You are given a movie to watch, and you must immediately write your judgment of it and have it published to the masses. You are now on the record. You either liked or disliked the movie, and the masses will see you as being in that camp for the rest of eternity. This is the job of a film critic.
That’s tough to do, particularly with films like Inception. As time went on after seeing it a first time, my thoughts on various events in the film changed, and my opinion settled. You cannot completely make up your mind on a film like Inception immediately after viewing it. It needs time to stew. That is why critics can fall into traps by making drastic statements based on their initial reactions. One of the most infamous is Ben “Frat Boy” Lyons’ review of 2007’s I Am Legend. He referred to it as “one of the greatest movies ever made”. While Ben Lyons is not a representative sample of film criticism, or competence for that matter, this is an example of the kind of snap judgments that can get critics in a world of trouble. (For the record, I liked I Am Legend, but it ain't even close to Lyons' assessment.)
I very well may have been guilty of some snap judgments in my original review of Inception. Do not get me wrong, it is a very, very, very good film. Probably even great. However, I think it is entirely possible people like me may have been using terms and phrases such as “masterpiece”, “Kubrickian”, “a modern 2001”, or “Christopher Nolan, will you marry me?” a little too willy-nilly. As time goes on we will see where Inception lies in the annals of film history. Maybe it will be remembered forever. Maybe we will look back and laugh: “Remember that piece of crap Inception we all overrated?”. I suspect the former is true, but again you cannot make such decisive statements so quickly.
That being said, I do not take back my review now that I have seen Inception a second time. What it does do is amplify the feelings I had the first time. I did not find the exposition in the first half quite as compelling, but I approached it with a more analytical mindset. It did not dazzle me, but it intrigued. However, the second half once they enter the dream world was just as amazing. This is as good a summer movie as has been released in many a year, and I still believe that.
It was noted to me that my original review I pretty much ranted on how freaking awesome everything was, but now let’s talk plot. Beware of spoilers, all who enter here.
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I’m not going to do a scene by scene breakdown. That’s a waste of everyone’s time. I’m going to focus on how one can interpret the film, and what you believe lies in the last shot: Did the top fall over or not? Is Cobb still dreaming?
The second time I watched Inception I kept a close eye on the spinning top. There are people who claim they definitively saw it fall over but I can tell you unless you saw a different cut of the film it does not do that. The point of the whole thing is that we don’t know. This is a movie made to be discussed for days and weeks after being seen. I’ve had discussions with myself and with others since I first watched it, and my second viewing did nothing to definitively answer questions. If anything, it adds to the mystery.
If Cobb was indeed dreaming at the end, I would think he was dreaming the entire film. One theory which has been gaining momentum, and one that I find interesting, is that the entire film is actually Cobb being incepted by somebody else with his inception of Fischer being the backdrop. This is incredibly possible, though I do not know whether I believe it or not. Think about the rules that are laid out for inception, and the plan to incept Fischer: an idea has to be introduced through a series of events throughout multiple layers of dreaming, and the idea being incepted has to come in its absolute simplest form. Is that not what happens to Cobb? By the end of the film he has to accept the fact that his wife is dead, that he must get rid of his regret, and that he must “come back to reality” in words of Michael Caine’s character Miles.
Think of the words uttered by Mal as she speaks to Cobb in her final scene. Cobb is often being chased by anonymous men in suits. The chase scene early on in the film where Cobb is chased through the streets of Mombasa has a certain dreamlike quality. The city seems to be a maze, and all the dreams are formed from mazes, are they not? He finds himself briefly trapped in an alley that shrinks as it goes on. Are those people chasing him projections? Would anyone in their right mind build that alley?
The better question is whether or not we even want to know. I don’t. I’d much rather be left analyzing the film, which is infinitely more fun than getting a definitive answer. I quoted Stanley Kubrick in my 2001 post, where he states that revealing his interpretation of the ending would simply depress people more than excite them. Do you want to be the person told “Nope. You’re wrong. You missed the point.”? Cutting to black at the end may very well be audience manipulation, but I there is enough to debate in the rest of the film that I strongly doubt it.
What is my feeling on the film? I prefer to speculate as to what it could mean rather than decide what it does mean. If you put a gun to my head (please don’t) I would say that it is reality simply because there’s no definitive reason to believe otherwise. Yes, it’s true we don’t know how Cobb got home, thus we don’t see the beginning of the dream, et cetera, et cetera. How many movies would show the drive from the airport to back home? Inception is not a movie that needed to be 20 minutes longer.
