Friday 6 August 2010

Inception [IMAX]


Just like 'Inception' only bigger.
Does IMAX make this better?
No. It makes it bigger, read carefully.

3 comments:

  1. OK, Inception.

    I wasn't going to comment on this, fearing being flamed from all sides by Nolan acolytes, but what the hell, it's just my opinion.

    Things that annoyed me about this film: Unmemorable, clunky dialogue and general lack of wit and charisma all round. Zero character development. One-dimensional ciphers of characters I couldn't give a flying fig about: Dicaprio - leaden, humourless, unsympathetic. Page - wooden, uncharismatic. Gordon-Levitt - smug, self-satisfied (can there be a more slappable face in cinema right now? What an unbelievable git). The self-conscious epic-ness of it all, the multi-layered pyrotechnics belying a hollow core - like a massive Russian Doll of a film.

    About halfway through, I realized I gave less than a shit about any of the characters or what was happening to them. Dreams within dreams within dreams providing nothing more than a fancy parallax scrolling backdrop for a ton of pointless action scenes in which I had no emotional or intellectual investment.

    The ending - yawningly predictable.

    This was a film I did not enjoy. Sorry.

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  2. We aren't 12 year olds or virgins, we don't flame. All I personally do (on the whole) is post my opinion of everything Al's seen that I have.

    I agree in principle with what you're saying about the characters, except DiCaprio. His is a rounded, motivated, human character and as the film's essentially a Bond heist movie caring about Bond's motivations is what's key to connecting.

    I've found a lot of irritating reviews ripping Inception for being pretentious. Never does it pretend to be anything other than an entertaining action heist movie in the globe trotting vein of the Bond franchise and that's what it is, so there is no pretention. As a challenging film about the nature of dreams and reality it's not very good; as a Bond movie it's awesome!

    I actually really liked the small, intimate end with Murphy and Postlethwaite. Despite all the bombast the "how do they do it" of the heist was a simple scene and a couple of lines of dialogue. Brilliant.

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  3. Yeah, 'flamed' was an exaggeration :-) Inflammatory language there sorry. Anyway, on the basis of what I've seen to date, I just don't think I'm a great fan of Nolan's work. His films generally leave me cold.

    I do get what you're saying about the fact that Inception should be viewed as an action/heist movie, not as a philosophical film - fair point. Probably half the reason I didn't enjoy it was that I was expecting the latter. But I also need more emotional attachment to the characters, even from an action movie, to make me care about the action.

    That's odd... I just had a really weird feeling of deja vu as I was typing that line. But typing THAT line dispelled it.

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