Everyone who covers the film industry has been writing non-stop about how disasterous this summer has been. Box office totals are way down and there’s plenty of blame to go around: bad economy, piracy, rising ticket prices, etc… The great hope for this summer has for awhile come to rest on Inception, the mysterious movie that could. I’ve seen it and yes Christopher Nolan’s heady movie is really that awesome. I can only hope that it becomes this year’s Avatar and is so successful that it sends the right messages to studios.
1) It’s not in 3-D
You don’t need 3-D for a movie to be successful. If anything, the technology, as awesome as it was in Avatar, really only helped to cover up the weaknesses of the story by distracting with something that felt awe inspiring. Because of it’s success, we’ve had a year of really crappy movies made even crappier by bad post 3-D conversions (Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender) which only worsen the film. Christopher Nolan has gone on record saying he’s not a fan of 3-D and would not support a post production process for Inception and that Batman 3 won’t be in 3-D either. Thank God.
2) You Have to Think
While I was watching the movie, I became aware of the fact that the movie was throwing a massive amount of information and details at me with little regard for my ability to keep up. Thusly I found myself becoming an active participant of the film and glued to each and every second with utter intensity for fear that I missed something. This is not a movie you can turn your brain off for. I don’t want to suggest that you have to be a genius to be able to understand it; no, everything is right there in the film. But it does demand a level of attention from the audience that is extremely rare.
3) It’s an original idea
Inception is Inception. It’s an original idea based on an original screnplay. It wasn’t a TV series, a board game, a Hasbro toy, a comic book, a video game, a remake of a foreign film or even a reboot of a formative original movie from the 80s that I loved when I was a kid. It is an original movie through and through, and I never thought I’d reach the day where I treasured just how rare that is. We need more original stories. I don’t want to see Inception 2 (or even Re-Inception). I like it just the way it is. Now show me something else that’s original. Please.
You’re welcome,
Ashley
18/07/2010 at 9:57 am Permalink
I agree with most of what you say, Ashley, but it’s hardly original. It’s a big-budget version of A Nightmare On Elm Street. But yes, I agree that it’s nice to know it’s a brainier version of Michael Bay/Jerry Brockheimer films, which is refreshing.
Ed – Well in the largest sense of the word, no story is truely original. Nolan was mining concepts he first explored in Memento and while the movie bears absolutely no resemblance to A Nightmare on Elm Street, a closer cousin might be considered Dreamscape if you’re wanting to pinpoint the similarities with dreaming. If anything, Inception owes a lot to the Wachawski’s for paving a gravel road with The Matrix and making movies like this possible. Still, I’ve never seen The Matrix or anything else command this type of attention from the audience and demand them to keep track of multiple layers of reality all occuring in the same timespace. This is where Inception shines and why it is such an incredible film.
I’ve found this revolving critique of the film: that it’s little more than a brainy Michael Bay movie, to be an absurd one. This is not Transformers on smart pills. (if such a thing even could exist) Bay movies are about the action and everything centers around that. Everything else, even plot, takes a back seat to that one overriding concept: give a balls-to-wall action experience. In Inception, the action is not a set piece, it’s not what the film is about and even moreso, the movie itself isn’t even really interested in the action. Instead, the action becomes a constant driving background force. Nolan turned what is usually front and center pieces into a simple narrative device whose purpose is to become the pulse of increasing tension in the film.