Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

[zedz]

Yeah, if you have experience of lucid dreaming, you know there are things you can and can't do, and part of the fun is figuring out ways to circumvent the 'rules' so you can do what you want (without waking up).

Despite what I said above, I think it's great (and depressingly rare) that a Hollywood fantasy actually does have rules, and strives to adhere to them without blatant cheating, even if the rules themselves are arbitrary or flimsy.

[domino harvey]

Inception in Real-Time (obv don't watch if you haven't seen the film)

[manicsounds]

In a way, bravo to Warner Brothers who didn't even put a synopsis on the back cover, and no spoilers. Very unusual.

[Sloper]

I very much expected not to like this film, but actually I loved every minute of it. I've only had a fairly quick read through the thread - some great discussion here - so won't engage in detail with what's been said already until I've seen the film a second time. Anyway, here are some long-winded initial thoughts:

SpoilerShow

First of all, Zimmer's score was not nearly as bad as I had feared, in fact parts of it were quite effective. It certainly didn't ruin the film, although at times - especially the marvellous Paris re-structuring sequence - it was noisy when it should have been quiet, and overall I still felt Julyan would have given the film the emotional resonance it so desperately lacks. Mfunk (I think it was him...?) is certainly right about the video game aesthetic, but Zimmer's repetitive, slightly soporific (and not in a good way!) score bears some of the blame for that. I still think Zimmer is fatally afraid to accompany the film, let alone allow it to speak for itself, preferring instead to beat it and beat it with that endless booming juddering noise. Still, it's a much, much better score than the ones he did for the Batman films; well, it's a much better film too.

One comment on the Youtube 'music comparison' video says that the Piaf-theme was not composed by Zimmer - but anyway, it is an absolutely brilliant touch. As usual I watched to the end of the credits, and there's a chilling reprise of the Piaf song, melting back into the film score at the end. I haven't seen La Vie en Rose (heard that Cotillard was the only good thing about it), but the casting of Cotillard in conjunction with the use of that song is inspired. Far from being a cheesy in-joke, it enhanced Mal's role in the film. The lyrics of 'Je ne regrette rien' are, obviously, highly relevant to Cobb's emotional state: they speak of coming to terms with, and indeed burning, the troubled memories of the past, in order to enjoy life in the present and future. It is Cobb's insistent regrets, connected to Mal, that threaten to trap him in a hell made out of insubstantial, disintegrating memories. It is significant that the song signals the end to a dream and the return to reality, and the Piaf/Cotillard/Mal connection foreshadows the way that Cobb ultimately escapes from the dream-Mal by realising that she bears no stable relation to the real Mal. To put it in the most cheesy and unsubtle terms, it's as if Piaf's voice is the 'good angel' version of Mal, calling Cobb back to his real life.

The cast is uniformly excellent, Ellen Page included, but I have to say Cotillard's performance, and the character she played, were by far the best things in the film. She only appears for a few minutes in total, but her intensity makes her a truly terrifying presence. For all the moaning about this 'not being like a real dream' (we have Vampyr, Seconds and Inland Empire for that, surely?), the dream-Mal was, I thought, a very authentic nightmare, especially when she runs up and stabs Page at the end of the re-structuring scene. Having had numerous dreams in which my late grandmother hurtles, screeching, down a dark corridor in order to destroy me, I found Mal all the more chilling because she was a projection from within Cobb's unconscious, a representation of some dark horror within the self rather than an easily objectified and defeated 'other'. And she has fantastic eyes. I've never seen such eyes. Amazing.

Speaking of the Paris re-structuring sequence, what I loved so much about that was how seamlessly and unassumingly the special effects were incorporated with what looked like location work. It was all the more impressive for not taking the techno-fetishising too far. That goes for the whole film, actually - so refreshing to see an action movie in which the budget really serves the story and the themes, rather than just being thrown up there on the screen for the hell of it.

