Quisby

taylordelatour:

kso my new tumblr theme is by someone whos tumblr name is ‘nostrich’ this made me lol, idk why :3

01st September 2010 • 5 notes

Inception

There are minor spoilers ahead. Nothing too specific, but they are there. Due to the nature of the film it shouldn’t spoil too much for you, but you’ve been warned.

I don’t want to theorize on Inception. Enough people have already done that at length, and I don’t feel it’s necessary — I have nothing to suggest that hasn’t already been covered. In my mind, it’s largely irrelevant anyway: there is some question about whether Cobb was dreaming at the end or not but in the context of the film, I don’t really think it matters. It’s a story about catharsis: Cobb is relieved of his guilt, and he doesn’t care whether he’s dreaming or not. Neither should we.¹ Catharsis in a dream is as real as catharsis while awake — that is the central theme of the film for a reason. Nonetheless, there is plenty of room for debate and discussion, and that’s just one part of why I liked Inception as much as I did.

When I went to see Inception I was with Heather here in England. When we left the cinema, the people behind us on the bus had just seen The Karate Kid. Their main discussion point was whether or not the film made Jackie Chan look like a pervert. Conversely, Heather and I spent over an hour talking about various facets of Inception — we talked about the nature of limbo and the subconscious, we affirmed our mutual understanding of the kick mechanism, we talked about Cobb’s subconscious relationship with his wife, we wondered about the aging discrepancy at the end in limbo, and so on. We missed two buses we were supposed to catch to my parents’ house to have dinner with them because we were so caught up in Inception. And that’s not a comment intended to enhance your opinion of my intellectual curiosity (it does though, right?) — we weren’t the only ones. The number of articles, blog posts and comments discussing Inception is astounding. I haven’t seen public discussion of a piece of media on that scale since the early days of Lost.

Lost kind of, well, lost its way after a couple of seasons, and even the producers have admitted by now that they were more or less just tying up loose ends toward the end with little thought to any overriding story arc. Inception (helped in part by its much shorter length, I suppose) manages not to fall into that trap. A large part of that is how long Christopher Nolan spent writing it: he’d been working on it since way back when he wrote Memento. That means he spent around ten years writing it. How many other films took that long to write? Nolan spent years rewriting and refining it, and it shows. It’s masterfully written.

And just about everything about the film shows great attention to detail. Even the score (courtesy of Hans Zimmer). Watch this video. See what he did there? As the gang go deeper and deeper, the score becomes more and more dilated — just like time! When they use the Edith Piaf track as a kick, they hear it at its normal speed, because there’s no time dilation up there on the surface. Frankly, I think that’s brilliant. (Incidentally, I’ve read that Nolan told Zimmer to read Godel, Escher, Bach when creating the score.)

This is exactly what I expect from a film. Every detail in this film was carefully planned — for instance, how Nolan makes it clear Cobb’s ring is only there when he’s awake (making it our totem, of sorts), and then refuses to let us see whether or not he’s wearing it at key moments — and by god it shows. I don’t want to leave the cinema wondering whether Jackie Chan looked like a pervert, I want to leave the cinema feeling like I did after watching Inception. (Which, by the way, has a 9.1 rating on IMDB right now, making it the #3 best film of all time.) That’s a tall order in this age of pumping out summer blockbusters starring Bruce Willis, I know, but if anything, I’m glad they’re so rare, it makes it that much more notable when they come along.

13th August 2010 • 35 notes