Inception (Spoilers) (Also Excessive Ranting)
I don’t watch many movies, but I did see Inception. Disappointment city.
The visual effects were stunning, to be sure, but the plot was uninspiring. Huge corporations fighting to corner the energy market? Seriously? The only character I cared about was Ariadne, in spite of her INTENSELY SYMBOLIC name. I guess I was supposed to be invested in Cobb and Mal’s relationship, but Cobb was mentally unstable and (his projection of) Mal was (1) trying to kill everyone and (2) imaginary. I didn’t even cry at the end, and I cry in EVERY MOVIE. All of them. No, I take that back. I don’t think I’ve ever cried during Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But all the others.
The movie went to so much trouble to set up these neat rules for dreams that I’d hoped it would be full of intriguing logic puzzles, but instead it was full of holes and nonsense.
The kicks, for instance. The kicks! I’ve tried and tried to make sense of the kicks, and I can’t. Apparently the “kick” is the sense of falling that jerks you out of a sedated sleep, taking the place of dream-dying in non-sedated sleep. Fine. When they’re first testing the sedative, they show Arthur hooked up asleep in the warehouse. Eames kicks Arthur’s chair, and Arthur falls over and wakes up. So far, believable.
But when they start the job, everyone acts as though the kick has to come from the dream level instead of the sedated level. So . . . if you die in a dream, you go to limbo, but if you fall in a dream, you wake up? Example: In limbo, Ariadne has to throw Fischer off the ledge and then jump herself. Why? It should be enough that their bodies fall in the snow level, like when Arthur’s chair fell over. Cobb should have been pulled out of limbo, too, because his body was lying next to Ariadne’s in the snow level. And who knows, maybe he is—I don’t know how else to explain why he washes up on the beach *again* at the beginning/end of the movie, when he should have been in limbo already.
As for the kicks having to be simultaneous—whatever, I’ll let that one go. At least it’s internally consistent.
But don’t even get me started on the falling thing. Do you know what the “feeling of falling” is, Mr. Nolan? It’s the feeling of weightlessness. It’s not the feeling of hitting the water, it’s all the falling the van did up to that point. And the people asleep on the hotel level? The explosive idea was clever, but really it would have *stopped* the feeling of falling their bodies had been experiencing for the last half hour. If you’d stuck to the rules you seemed to lay out earlier in the movie, everyone except the folks already in limbo should have popped right back up to the first dream level as soon as the van started to fall.
These little sloppy bits didn’t bother me too much while I was in the movie because I figured, hey, it’s pretty confusing, I probably missed something. But the more I’ve thought and talked and read about it, the more I’m convinced that it’s not me. The movie doesn’t make sense.
That alone isn’t a problem. The problem is that it tries. Don’t tease me with the idea that I’m going to get to work through some awesome logic. I get way too excited, and if you let me down, I’ll totally post about it on my blog.
A movie that did dreams and memories right? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Didn’t make sense most of the time; didn’t need to. Damn good movie. Watch it instead.