And so refreshing to feel actual, agonising suspense during an action movie, and to be genuinely desperate to know what happens next. I like the comments early in this thread (from Mr. Sausage I think) about the way the film plays with cinematic conventions, such as intercutting and slow-motion, and the general tendency in action movies to distort real time for the purposes of building suspense. Inception uses these techniques in an entirely conventional manner but in a stunningly original and thought-provoking context, which for me made up for any deficiencies in Nolan's direction of the action scenes. In a way, you could see those four levels of the dream as sending up different kinds of action sequence: the car chase, the hand-to-hand combat scene, the Bond-style silliness with snowmobiles and grenades, and the Roland Emmerich-style disaster movie. The suspense in these scenes has nothing to do with the manifest dream content, and everything to do with the latent dream content, and the film did a great job of making those latent stakes high enough that we (or at least I) cared tremendously about the outcome of these various chases, fist fights and so on.

As always, Nolan's exploration of the human condition works more on an intellectual than an emotional level, but I'm not sure I agree with zedz that the Murphy/Postlethwaite and DiCaprio/Cotillard scenes came off as mere soap opera. The relationships between these characters weren't fleshed out, nor believable exactly, but these are four really good actors, and I was about as moved by both scenes as I think I was supposed to be.

The important thing in that deathbed scene is not its emotional impact, but the manner in which it accomplishes the 'inception', which is fascinating and very clever: notice that what clinches it for Murphy is the childhood toy in the lower compartment of the safe, beneath the will, and that by the time he looks back from the toy to his father, the latter is dead. Was this a toy he made for his father, and has the father kept it all this time (unlike the real father ignoring the photograph) showing how much he values the memory? Or is it something less specific and more primal than that, a simple gift from father to son that caters to the latter's deepest infantile needs?

In any case, the point is that the real inception comes from Murphy's own unconscious. As the doctor says in Macbeth, in matters of the mind and spirit 'the patient must minister to himself', a central idea in Freud's own theories. Nolan, of course, gives the idea a sinister twist by making the self-healing process the result of outside manipulation, highlighting the fact that this character's relationship with his father no longer bears any relation to reality, but is entirely a construction of the mind, a staged, illusory reconciliation. In a way, this is quite comforting, especially to those of us with daddy issues: no matter how horrendous the impact of those parental abuses might be, you can still lie to yourself to get through the days. Which, as someone commented earlier in the thread, was the theme of Memento; there's probably a thesis to be written on how this theme runs through all of Nolan's work. (There was also another intertextual cinematic reference here, to Postlethwaite's turn as the complicated dad in In the Name of the Father, in which the father/son relationship was in some ways similar to the one depicted in Inception.) And of course it raises the possibility that Cobb is also lying to himself, that his reunion with the children is a self-imposed delusion...

As for the final shot, I definitely agree with whoever it was (Domino?) who suggested this was an inception inflicted upon the audience. It invites us to toy with the idea, not so much that Cobb's return home is a dream, as that all of life is, or may be, a dream; and that the film, and films in general, are like a dream. I agree that the totem thing doesn't entirely make sense when you stop and think about it, but it's such an interesting plot device, and becomes such an ambiguous and manipulated symbol, that I could forgive any implausibilities here. At first, that last shot made me groan a little - like the ending of The Departed, it seemed like a smart-arse gesture which cheapened what had gone before - but actually it just reinforces the common ground between this film and The Prestige, which was also, I think, comparing its main subject (magic) with the process of film-making, or film-watching. (And of course Memento reflected the protagonist's mindset in its own construction, and forced the viewer to enter into that mindset. Insomnia certainly does a great job of evoking Dormer's sleeplessness, and his guilt (with the incessant flashbacks, first to Dormer's own crime, then to the killer's), though I don't think it's commenting on filmic conventions as such; I just wanted to mention it because I still think it's Nolan's best film...)

