Discussion about this post

User's avatar
CuriousBusiness's avatar

Hey, big thank you to MovieWise for letting me write this guestpost. As one can maybe tell from the article, our views on Inception differ quite a bit.

I agree with many of the points made, the movie featured a lot of action sequences not central to the story, the character of Ariadne felt merely like an exposition tool and her being in charge of managing the actual Inception felt indeed very unnatural.

I think the original sin of the movie was its budget. This budget is the cause of many points of criticism mentioned - the star power/ the over the top action sequences/ the meaningless eye candy locations. These attributes are not there simply because the movie had a big budget, but rather because the movie needed even bigger sales to justify the budget and be a financial success. To achieve this number of sales, it needed many viewers. And the best way to ensure many viewers is to make a movie appealing to the masses, so to speak, which is most often easier with an action flick. Flashy trailers and adrenaline filled shots do convince a lot of people to watch a movie - and to recommend it to their friends. Perhaps keeping the story confusing, to motivate a second viewing, was also part of a sales maximising strategy - though that is pure speculation.

But that is the point that also redeems the movie for me. By wrapping the ideas of dreams and the subconsciousness in a exhilarating and fast paced story, the movie becomes much more accessible. Rather than appeal purely based of its concepts to a small group of people, it draws in a large variety of viewers, who otherwise would have never seen it. Those viewers then too get exposed to the ideas put forth and the questions raised by the movie. At first they might be superficial, like what is going on, did the totem fall, did Cobb meet his kids? But soon afterwards they turn deeper, the viewer is induced to question themes like dreams, (sub)consciousness and reality. The success of Inception is that the movie accomplishes this introspection in many different viewers, rather than in those naturally inclined to do so.

The first time I consciously came across Inception was as a poster in my then teenage cousins bedroom, and I seriously question if that would have been there, was it not at the surface an action movie. And that, for me, is the greatness of the movie.

Expand full comment
J Hardy Carroll's avatar

The Nolan brothers smoke an awful lot of weed. Tenet is a case in point, a point already made by Inception, a nonsensical pile o' style that doesn't hold up on the second viewing. Yes, Leo and Tom are handsome, and yes the synth-enhanced visual effects were stunning on the big screen, but there's no story here, no characters, no tension at all. All the gunplay and car stunts layer into a numbing chaos that forces me to tune out, and once I do there's nothing there.

I felt the same way about The Matrix. It was part of a spate of movies that posited all humanity was merely a simulation (The Truman Show was another) and that we were cogs in the machine. The whole "Chosen One" trope is weak storytelling, even in a masterpiece such as Dune, and in the Matrix it's positively dreadful. "I know kung fu" is the low point of some fairly odious dialog, and there's a ton of that.

No, the movie to watch is Alex Proyas's Dark City, which came out a year before The Matrix but died at the box office. Same general premise, and also with stunning special effects, but at its center are real characters struggling to find out what the hell is going on. It's creepy, it's weird, and it says interesting things about memory and free will. I consider it as far superior to either movie discussed in this post.

Watch it yourself and see if you agree. Personally, I think it's a 90s masterpiece.

Expand full comment
16 more comments...

No posts