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If it’s clever, it must be good! But that’s not always true. (a) When I say “needlessly clever,” my undergraduate students usually rail against me. Extremely clever, and much more complex than “Inception.”īut while there are a lot of things to love about “Inception,” there were also quite a few moments when the filmmakers were either (a) needlessly clever, or (b) deliberately and annoyingly vague. “House of Leaves,” as a sidenote, utilizes a first-person narrator (Sphere One) who finds a literary analysis manuscript written by a blind man (Sphere Two) which focuses upon a film created by a man who moves into a haunted house (Sphere Three) and the subsequent investigations (hundreds of them) into the true circumstances of the haunting. It’s a great concept, and the cuts between various levels of narration are often seamless, easy to understand, and add to the overall drama.
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“Inception,” in a way, reminds me of a poor man’s version of Mark Danielewski’s “House of Leaves.” There are several spheres of narration here: the waking world, the dream world into which the characters descend, and then level after level of different dream worlds within the initial dream world, each of which progresses in real time (but occurs at a speed of 1/12 the waking world above it, meaning that you can spend a full hour in a dream but will have only aged by five minutes…got that?). The characters were all great, unique, and it was the rare action film where the plot was dictated by specific character personalities and decisions (in other words, I could drop any human characters into “Transformers,” and nothing would change…but if I changed the characters at the core of “Inception,” the entire plot changes).
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Yes, it was a very smart movie, and Christopher Nolan certainly understands how to structure an action-adventure narrative, how to structure a mystery, and how to sustain a visually interesting world. And for a summer action film, I thought it was great. A very long lead-in, right? What did I actually think of “Inception,” with all of these different ideas swirling in my head?
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Is that a good thing? Like, I loved the movie so much that I want to keep watching it until I’m sick of it (the “Anchorman” syndrome)? Or, maybe there was some crazy twist that the filmmakers pulled off, which makes me curious as to how they were able to do it (see “The Sixth Sense” or “The Usual Suspects”)? Or, perhaps, I didn’t understand what the hell I was watching, and so I’ve got to see it again to try to figure it out (for me, this happened with “Syriana”)? If the movie is great, then “you’ll want to see it again!” is a compliment, right? But if the movie is convoluted or confusing, then “you’ll want to see it again!” is a bad, bad thing a movie steeped in obscurity, for the sole purpose of making us think we’ve watched something smart, just so we’ll “talk about it” and then “see it again?” Smart marketing concept, but bad movie. Why? For emphasis? Ever heard of italics?)īut I’m often skeptical when I hear that a movie will make me want to see it again. (One critic’s negative review, however, stated that this movie “was trying to be ‘too’ smart,” a review I immediately discounted because she quoted the word “too.” Um.
“Inception” has also received a pretty favorable response from the movie critic community, and as I was scanning the reviews, I remember several of them mentioning that this was destined to be the most “talked-about” movie of the summer, and that people were going to immediately want to see it again, etc. “Toy Story 3,” for instance, has a 99% fresh rating on, which means that there were just 1-2 critics who gave it negative reviews (full disclosure: I haven’t seen it…but if you’re the only one in the world who doesn’t like a film, doesn’t that say more about you than it does about the movie?). I always think it’s fun to try to understand why certain critics would make certain comments in their reviews.
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