Disclaimer - as this post discusses movies, there will probably be spoilers. Even for movies that aren't Inception, because I write in a sort of rambling way and you never know where the conversation will head.
We watched Inception on Christmas Eve since it's obviously an appropriate Christmas-themed movie, so this post has been brewing in my brain for a while now. I remember when the previews for it came out like a billion months ago, I had 2 main thoughts: "Holy crap, that world is flipping upside down!" and "That's a lot of crumbling buildings on the beach there." It turns out that it wasn't really a beach, but oh well. Other than that, I had literally no idea what the plot of the movie was going to be.
Cut to the movie's actual release, and it seems that apparently no one else had any idea what was going on either. Really?
Because I am a cheap and lazy person (a dreadful combination for movie viewing), I rarely/never see movies in the theater. But a lot of other people must have gone to see this one since it's made like $800 million dollars. And nearly everyone had the same reaction, which was "WTF?!??!!!??!?"
Um, did these people actually watch the movie?
The short version of the plot is that Leonardo DiCaprio and his crew go into people's brains through their dreams and steal valuable information. Except that one time they try to hijack a super-powerful Asian businessman, and he doesn't take too kindly to it when he catches them. He decides that they can either do a job for him, or, presumably, be thrown off the top of a really high building. So Leo's crew teams up with Juno to do a super-complicated 3-tier dream raid. And as expected, things do not go as planned which leads to the movie's main plot. No big deal.
The mind-screw at the end is that you don't know how things really turned out. The last scene can be interpreted in a positive way (he gets back to his family, hooray!) or a negative way (he's stuck forever!!). Sort of like Minority Report or Total Recall. You can take those films at face value for the saccharine, happily-ever-after ending, or you can assume neither main character ever really wakes up and the entire thing is in their respective heads. Whoa. And I'm sure the internet is full of anonymous message boards with people formulating barely coherent, poorly written arguments on both sides for all three of these movies.
Regardless, the ending is the only thing in the movie that isn't clear-cut. But confusing? I don't really see it. Maybe you have to see the movie a bunch of times before your brain stops working and gets confused. But after one viewing, I am pretty sure I've got it.
As for movie quality, I'll be the first person to let you know that I don't have what it takes to be a movie critic. First of all, I don't see nearly enough movies. More importantly, the only thing I care about is whether or not the movie was entertaining. And somehow, that does not entirely coincide with whether or not the movie was "good." For example, movies can be utterly stupid, yet still be entertaining (see True Lies, Gone In 60 Seconds, The Rock, ok really any action movie with Nicolas Cage except Ghost Rider, the Ocean's # movies, etc). Are any of those movies great films? Probably not. Will I watch any one of them every time they're on cable? Probably. And in the oppostie direction, they can be incredibly well-reviewed or popular, but still suck donkey balls (see Girl, Interrupted, Titanic or anything that has Dane Cook in it).
But now I'm getting sidetracked.
Inception was a very entertaining movie. It had all sorts of explosions, a car chase, shootouts, a zero-gravity fistfight (which might violate everything about physics) and an ambiguous ending that could be interpreted in at least 2 ways depending on how pessimistic a person you are. And it was a wicked cool concept. Being able to screw with people's dreams would be an absolutely awful thing in the real world, but as a movie it's awesome.
Is it a movie that I'd watch again? Maybe. It was great, but it was also really long and all the crazy stuff that was surprising and fun the first time around might be played out during a second viewing. Sort of like seeing The Sixth Sense a second time. But the first viewing is super entertaining, even if you have to watch it on a TV that refuses to play DVDs and Blu-Rays at a normal volume and the people in your family who aren't watching the movie refuse to stop making a racket in the background. With all that working against it, Inception was still fantastic, so you should go watch it. And if you're confused afterwards, let me know so I can make fun of you.
Seriously, they stole the whole idea for Inception from Scrooge McDuck. How complicated can it really be?
-Jon
No comments:
Post a Comment