi, The Matrix, What Dreams May Come, and eXistenZ, without any particular addition to the conceptual realm.
A far better, overlooked film in this same genre is 1999′s ‘THE THRITEENTH FLOOR”.(Which cam out right next to the Matrix and got lost.)
Get a copy of that instead.
Better music, more emotional weight, and no BANG BANG SHOOT EM UP cliches.
Nolan made a 2 1/2 hour roolercoaster ride.
Which ultimately induces ennui and ennervates.
1. Ed m. This film wasn’t meant to be a surrealist film, it’s more like virtual reality, as the reviewer said. The best description of this film would be heist film + virual reality film + noir. Just because a film uses dreaming as a plot device doesn’t meant the film -has to- be like Bunuel, you can’t criticize a film for something it had NO intention of being.
2. Ed m , again. How do the rules and quirks of Inception have anything to do with Cobb’s character development. How does all the blabbing about the rules: that you need a ultra potent drug for dreams within a dream, all the exposition about death within a dream, even explaining the gravity situation when repeated slow-mo shots are shown of then van are shown intercut with the hotel non gravity situation. PS anybody who has studied any physics would know that would don’t reach terminal velocity(meaning they stop acceleration) until several seconds in free fall, therefore Nolan’ premise that the dreamers wouldn’t wake up is blown apart.
@ Jesse
You say this film is a neo noir. Simply not true, it only strolls bits and pieces from the noir visual language. Pitch = Oceans 11 meets Matrix by director of Momento. There is none of the dark, dank feeling of a noir here. Even with a tortured Cobb and corporate espionage, it’s totally unsuccessful at capturing any of noir’s darkness and moral ambiguity.
Also, the reviewer doesn’t say he expected it to be surrealism, he says that it’s virtual reality instead of surrealism.
@all
This isn’t a “cerebral” film, if it was I would expect it to have dealt with complex themes. This film doesn’t have any theme, at least any strong cerebral themes. This film is simply a filmed explanation of the rules to Nolans dream world, with some horrible, nonsensical action scenes(the awful awful running around to eat up time that goes on in the winter level, and a out of poach beginning simply slapped on to give the viewer a feeling of “oh, that’s what it’s about” at the end of the film to make up for it’s utter failure to engage viewers.
Other than the slapped on beginning, is the film nonlinear? NO, so the way Nolan slapped this scene onto the beginningnis utterly cheap.
inception = most overhyped film I’ve seen yet, especially on the net.
” If you think this does the film’s plot an injustice, then my apologies. I don’t feel I was setting up a straw man, and to dismiss my review on this claim is like dismissing a film for one bad scene.” No, not really. One bad scene can be mitigated by all the other scenes and it would obviously be closeminded to dismiss a film on one bad scene. Missing (significant) parts of the narrative in a film you are reviewing taints the whole review. I for one like the fact non-linear narrative was a big factor in the film, a nice dream-like motif. And absolutely, I think it’s more about the virtual reality aspect of dreams rather than the 20th century surrealist/psychoanalitical aspects of them we’re uses to seeing explored. While it was jarring to see a heist team without much charachter development, I can’t really complain about the lack of emotion, especially as it would have had to squeeze out more of the necessary plot development in that IMO was a well paced and streamlined (albeit long) film. I wouldn’t have wanted it to get sidetracked into being a film about what dreams are like when it did enough for what it was.