Like those other films (always excepting the Batmen), this one was so absorbing and thought-provoking that it left me feeling as if I were still inhabiting the world it had conjured up, still looking askance at the world around me as though it might be a dream (within a dream) - so as long as the film has this effect on the viewer, it's the perfect ending. Otherwise it's a bit crap. In a way, it's good that the film shies away from excessively serious profundity at the end. As usual with Nolan, the weakest moments are those where the 'deep' themes are spelled out and underlined with great solemnity. This is a thinking person's action film, no doubt - I can't remember the last time a film demanded so much from my brain - but I don't think the writing is always good enough to support the weight of the ideas.

I also just wanted to say how much I like Cillian Murphy. He should get more (and more interesting) work.

[domino harvey]

I also just wanted to say how much I like Cillian Murphy. He should get more (and more interesting) work.

He's great in Peacock, which got unceremoniously dumped straight to DVD earlier this year

[oldsheperd]

I guess this hasn't gotten much love from Awards season so far. Admittedly I haven't seen that much stuff for the year 2010 but I find it very engaging. You have to be actively thinking about the film while watching it the whole time.

[flyonthewall2983]

Nolan won't get any recognition until he does the story about the stuttering mountain climber who starts a website.

[Fiery Angel]

You have to be actively thinking about the film while watching it the whole time.

Hmm...never thought of doing that...I should give that a whirl with Antonioni, Bunuel, Bergman, Godard, etc.

[oldsheperd]

You have to be actively thinking about the film while watching it the whole time.

Hmm...never thought of doing that...I should give that a whirl with Antonioni, Bunuel, Bergman, Godard, etc.

HAHAHAHA! ugh.

[zitherstrings]

I guess this hasn't gotten much love from Awards season so far. Admittedly I haven't seen that much stuff for the year 2010 but I find it very engaging. You have to be actively thinking about the film while watching it the whole time.

Actually this is not true. It has 4 Golden Globe nominations (none for Dark Knight), even for screenplay (just 1 category there). Also many critics awards or nominations.

[colinr0380]

Spoilers:

I've finally sat down to watch Inception and enjoyed it very much. I’ll phrase my post to tie in with some previous posts. In short I think I mostly agree with knives on his reaction to the film, but also with zedz that if you combine World On A Wire with Demonlover, you pretty much get the template for this film (Ellen Page could be playing the Chloe Sevigny character from that film). I'm also not a huge fan of the Zimmer score, which feels as if it falls in the trap of the Matrix sequels by running constantly without any consideration for the rhythm of scenes it is playing over, but then the 'slowed down Piaf' idea helps to counter that thought during the climax(es).

I agree with domino’s first post that there is a very big element of Solaris in the film (though I also got shades of The Fountain from the Di Caprio/Cotillard relationship, as well as huge elements of the philosophical ideas of The Matrix, especially the motif of chats with significant figures in kitchens, though handled far less clunkily than in the sequels to that film), though strangely I didn’t just get that from the DiCaprio/Cotillard relationship but also the one between DiCaprio and Caine, as well as from Cillian Murphy and Pete Postlethwaite, as if that idea was split between all of these characters. I was also left feeling that the film had a lot in common with Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven, along with heist films, in the sense that all of the members of the team come to embody not just particular skills but also different temperments.

If we take the ending to mean that the ‘top level’ of the film is still a reality that DiCaprio’s character created for himself (which I think is shown not just at the end but in the early Mombasa chase which, like Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon, is just a higher resolution, more life-like level of the game, with a more lifelike simulation of blood and pain when you are shot. The early section of ‘putting the gang together’ is sort of a generic blockbuster film version of the ‘real world’ with certain telling details of streets turning into mazes and jumps between globe-trotting locations suggestive of a hyper-real existence. And then there’s that scene of Cotillard’s suicide where the ledge and room opposite from which she jumps seems like a mirror image of the room DiCaprio is in, as if her character is a mirror image segment of his psyche), then it becomes even more a situation where the other characters are elements of his psyche jostling around for position from the most mercenary (even the father issues with Caine are co-opted in the Murphy/Postlethwaite section) and businesslike to those aspects just performing their role in the scheme, to those trying to snap him out of it.