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At the end of the day I hold one belief about film: no two of us share the exact same tastes. There may be an overwhelming majority opinion on a single film, but there is no one film that you could show to everyone and get the same reaction. Inception is no different. A whole lot of people love it, myself included, but there are many people and critics who do not share the enthusiasm I do. RottenTomatoes.com says that 86% of all critics gave favorable reviews, but that includes the likes of TheDivaReview.com. The “cream of the crop” critics, who really matter, hold a slightly lower 78%. This is still a rating most films would love to get, but now I’m going to look at some of the main criticisms of Inception, and I'll give you my take on them.
THE DREAM WORLD IS TOO LITERAL
This is a view taken by a few very prestigious critics. One of the more infamous negative reviews comes from David Edelstein of New York Magazine, and he has gotten a lot of flak for his review. It is not wholly surprising, he didn’t like Nolan’s brilliant The Dark Knight either, but the complaint about the film’s dream world being too literal is one that, quite frankly, confounds me. It is not just Edelstein who says this, but also A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Scott is a critic I respect a great deal, even though I find myself disagreeing with him often. His review of Inception is mostly positive, but Nolan’s dream world is one of his main complaints:
“Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.”
I find this hard to understand simply because Scott (and Edelstein, for that matter) seem to be reviewing a different film, one that they WANTED to see rather than the one they are seeing. While Inception certainly includes a lot of talk about dreams, it is more about ideas than dreams themselves. The dreams on display here are not simply the result of a character taking an afternoon nap. They are mazes designed by architects for the sole purpose of extracting (or incepting) information from the minds of the subjects. It is the ideas placed inside the dreams that are important, not how freaky the dream world is.
They also seem to have forgotten what month it is. At the end of the day this is a big-budget summer action movie, not a small psychological art film. It’s main goal was to entertain and thrill the audience, and maybe get some bigger ideas in there too. The quality of the action here is higher than any film I saw this summer, or for that matter just about any summer. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s fight in the revolving hallway is as memorable a sequence as has been filmed in recent memory. Made all the better because it looks real, and it wasn’t the product of cartoonish CGI.
IT’S MUDDLED, CONFUSING AND BORING
It is confusing. By design. I hate to say it like this, but you know what? It’s your fault. You weren’t willing to surrender to it, no matter what you claim. I could follow it. Most people I’ve talked to could follow it. The thing is that Inception actually requires the audience to pay attention to what is going on. If you fall off the wagon, you are going to get left behind.
Also, the fact that anyone can find this film boring is baffling. Confusing, maybe. But boring? You're not even trying.
IT’S THE SAME AS SHUTTER ISLAND
No, this is not a criticism I’ve seen in professional reviews, but I’ve heard it from others. There is only one slightly eerie resemblance, that being DiCaprio’s crazy dead wife. Other than that, if you think it’s the same movie, I can’t help you.
IT’S NOTHING BUT EXPOSITION AND THE RULES OF THE DREAM ARE MADE-UP HOOEY
During Cobb’s early conversations with Ariadne, he describes the various facets of the dreams in Inception. If you could not identify with some of what he said I’m shocked. Comments like “dreams feel real while we’re in them”, and “you never remember the beginning of the dream” rang true to me, as did his explanation of how the mind forms a dream. Look at the diagram he draws for Ariadne. More is said about Nolan's
I will concede that there is a lot of exposition to be found here, but it is explained with urgency. Compare this to “The Last Airbender” (God forbid) where the characters often grind the movie to a halt with mindless explanations of the world around us. The explanations of “Inception” drive the plot forward, and it all seems to come naturally. We WANT to know what is going on.
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I think I can stop here, wouldn’t you agree?
Thus far, I am glad to report that audiences have responded enthusiastically to Inception. It has held the top spot at the box office both weekends since its release, and has brought in almost $143 million domestically. The audience polling group CinemaScore claims Inception received a B+ from audiences, a very good grade. Interestingly enough, viewers under 25 give the film an A (kids these days, eh?), and most other polls hold similar verdicts.
Christopher Nolan is no longer just a promising newcomer. With Inception he is officially one of the big boys. Some may be resistant to it, but he is going to be a major force in Hollywood for the foreseeable future, and hopefully he will give us more films like the thrilling, conversation-starting Inception.
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