Stickler
Well-Known Member
Inception had an intriguing concept (but not an especially original one), beautiful special effects, a nice cast, and great-looking clothes. After it was over, I turned to my friend and said, "Wow. I wish they had hired a writer. That could have been great."
It was terribly paced. As beautiful as the special effects were, it was primarily a talking heads movie. There were about twenty minutes of spectacular visuals and about 60 of people explaining the plot to each other while using extremely stiff, lifeless, uninvested dialogue. There was barely a conflict. There were barely characters; these people had no personalities. They were barely distinct from each other. They had no inner lives. The whole business about his wife was hack Hollywood "moral conflict" formula ********. If it had been removed entirely from the movie, there is not a single audience member who would have felt differently about the movie when it was over. Nobody walked out of that movie going, "Man, I'm glad they gave him that dead wife to pontificate about for a third of the movie. It gave the film a strong emotional core." It was just painfully boring. I'd bet ten thousand dollars that Leonardo's dead wife was inserted after a note from a studio executive looking for a way to make the story more "human."
Inception had some neat things. I really liked the Joseph Gordon Levitt in the hotel sequence. I liked the city folding over itself.
But it's not some intellectual masterpiece. It's a pretty dumb movie. For instance, dreams don't work that way. The reason time is slowed down in dreams is because your brain fires hundreds of images at you in a short period of time. Your mind then tries to sort out and make a narrative out of the images, which causes the impression of a slowing effect. The notion that anything that happened in Inception is even slightly plausible (even suspending disbelief for the sci fi gadgetry involved) is silly. Dreams just don't work that way.
It's a fun movie to watch once, I think, but it's not exactly Kubrick.
Just my opinion.
One of the things a real writer would have done, by the way, is they would have figured out a way to explain all those things that everybody stood around explaining to each other in the context of an unfolding story, as action, instead of as people standing around talking to each other, and most likely they would have caused that action to show off the character and conflict going on in the inner lives of the people in the story. (Action = something occurring.)
It was terribly paced. As beautiful as the special effects were, it was primarily a talking heads movie. There were about twenty minutes of spectacular visuals and about 60 of people explaining the plot to each other while using extremely stiff, lifeless, uninvested dialogue. There was barely a conflict. There were barely characters; these people had no personalities. They were barely distinct from each other. They had no inner lives. The whole business about his wife was hack Hollywood "moral conflict" formula ********. If it had been removed entirely from the movie, there is not a single audience member who would have felt differently about the movie when it was over. Nobody walked out of that movie going, "Man, I'm glad they gave him that dead wife to pontificate about for a third of the movie. It gave the film a strong emotional core." It was just painfully boring. I'd bet ten thousand dollars that Leonardo's dead wife was inserted after a note from a studio executive looking for a way to make the story more "human."
Inception had some neat things. I really liked the Joseph Gordon Levitt in the hotel sequence. I liked the city folding over itself.
But it's not some intellectual masterpiece. It's a pretty dumb movie. For instance, dreams don't work that way. The reason time is slowed down in dreams is because your brain fires hundreds of images at you in a short period of time. Your mind then tries to sort out and make a narrative out of the images, which causes the impression of a slowing effect. The notion that anything that happened in Inception is even slightly plausible (even suspending disbelief for the sci fi gadgetry involved) is silly. Dreams just don't work that way.
It's a fun movie to watch once, I think, but it's not exactly Kubrick.
Just my opinion.
One of the things a real writer would have done, by the way, is they would have figured out a way to explain all those things that everybody stood around explaining to each other in the context of an unfolding story, as action, instead of as people standing around talking to each other, and most likely they would have caused that action to show off the character and conflict going on in the inner lives of the people in the story. (Action = something occurring.)