It is interesting that Watanabe's character is immediately incapacitated, suggesting that Cotillard does not need to ‘infect’ the dreams, but that Murphy’s dreams are totally created by DiCaprio, as Murphy’s character is one more element of DiCaprio’s psyche himself rather than just a pawn in the scheme. The film is about the complexity of coming to terms with an idea - a literalisation of someone changing their own mind. This is most explicit with Murphy’s character but really it is sort of a dry run-version of what DiCaprio’s character is doing. Eventually Cobb ‘infects’ the businessman Saito with the same destructive idea that he gave to Mal, maybe signifying his wish to break away from that segment of his psyche. He needs to pull Saito out of limbo (both for filmic/psyche salving ‘heroic’ reasons, practical reasons for needing Saito to make the call to allow Cobb back into the country, and also since Saito is also another element of his own psyche that cannot be abandoned)

I note that there are some comments about the passivity of some of the characters, that even when they realise their lives are in danger they do not really react properly to that threat. I think this fits in with all the characters being elements of DiCaprio, therefore they may have a flicker of concern but nothing major (DiCaprio, as the overarching architect of the entire situation, is of course more troubled with the Cotillard situation than gunmen). Most of the team are also regulars in his jobs – parts of his psyche that he is most familiar with using, so they mostly display that extra familiarity in their actions. Page is the exception, in that she is the symbol of the new idea (ironically provided by DiCaprio’s father to him, much as Postlethwaite ‘gifts’ Murphy his own ‘new idea’) that is being adding into a familiar heist scenario – her character is the one who explores DiCaprio, pushing her way into his innermost guilt and re-exposing it to him, and is the one who accompanies him into places he cannot show to the rest of the team, in order to prevent him from being lost.

I like the idea that the ending is a happy, neat one in terms of the heist narrative that we have been following being pulled off successfully and against the odds (I amused myself by hoping that maybe someone should try the same kind of inception thing with Rupert Murdoch’s son sometime!), but I also don’t think that we are meant to see the revelation that this is another layer of dreaming as anything particularly terrible. DiCaprio has solved the problems facing him in this layer of consciousness, everything has been put into its optimal place, he has come to terms with his relationship with Cotillard and returned to his children. It might be as a single father, but at least he can now look them in the face again without guilt. He has restructured his psyche to reach this happy ending.

The question comes of whether this dreaming state ever ends, or does the person dreaming stay in a kind of perpetual ‘coma’ state? If you are outside of limbo and just in a dream will you age normally in this ‘dream world’? The flashback to Cobb and Mal as an elderly couple suggests this could be the case. Therefore will a death due to just natural aging in that plane of existence provide the ‘kick’ into a further layer of existence? If it does, that suggests that suicide is not really essential to moving between the layers – DiCaprio can enjoy his time in the layer of reality that we see him in with the possibility of maybe a meeting with Cotillard again in the ‘real’ reality after his death there. He takes a much slower route upwards through the layers while Cotillard cannot wait – he either stalls at too low a level of reality (and there is that sense of the layers of dreams getting more and more detailed and ‘realistic’ as you move upwards through them, that it could be easy to imagine being fooled, or wanting maybe to stay in a layer that you could still have an influence over in some ways, in comparison to reality) while Cotillard is intent on moving onward and upward; or Cotillard is too eager and jumps one layer too far, into oblivion.

So while the ending of the film is happy on face value, it is also not exactly exposed as ‘unhappy’ by the final idea that this is still all a dream. I’m optimistic that Di Caprio is hopefully just going to take longer to wake up than Cotillard did – so you might say we are going to get two happy endings (as long as Cotillard hasn’t killed herself in the layer above in the meantime)! But even if that's not the case, at least Cobb has made the best of what he had.

