Inception
Monday, July 26th, 2010
The poster for Inception
So, what did you think? Do you agree with Memento fan Whitey that “Inception just fails to work” or perhaps with Kermode’s view that “the idea of getting lost in it kind of is the point of the film“? Anyone who’s seen the film has an opinion on it, so allow me to share mine.
Without giving anything much away, Inception is a big summer block buster with a slightly complicated plot involving dreams within dreams. It’s not art house, it’s not even particularly clever but it does contains a handful of visual wows, some decent plot twists and turns and some decent acting.
Whether you’ll like it or not I think depends on how you approach it. Let’s create a Christopher Nolan scale of Dark Knight (0) to Memento (10), where the numbers aren’t scores of any kind, but more a scale like black to white with opposites at either end. This movie falls much, much closer to the Dark Knight end of the scale, so if you go in believing a lot of the chatter about how clever it is, i.e. closer to the Memento end of the scale, you’re going to be very disappointed. Similarly, if you go in expecting Batman without the costumes, you’re going to be pretty disappoint too, just not as much.
The fact is Inception would come in around a 3 on the Dark Knight to Memento scale, a little too complicated for the popcorn crowd, and way too simple for the art house crowd, but strangely enough I think it does work. If you can switch off during it and go with the flow of the film it carries along at a good pace, it has some amazing set pieces that are all the more amazing when you read about how they were shot, and bar a couple of plot devices that cause some debate I think it hangs together well as a less brain-dead blockbuster.
I think the fact that it has divided a lot of people over whether it’s any good or not is a good thing. It means it has an audience, and one that really likes it. I count myself amongst them. Go see it.
