Inception

[Johnatone]

Wow, I can't believe I'm the first to post about this movie. Made plans to go and see it at 9:45, ended up in Springfield, IL with a friend and caught the 11:20 showing. This was only a pain because the movie is 2 1/2 hours long and the trip home was an hour. Long night.

It was phenominal(s/p). I think most directors would've tried to make it complex and confusing, but Christopher Nolan kept it pretty simple and it still turned out pretty deep and complex. I can't say I connected to the characters as emotionally as I have in other movies, but that didn't take away from it any. The 2 1/2 run time was perfect: long enough to develop the story and events properly but not so long as to drag it out and make it a "Alright already hurry up" event (I'm talking to you drawn out highway fight scene in Matrix Reloaded). So if you can, go see it. I think seeing it in theaters is probably worth the experience.*

And has anyone noticed that Jospeh Gordon-Levett has turned into a pretty good actor?

*Alright Mr. Nolan, where's my advertising fee? Heh.

[Skeletor]

Saw it last night as well. It was a very well made science fiction movie. I was entertained the whole way through.

Haha, and you're right, Gordon-Levitt was actually pretty cool in that movie! I never thought he was a bad actor though. He was great in 3rd Rock from the Sun and a few other movies he's been in.

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I just have a few questions that were unclear to me in the movie.

1. How did Cobb and Mal (Dicaprio and his wife) fall into limbo?

2. Who's dream were they joining in the 3rd level?

3. In the third level, Fischer needs to get into the "vault". Was that his own mind?

4. How did they plant the idea that Fischer needs to go his own way and disband his father's company?

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[Planky]

Johnatone said:

And has anyone noticed that Jospeh Gordon-Levett has turned into a pretty good actor?

He always has been a good actor

[Johnatone]

Planky said:

He always has been a good actor

Okay, I guess I should qualify this. He was great in Third Rock From The Sun, but after that I never saw him in anything. Lo and behold several years later and he's all of a sudden in a lot of stuff. If it hadn't happened to be a group of movies I saw relativly close together (G.I. Joe, Killshot, 500 Days of Summer, Inception and one more I can't think of at the moment) I wouldn't have noticed. Just nice to see at least one child actor not turn into a complete screw up is all.

[Planky]

It was only two years after Third Rock that he started showing up. The Lookout and Brick are two that come to mind that I think he's done well in.

I'm going to see Inception sometime this week.

[Megalyth]

I saw this yesterday, and I was thoroughly engrossed. Like the OP said, it was never too complicated but simultaneously a bit of a mind-job.

Also, Brick was a fine film.

[Sporku]

I thought it was a damn fine flick. I wish there were more movies like this around. I love mindfuck movies, even if this one's a little bit low on the scale of mindefuckness.

[40oz]

Johnatone said:

(I'm talking to you drawn out highway fight scene in Matrix Reloaded)

I could never get enough of that scene.

[Reisal]

Good movie.

[Snakes]

Saw it late last night. Found it to be captivating from the first frame to the last. Plus any movie with that much Watanabe is going to be entirely kick-ass. Just sayin'. Maybe my favorite movie of the year so far.

[lupinx-Kassman]

Saw it a few days ago with a friend during a midnight showing. It was pretty good, but I was already a sucker for sci-fi flicks to begin with.

[AveryMaurice]

Saw it yesterday, awesome movie, just not as good as the critics are making it out to be.

[Aliotroph?]

Good movie. Overhyped now. And it bothers me that they had to base the premise for a near-future movie on ideas about dreams that are clearly false (drastic timescale differences, only consciously using the brain in a limited way, dreams actually being inside other dreams).

[Hellbent]

I didn't really like the movie that much. As with most cg/effects heavy movies, too much effects, not enough realism. The movie played too much like a great video game and not enough like an intriguing film. The script was too banile (ie. we need to go deeper into the subconscious). The rigidity of time scale from each level was cheesy (better suited to a video game). The lack of psychological depth and atmosphere also left me decidedly meh.

Just to clarify one thing, if the spinning top totem falls, then it's real, right? My friend was trying to tell me if the totem keeps spinning, then it is real and not a dream. I understood it to be that in the dream the totem will keep spinning infinitely, but in real life will eventually fall.

[AveryMaurice]

For Cobbs, the spinning top will fall if he is awake, it will continuously keep spinning if hes dreaming.

[AndrewB]

It's a good movie but does not live up to the hype. I give it a solid 8/10.

