Dear readers despair for alas, Inception has proved yet another stumbling block on the path leading to that grandest of goals: me thinking along the same lines as mainstream society.
Inception is a brilliant film. Excellently made and highly entertaining, but despite it's many, many strong attributes I left the screening feeling under-whelmed.
"Why," you ask (I can tell that you asked it because that part was in speech marks) "Why are you not raving about this film like every reviewer on Earth? Like every movie-goer on Earth. If you have a pulse, you should be raving about this film. Even the trailers and TV spots have fan groups on Facebook! Yet you have the audacity to be "under-whelmed"?!" (See what I did there with the quote inside the quote? Clever huh?)
I do want to sing the praises of this film. I want to tell you about how amazing Joseph Gordon-Levitt is. How Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio are coolness personified and a pleasure to watch. How the film is based on an entirely clever and original idea - a rarity these days. What about the breath-stopping corridor fight scene which push the world of visual effects to another level. It is all of these things and a true feat of film making. Christopher Nolan is excellent at what he does.
I am however, I'll confess to you and you alone, getting a leeeeeeetle tired of people rattling on about this film as it it's a life-changing experience. Yes it's excellent, but for me it didn't leave me questioning my reality, the world around me, everything I'd ever known and believed. I just walked away, no questions at all.
The film relies on layers and shifts in time and relativity, dreams and reality are inter-changed but I was hugely disappointed to be able to keep up the whole time. Not once did I question where I was or when or if it was a dream or not. Perhaps my expectations were misguided because of the publicity out of the US, but I really didn't get the dose of mind-fuck that I was looking for. I wasn't challenged.
Visually I was also let down. Yeah alright it looked pretty impressive, but it wasn't like the Matrix was - creating brand new effects never before seen on the big screen. The rolling over of Paris that we've all seen in the trailer was their big set piece and it was pretty meh really. I can't fault any of it, I just wanted a bit more.
I'm prepared for basically everyone to disagree with me on this one. I really am. Just please don't feel the need to tell me about it. My world has gone on completely unchanged post-Inception though I did enjoy the two and a half hours I spent watching it. I just don't feel the need to see it again.
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Four - bet you wouldn't have picked that from my comments as a whole, but I did tell you it was well made.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
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I just watched it. What really yawned me out was the boring type of fighting scenes (ie every 5 minutes). Like grappling and more grappling. As for the reality shift thing, this film really set the conspiracy theorists' imagination on overdrive. Life changing? No, to a rational person.
ReplyDeleteWhat I noticed was how this whole subconscious thing had elements of what we most personally have experienced, like the jolting feeling of waking up whilst falling off a cliff in a dream. It made the whole thing convincing, in our minds anyway.