It is a very existential and philosophical film in that sense – human existence is bounded by limbo on one end and oblivion on the other, with the vague promise of there being something beyond those layers, someone waiting for you or some kind of higher knowledge that will explain the circumstances of your previous existence. Do you commit suicide to get to ‘the next level’ faster, because your existence at this point is obviously a fake one (something which to me raises ideas of those cults making suicide pacts because they believe their current world is a sham)? Or do you come to terms with yourself at each level of dreaming, accept your existence at this point and try to build a life you find there into the best form it can be (which in itself is important in keeping your mind from falling apart under the reality/illusion strain)? AWA comments earlier in the thread on the lack of ‘God’ in this film, but I think those questions of afterlife are running through the film, if not as heavily telegraphed as in, say, the Matrix.

This is also why it is important to see the way that Page jolts her way through the ‘kicks’ near the end of the film – it might be a quick way to move through the layers to the correct layer, but it is also like dying multiple times. She becomes aware a crucial moment before the next death jolts her upwards again. (I was left thinking that this whole section of dreams within dreams has a similar Chinese box structure to Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, where you get pulled away from a story to go to the next one and then eventually at a crucial moment, again turning on an attempt at transcendent suicide, you get four climaxes at once).

I think my favourite thing about Nolan’s films is that you come away from them thinking ‘wow, that was a complex experience’ and then instead of feeling that you have understood it after a few hours of thinking about it, just thinking more about the film unpacks a huge range of extra implications that resonate not just with a section of the narrative (such as the ending or a big twist) but through the entire fabric of the rest of the film with each new idea. It’s a nice experience to have with a film, one I can only really remember having recently with Memento.

[colinr0380]

I haven't seen Following, but I understand that one of its main characters is a thief named Cobb. Can anyone make some relations between that film's character and Inception's?

for FollowingShow

Well, in Following Cobb spins a huge web of lies and deception around the naive main character who he is apparently teaching the ropes to, getting him inextricably bound up noir-style as the fall guy in a murder plot.

[Galen Young]

...if you combine World On A Wire with Demonlover, you pretty much get the template for this film.

Another possible template for the story may have come from the episode "A, B & C" of The Prisoner, where Number Six's dreams are manipulated in a technological way to get at his secrets. High tech machinery/drugs/putting words in people's mouths (inception?) to manipulate the dream/realizing you are being manipulated inside a dream. The scene on the train where Saito notices a needle mark on his wrist appears to be almost a homage to similar shots with Number Six from this episode. (I love the shot in the final dream/party scene where McGoohan straightens a mirror hanging sideways on the wall!)

Nolan was also at one time in talks to direct The Prisoner remake, so he must have been familiar with it.

[Sloper]

I hadn't thought of the Prisoner connection, but of course you're right (I like that mirror shot as well). It's also kind of reminiscent of the Western-style episode 'Living in Harmony', in which death ultimately serves to awaken the dreamer. Well, it's not literally a dream but the premise is the same.

[talker]

I agree with zedz. The centerpiece of the film is obviously the fantasy, and the work of the actors is to assume their places within it. The only way the film works is by adhering to these rules, and the actors work wonderfully with such an intangible plot. If they didn't, the ending would have fallen absolutely flat. This could have gone the way of another failed Shyamalan flick, not that I expected it to.
_______________________________________

dad jokes

[colinr0380]

Following zedz's comment on the problematic way that the dreams are structured more like levels of a videogame, which I'd agree is perhaps the biggest philosophical issue with the film (though I do think it is amusing that if the computer games industry collapsed all of the people working in it could move across to being employed to design dream levels for shadowy government organisations with apparently only a minimal amount of re-training needed!), the following quote from Nolan about an Inception video game probably won't come as a surprise.

[hearthesilence]

Favorite description of Inception:

Yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda BRAAAAAHHHHHM! Cut to new location. Yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda BRAAAAAHHHHHM!" The "BRAAAAAAAHHHHM" being that mallet-to-the-medulla score, which some joker cleverly reduced to its essence: a big red button.

[What A Disgrace]

Words fail me.

[hearthesilence]

Words fail me.

HA!