[Enjay]

I thought that it was reasonable. Quite watchable with some interesting ideas but, on the whole, it was a wasted opportunity. It wasn't enough of a mindfuck for me and the dreams were way too mundane. I don't know who the boring fuckers who have dreams like that are, but I can guarantee that mine are a lot weirder with far more in the way of unusual characters, weird creatures, and interesting physical places and time-locations. Although some bits were quite convoluted, a lot of it was pretty predictable.

A nice idea with some good concepts but, IMO, simply not taken far enough - hence the verdict of "wasted opportunity".

[Abyssalstudios1]

Bloody awesome. It's really a beautiful piece of work, so long as you suspend disbelief. All of the confusion at the beginning slowly expands and begins to be resolved, until the climax where it all comes together. Yes, the way dreams are handled was perfectly inaccurate- but I don't care. I loved it, and I'll certainly be getting the DVD.

[EarthQuake]

Just got back from the theatre.

It's fucking awesome. Go watch it.

[Aliotroph?]

I thought the dreams themselves were too consistent. Who can keep a dream stable for so long? Dreams tend to fall apart if you don't have a constant narrative, and even then elements change all the time. The building I leave in a dream is almost never the same as the building I entered.

[Clonehunter]

Yes to the above. Dreams can fall apart quickly. My last dream was in a space ship or submarine or something, fighting an army of Pinky's like the doom movie, and then we ended up in a plushy pink bedroom with an ocean out side the window with an underwater bridge and lots of trees. wtf...

ANyways, I havn't seen the movie yet, but I fucking want to.

[Abyssalstudios1]

Aliotroph? said:

I thought the dreams themselves were too consistent. Who can keep a dream stable for so long? Dreams tend to fall apart if you don't have a constant narrative, and even then elements change all the time. The building I leave in a dream is almost never the same as the building I entered.

IIRC, the dreams are constructed by the architect. The combination of the architect and the sedative keeps the dream relatively stable.

[Use]

Yes exactly, the dreams seem mundane and ordinary becuase they are designed that way. If the subjects subconscious was making the entirety of the dream it would be chaotic and thus very difficult to navigate.

I saw the film last night and enjoyed it a lot, like most of Nolan's films several watches will be required to catch it all.

[Grazza]

I watched it last night and thought it was excellent. I think the way it was set in dreams worked a lot better than the Matrix (which I didn't link it to, but others have), and made the action a lot more meaningful.

Aliotroph? said:

ideas about dreams that are clearly false ... dreams actually being inside other dreams

I have many times experienced dreams inside dreams, often multiply layered.

Anyone watched this in a "D-BOX Motion Seat"? We were going to do that (at the Mall of America, having tried out the seats there a few weeks back), but other people we were going with didn't want to travel that far. I could imagine this being a movie where that would be quite effective (or else just shake you about a lot and distract you from the film).

[Abyssalstudios1]

Grazza said:

I have many times experienced dreams inside dreams, often multiply layered.

You are clearly false.

[Grazza]

Not at all. Some people have more control over their dreams than others, just as some people remember them more often than others.

How exactly you can claim to know what has happened or has not happened in the dreams of others, I am not quite sure.

[Use]

Abyssalstudios1 said:

You are clearly false.

You're wrong again. I can often have dreams within a dream. In fact, I can almost do this without fail if I come home from a long stressful day at work and take a short nap. With great frequency do I find myself awake from the nap only to be still dreaming, and sometimes become surprised within the dream when I realize I have not actually woken up.

[AndrewB]

What you're describing is a dream that is "about" sleep, not a dream within a dream. It's still all one dream, one layer of unconsciousness. It's only really fair to call it multi-layered if more than one of those layers are actually real. The only "real" layer is the first one, the fact that you are dreaming. If that dream happens to be about dreaming then that's a "fiction" of dreaming and not actually a second dream.

[Abyssalstudios1]

I... I was trying to be funny... I'm sorry, it won't happen again.

[40oz]

Awesome movie. I can't determine whether or not the part where they are going onto the plane to get into fischer's dream was all a dream in itself given the trick ending. The movie started within a dream so maybe the movie was directed in a paradoxical manner so that it can't be determined whether there was a dream happening or whether there was actually some reality to it.

Very cool.

I was especially intrigued with the part where the young girl (I don't remember any of the character's names) was being introduced into being the architect for someone else's subconscious, and manipulating the world around her. I really related to that because it was eerily similar to my thinking process for creating doom maps. Taking something generic and simplistic and manipulating detail into it.

I also found it very cool how the way dreams are depicted in this movie are very closely related to doom wads, in which everytime you play one you're in a different reality, and you "wake up" but getting to the exit. The lengthier and intricate the map is, the more time spent dreaming. The monsters are projections except that their behavior isn't necessarily linked to how strange the wad is. But doom wads being similar to dreams probably explains what attracts me to doom so much.