09-14-2020, 06:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-14-2020, 06:22 PM by Gaith. Edited 3 times in total.)
Inception (2010) (US Amazon Prime)
![[Image: 7842506-C1fy9.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/7Z8YXbYG/7842506-C1fy9.jpg)
About 2/3rds of the way through my second-ever viewing (and the first not on a measly laptop screen), I wondered, Was I wrong about this? Is it, in fact, a great flick? By the end, however, I was back to Nah, it's fine. The multi-dream level heist montage is thrilling, but the emotional climax, where Dom achieves closure by saying goodbye to his own warped mental specter of his late wife, lands with a thud of "Who cares?" Dom isn't a likable protagonist, the audience is never shown the real Mal at her best, and the goal of sabotaging one corporation so another corporation can takes its place lacks any kind of rooting interest, so once the heist is completed, the rest just falls flat.
The question of whether Dom is still dreaming or not at the end, moreover, is laughable, in that there's no reason whatsoever to think he might be - because someone would have to be running a dream simulation on him, and to what end? Sure, he's doubtless learned sensitive information as a thought extractor, but there's no hint that tricking him into thinking he's reuniting with his kids will get him to divulge anything.
I respect Nolan's desire to tell a precise, logical story about directed dreams that doubles as a metaphor for filmmaking, and the twist that Dom caused his wife's suicide by planting a depressive disorder in her mind is a haunting one. But for this story to have really worked, he should have been much more dissolute, and the last act should have been a lot weirder.
Grade: B
... Hey, look, it's Rosa "Battle Angel" Salazar!
About 2/3rds of the way through my second-ever viewing (and the first not on a measly laptop screen), I wondered, Was I wrong about this? Is it, in fact, a great flick? By the end, however, I was back to Nah, it's fine. The multi-dream level heist montage is thrilling, but the emotional climax, where Dom achieves closure by saying goodbye to his own warped mental specter of his late wife, lands with a thud of "Who cares?" Dom isn't a likable protagonist, the audience is never shown the real Mal at her best, and the goal of sabotaging one corporation so another corporation can takes its place lacks any kind of rooting interest, so once the heist is completed, the rest just falls flat.
The question of whether Dom is still dreaming or not at the end, moreover, is laughable, in that there's no reason whatsoever to think he might be - because someone would have to be running a dream simulation on him, and to what end? Sure, he's doubtless learned sensitive information as a thought extractor, but there's no hint that tricking him into thinking he's reuniting with his kids will get him to divulge anything.
I respect Nolan's desire to tell a precise, logical story about directed dreams that doubles as a metaphor for filmmaking, and the twist that Dom caused his wife's suicide by planting a depressive disorder in her mind is a haunting one. But for this story to have really worked, he should have been much more dissolute, and the last act should have been a lot weirder.
Grade: B
... Hey, look, it's Rosa "Battle Angel" Salazar!
![[+]](https://forums.fanedit.org/images/focus/collapse_collapsed.png)