LibriumArcana.Games

hey guys holy shit i think inception is the awesomest film ever

Spill.com did a review:

From that, I'll wait to rent it. Then again, I don't really give a shit about seeing a movie in the theater anymore.

your loss if you decide to wait

the action sequences alone are worth the price of admission

rhoenix wrote:Spill.com did a review:

From that, I'll wait to rent it. Then again, I don't really give a shit about seeing a movie in the theater anymore.

They gave it a full price as the aggregate review dude. It's worth it.

It's a great flick.

Alright so I saw the movie. And here's my two cents.

The driving force of this movie is Leo's character and his simple desire to go home and see his kids. It's a good motivation, simple and outlined early in the movie. Of course there are complications.

The movie has a multi-layered plot and about huh 4 characters (the others aren't really looked into). We got Leo, the driver of the plot. We got Saito the Japanese businessman who started all of this and is offering both reward and complications. We got the girl whose there to be a voice of reason and have things explained to her. Lastly we got the businessmen who is the target and oddly enough, a good chunk of the movie is about him. The 4 characters are well done and the supporting staff is interesting and competent(the forger is actually my favorite... Grenade Launcher for the win!). The plot depends on the sheer unreality of the dream state and it's very odd physics (it's even odder to see dreams have physics but whatever) and is driven by the Leos and the Businessman psychology and their personal issues which is usually a pretty good choice for driving a plot. This isn't an epic scope, it's an intensely small and personal scope but important at least on that level. If anything this movie doesn't take a break but keeps swinging at you throughout the entire run. I do think the last 4 seconds are frankly unneeded (the last focus on the top guys).

Here's the kicker though. This movie has been out for almost a month now... We're still talking about it at the theater and we can't reach common agreements. That's a hell of a job.

I give this movie an A. I believe that's the first A I've given so congrats to Leo and Nolan.

I didn't really know what to expect going into this movie. I knew it was about dreams and weird psycho-stuff, that Leo was in it, and that people liked it. I had seen no previews and read no reviews. With these low expectations, it blew me away. The movie was labyrinthine, yet easily followable. It had moments of humor, superb acting, and some of the most inventive action scenes I've ever seen. Just when I think I've seen every variation on a one-on-one fight scene, this movie thought up new ones. The characters were excellent, the directing tight and focused, the writing managed to get enormous explanations across without sounding too infodumpish. I was not expecting anything like it.

I gave it a 9/10, the best movie I've seen all year, in fact, the best I've seen since the Dark Knight. I was always impressed by Christopher Nolan, but now I'm very impressed. This movie is a must-see.

Commentary from the resident person who has crazy dreams all the freaking time:

I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. As you probably guessed they made up pretty much all the stuff about how dreams work and such (like the thing about dreams having sped up time - actually, the amount of time that seems to pass in the dream appears to be approximately the same amount of time that actually happens in real life, though it's hard to measure exactly for obvious reasons). I don't care. It worked for the story. They've got crazy technology and it does that so who cares? The internal logic worked just fine. They had to keep things realistic so Fischer Jr. wouldn't suspect anything, and of course they make themselves into super-elite commando agents in their dreams, because they can. Stuff like that.

Anyone want to indulge in ridiculous hypotheses about what may have happened or what was going on in the movie? My favorite one, though it's not the one I subscribe to, is that the entire movie except for the very last part where he wakes up on the plane, gets picked up by his dad, and goes home is the dream. There is no extraction process or anything. He dozed off on the plane after looking at his fellow passengers in first class (and noting, 'hey, that guy in front of me is that Fischer kid I heard about') and had the craziest dream where he stole memories from people, but you could also implant memories, and etc etc. His dad probably got a kick out of hearing it on the drive back home ("so I'm a professor at a French university doing black-op brain work?") The movie, at two and a half hours long, would be a really, really long dream, but there have been recorded instances of people being in REM sleep for three hours, and he might've been occasionally very slightly waking up for a moment, long enough to register that the Japanese guy across from him keeps making phone calls and there's a storm outside, before drifting back to sleep. Lucid dreaming is supposed to work well on those edges anyway. And besides, some of us have these sorts of wacky dreams. You tell me that I couldn't end up with something that crazy (albeit not presented as nicely).

Time being sped up relative to the dream may be a function of the machine, rather than natural dreaming. The whole dream-within-a-dream thing is also interesting. Since you need a 'dream' version of the machine in order for it to work. It's really weird.

Needing the machine in the dream might be due to the shared reality aspects of those dreams. One of the usual clues that one is in a dream in real life is the constantly shifting dreamscape. The brain can make up the details just fine but it has trouble holding a lot of them, so if you see something, look away, and look back, it'll probably be different (if anybody reads that dream thread, remember the one where the character in the dream was saying, 'Hey, we're in a dream, so if we all look away from the car and then look back, we'll have a different car'? And he figured out the dream thing because the parking lot was constantly changing slightly? Exactly that.)

I'm trying to remember but I don't think there were any examples of anyone aside from Cobb going under alone, and even then he was only revisiting his memories. Having more than one person means stuff can be more stable, so the building that was there when you left will still be there when you return. That might also mean that they have to obey some sort of physics because they all 'know' how things should work and why they have to use the machines in the dreams to get to the dreams within - extractors know they have to use them and since extractors are always involved, they must use them. And trying to screw with things too much always brings the projections to attack (though if you're already under attack, why not play perspective games?) Might even be harder to break reality as more people get involved.

The multiplying 20x stuff going deeper and deeper in makes absolutely no sense though. It's not a real machine and they're not pumping new drugs in. It's all a dream illusion. But you know what? I don't care.