[Saturnome]

I have the graphic novel where it's included as a bonus (The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, it's really great, full of obscure historical details and things you thought you'd never see in a Disney comic book, like the death of Scrooge's parents or a full three pages parody of Citizen Kane!) and in the making of pages, the author mentions that the idea was suggested to him by someone who had seen a film called The Cell. I doubt the two have much in common though.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Awesome poster

[warren oates]

And yes, I do understand that the complex nature of the plot would require at least some of the plot to be explained through dialogue. But, Nolan could have needed to found a way to communicate the ideas in a more visual manner, or simplify the general plot structure to give way to a more visceral experience.

Do you not get that this is essentially a heist/caper film, as Nolan has stated many times over, a genre that's practically defined by the complexity of its characters' plotting? And that either not understanding, accepting or not liking that is the root of nearly all of your problems with the film? Heist films are notoriously top heavy with scenes of planning, training and verbal exposition. What about Soderbergh's Ocean's films -- too much talky exposition for you too?

Here's an interesting video from Rob Ager on how Inception could have been better. I don't entirely agree with everything he says, but he poses some interesting points.

I can't believe I actually watched all of that two-part bloviation but, yeah, so now you'll definitely have to elaborate. Interesting how and what exactly do you agree with?*

He leads with: "The dreams aren't dreamy enough." Heard that before, like, a jillion times from every dissenting corner of the Internet, most notably from critic Jim Emerson. Okay, but given the necessary complexity of what Nolan's trying to do with his heist/caper scenario, how could you begin to introduce a substantial number of wildcard surreal dream elements without spending even more time endlessly explicating what it is they are supposed to mean?

Let's just take up a few of the examples your man Rob throws down: In A Nightmare on Elm Street the sleep/waking confusion is interesting to watch, but it's based on one simple rule the audience gets in the first scene -- you die in your dream and you'll be dead in real life. Likewise with some of the other films he cites like Brainscan and Brainstorm.

A few other examples he cites where establishing the rules seems to matter less than the exploration of the world: Videodrome is a mystery story about a guy who's intent on finding out what the hallucinatory imagery of this weird channel entails. The structure, plot and theme of the story is centered on allowing him to explore and experience the strange imagery of that secret world. The Matrix is basically a superhero origin story, about one guy exploring his newfound powers in a strange world. Rob Ager gets even further afield when he starts citing out-and-out fantasy works like The Wizard of Oz or the images of Salvador Dali. So I guess Inception should be more like Spellbound? You know, the Hitchcock film wherein the entirety of the narrative is spent decoding one short Dali-designed dream sequence in endless streams of verbal exposition. (And I'm not even going to go their with his ludicrous sketches of alternative "concept art.")

It takes that YouTuber more than 25 minutes to propose two ideas worth considering, only one of which could have impacted Nolan's version of the film. And that's simply that it would have been cool to see at least one or two more high-stakes action sequences with some sort of dream physics, like the hotel fight. Okay, I'll agree with that. The other decent idea, though, is that the film instead of being a heist/caper story centered on the team ought to be a paranoid thriller about (and from the point of view of) their mark as he, the protagonist, struggles to recognize his predicament and break out of the dream world. Okay, that's cool to imagine, but that's also an entirely different film.

Anyway, I'm almost glad I waited until I wrote most of that to discover that Rob Ager seems like kind of a crackpot, part of the Room 237 crowd of self-styled Internet Kubrick theorists. For him, The Shining is, among other things, apparently some kind of allegory about the gold standard.

I don't even love Inception or Nolan all that much. I'm just kind of with DarkImbecile and domino, tired of hearing boring broadsides against his work that seem mostly concerned with the fact that it's too popular with the wrong people.

*(Watch out for domino, though, as things can get dicey around here quick when we take that dreaded turn into the dreamy world of the hypothetical.)

[colinr0380]

Perhaps the biggest missed linkage in the video would be of some of the similarities between Inception and World On A Wire and the US remake of the same called The Thirteenth Floor, both of which feature layers upon layers of co-existing 'realities'.

