what’s all the fuss about
everything else aside, this is pretty damn cool.
pretty much everyone i know has seen inception at this point. and pretty much everyone i know not only loved it, but loved it enough that they had to start talking about it with everyone else they knew. and pretty much everyone i know, and the people they knew, all immediately took to the internets after seeing it to see what other people were saying about it. i am pretty much like pretty much everyone i know in this regard. here is what i found:
there are lots of people trying to figure out just wtf happened in that movie. on one hand, that sort of reduces the movie to a puzzle, but on the other, it also seems like a valid first step in an attempt to divine just what kind of story chris nolan is trying to tell us. among the more interesting parsers and theory-spinners are the folks at terrible minds and cinematical—and when i say “folks” i absolutely mean to include both the original blogger and all the people who commented on the post. slate also has a couple posts that are good in this vein. inquiring minds at work all around. needless to say, these are all individuals who were enthralled by the movie, enough so to devote consider time to arguing about it online.
i’ll come right out and admit that i am predisposed to love nolan’s movies because i’ve enjoyed so many of the other things he’s created, and, yes, i, too, was mesmerized by inception. but i wasn’t 100% convinced that it was anything more than a highly, highly enjoyable heist film with a high-concept structure. so i tried to find a review, anywhere on the internet, from someone who (a) disliked the film and cited valid critiques, and (b) was a writer whose opinion i could trust. and you know what? i couldn’t really find one.
the vast majority of criticism i came across faulted nolan not for the movie he made, but for the movie the particular critic wished he would have made instead (the meme apparently being that he was “too literal” in his portrayal of dreams). there was also a smattering of reviews from people who i think you would recognize, probably from high school; they’re the ones who will hate for the sake of hating (i.e., you’re not even sure they actually believe the shit they’re writing because they seem more preoccupied with offering an outsider/contrarian perspective).
a good example of the former kind of review is a.o. scott’s at the times, who seems disappointed that nolan’s dream movie wasn’t nonsensical enough. okay, fine—but it seems pretty clear to me that nolan wasn’t interested in making that kind of movie. the architect characters seem to exist in inception precisely for the reason of giving the other characters a reasonably stable world in which to interact with each other. so about all i got out of those reviews was that inception wasn’t like any dream the reviewer ever had. great. that’s so incredibly helpful to me, who’s never actually, literally, been inside their heads while they slept.
the epitome of the latter review comes courtesy of the rumpus, whose piece drips with such disdain and sarcasm from line one, only to offer little more than unsubstantiated barbs and unfair broadsides—so much so that i stopped reading when the author called the dark knight “painfully, infuriatingly, ludicrously overrated,” but then completely neglected to defend that opinion. in short, that rumpus review is the reason why i think we’ll rue the day when bloggers have finally replaced professional critics of the arts. which makes me seem like a cranky old man, but hey—i’m just following the lead of these online writers who seem to still be smarting from the time the free urban weekly paper they used to work for went under. alas, you smart-ass arbiters of all that is cool and ironic, there will always be a place for you on the internet.
in the meantime, if anyone’s found a review of inception that manages to thoughtfully criticize the movie without the unnecessary venom, you can share it with me right after we go see it a second time.
I don’t know about other reviews, but for myself, while I enjoyed Inception, I did think it missed its mark; yes I suppose I refer to what it could have been. Frankly it wasn’t mind-bending enough to have wrapped itself around the blockbuster theme, and it didn’t get enough character depth to offer any revelations there. It wanted to be a redemptive tragedy, at least in part, but didn’t create enough empathy for DiCaprio’s character to make me feel much for his loss. It relied too much on the actors for character, and while I think they did an excellent job, they weren’t given story to develop characters so much as brief moments to portray characters. It was entertaining and fun, but middle of the road trying to do too many things without entirely succeeding at either. The mystery was too obvious, the mind-bending settled quickly into the mundane with odd inconsistencies (they lost gravity in one world down, why not the next one?), and the dark side of characters was done in pencil and quickly overwritten. I would watch it again, so I’m not trying to say it was awful, but neither was it the most incredible picture which will change the way I view movies, dreams, people, reality or whatever.
Dark City lite…
[...] amounts of story ideas. The problem is, I don’t like to work from memory. Kind of like in the movie Inception, which Jason recently wrote about, I feel that the past is often dangerous to recreate. I’ve never been able to focus on [...]
I don’t think you’re going to find a review that satisfies A and B, because I don’t think it is going to exist. Not everyone is going to like it, but no movie is universally loved. A critic that you respect, one who is professional and knows that his job extends past his own personal taste, is going to know enough to at least get outside his own bias and recognize well-drawn characters, compelling acting, and a really brilliantly conceived world, even if it didn’t appeal to him.
for what it’s worth, i did find one review on HTMLgiant that made some good arguments in favor of the film (and some that were a little flimsy), and one blog post that did a round-up of professional reviews (some points of which i thought had merit, and some which fell into the aforementioned categories). and, also, one piece that cautioned the nolans against letting this all go to their collective heads (see: m. night shyamalan).
Just came across this critique. Pretty thorough:
http://bigother.com/2010/08/08/seventeen-ways-of-criticizing-inception/
i found it entertaining, but i wasn’t looking for art or going as a critic. my one writing comment, had i critiqued the screenplay, would be “too much explanatory dialogue,” which i think is even worse in movies than on paper.
i had the same immediate reaction! on the way home from the theater, i was pretty amazed. but during the movie, there were definitely parts where i said to myself, “oh, right, and now here’s the part where this character is going to stop & explain everything to me.”
[...] and read it so we can talk all about it. it’ll be like the bookworm’s equivalent of inception. but better. i [...]