I'd agree with Warren Oates on this one: I don't buy the video's arguments about Inception. If one of the main points is that the plot is too exposition heavy and then it takes half an hour to describe what are felt to be the necessary elements of the plot anyway, isn't that moving towards its own Inception-style nested reality thing in itself?! Of explanations running on top of explanations (and is Inception itself criticising various character's overconfident explanation of the 'rules of the universe' as a way to obscure their own insecurities and truths that they don't want to confront by seeming confident that they have every aspect worked out?). Is criticism itself the act of seeding in an audience's mind (occasionally sometimes subversive!) ideas about the different meanings that may be contained beneath the superfically, straightforwardly calm and untroubled surface of a film?

I do also feel that the supposed 'lack of imagination' in the different levels of reality is a kind of comment on different eras of action movie tropes in themselves, albeit literally turned on its head in in the hotel corridor sequence (the Matrix-esque reality bending section), with each kind of action sequence tied into a different character's individual idiosyncratic psychologies. And I love that Marion Cotillard's character regularly turns up to swerve events into a tragic melodrama! It is a film that is constantly using locations and genres (even bringing the baggage of actor's personas and previous roles, and the history of cinema to bear - Ellen Page's Paris sequence seems like a twist on the madcap chase sequence of Zazie dans le Metro as much as Page's own tomboy no-nonsense persona) to suggest the unreality of an entirely created fictional work. Of the idea that you can live your whole life within a created artefact, or at least feel as if you have had a lifetime's worth of experiences within it, but then emerge only a couple of hours later and are faced with starting from scratch again in a new world. Whether that's the waking world, the world outside of the movie theatre, or a wholly new location to start off in afresh after stepping out of your airplane.

Anyway I don't really have too much of an opinion on Nolan's work as a whole yet, apart from a general feeling of positivity towards it. I love Following and Memento and enjoyed the Batman films, especially for the way that they smuggle large concepts into blockbuster fare, as does Inception. I've not yet caught up with The Prestige. Those films might not be entirely flawless (though I'd like to live in a world in which Inception was considered the minimum 'base level' that every big blockbuster action film should be reaching), but in comparison to many other empty-headed Summer movies they're at least trying to do something.

If I had any concern, I guess it would be that there could be a danger that Nolan is going to become trapped (calcified?) into making a form of blockbuster cinema in which the bombastic spectacle entirely takes over from ideas (I'm sure some would suggest that has already happened!), and that is going to be the struggle he is probably going to be facing as a filmmaker going forward. It can sometimes seem as if extraordinary success and complete unquestioning adulation can be potentially as creatively limiting as a dismal box office failure.

I would suggest however that the biggest, and perhaps most telling, misstep in Nolan's filmography was the remake of Insomnia. That took an impressively dark and complicated original film and quite rigorously sanded all of the rough edges off in the retelling. Maybe that was the result of it being Nolan's first 'studio' film and needing to prove he could handle that kind of major star vehicle assignment. It is also the only film in his filmography that he didn't write or co-write. Whatever the possible reasons, the result felt like a slick, untroubling procedural thriller with no identity of its own. For better or worse it is difficult to say that about any of the films which followed, even the Batman ones, which makes me presume that Nolan learnt his lesson from Insomnia (or was able to prove his skills to the satisfaction of the Studio) to then return to having a hand in adding his own ideas into a film, even when adapting pre-existing works, in order to add that individual spark to a project.

[Lighthouse]

If you're intent on rewatching Inception, perhaps do so with a stopwatch so you can see that the "endless" expository dialog y'all won't stop bitching about amounts to far less screentime than claimed

I don't need a stopwatch to feel its penetrative impact.

Btw how do you guys interpret the ending? Is he caught (that's what I think) or is the spinning top eventually shortly stumbling. Or is there a more astute interpretation?

[knives]

I kind of don't think it matters and that's sort of the joke of the film. Whether that's a negative ala Brazil or a positive I don't know, but the film seems to think that reality only is what you make of it so if it is a dream of not doesn't matter.