Personally was not a big fan (hard to say that without sounding snooty) - the movie was mostly entertaining but was kind of pop-corn sci fi masquerading as deep sci fi. Too many plot holes filled with arbitrary mechanics. Edit: it may have been over my head, but I think it is perhaps in a movie's favor to be very clear in its purpose (without necessarily bludgeoning you with it)?
Great link.. This is really interesting. Reminds me of one of the original Matrix Essays about it's symbolism, religious imagery, chance, subtle references to philosophy, etc. There are too many Matrix essays now for me to find it again... sadly.
I've tended towards criticism from the opposite direction (which can also apply to The Matrix). Its philosophical underpinnings have been done by other works of fiction to greater depth, but those stories tend to be impenetrable for most people, much more so than either Inception or The Matrix were. See Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, for example. Or even Nolan's own Memento.
Putting it in a more easily-digestible form is a useful thing to do, which tends to blunt this line of criticism. There are some philosophy professors who really appreciate these movies, because they provided nice reference points that their students already know about, making it much easier to teach certain concepts.
Memento is really the best lens through which to view Inception. The former was the more metaphysically mind-fucky, intellectually and emotionally jarring experience. The latter is the more visually spectacular, but shallower variation on a similar theme.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the idea of Inception a great deal. Part of me really wants to love the movie. But it's hard for me to love it when I've seen Memento do the same thing so much more deftly, with such a smaller budget, given a lot more constraints. Memento is Nolan the filmmaker, and Inception is Nolan the movie director. I enjoy both, and I'm not saying Inception is without its originalities or its merits. But I can't call it a masterpiece; it's disjointed and incoherent in a way that smacks of excess.
I dig your analogy, but I am not sure it's 100% warranted in this case, given that Nolan made both movies. It would be one thing if the Wachowskis both wrote Neuromancer and made The Matrix. But they didn't. They made The Matrix as an action movie that just happened to have some metaphysical underpinnings. They didn't make a philosophical piece that happened to have great action sequences. The movie is pretty clear about where it stands on that spectrum, and most fans who are honest with themselves about why they like the movie will admit they like it for the fight scenes. (As a mental test, replace the computer-simulation plot device with any similar construct: dreams, alternate dimensions, etc. -- and everything else about the movie holds up just fine.)
With Inception, I can't tell where Nolan stands. Is it a thought piece with cool special effects, or a special-effects piece with deep thoughts? As much as we might rush to categorize it as the former, I'm not so sure. Trying to be the latter gets in the way of the former. Nolan tries to have his cake and eat it, too, and he's not entirely successful at either. What results is a beautiful, haunting, provocative, but flawed movie.
Memento was literally a mystery film, and unless you kind of know which context clues to look for you're not really going to figure out what's going on until the end. Inception had a lot of mystery to it in terms of what's real and what's not, but in the end the mysterious portion of it is not really the point of the movie. We're not really presented with the question of what's real as the core mystery to be solved. The fact that Nolan doesn't actually reveal anything at the end aside from the context clues mentioned in the video and in the article posted at the top of the comments and his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study of that man rather than an overarching sci-fi type world. The journey is not really to decide whether or not Cobb is living in the dream world but more so whether he is at peace either way.
I do agree with your general assertion that Momento is a more coherent film and I think that is largely due to the scope and scale of those respective films' budgets.
On one level, yes. But Memento is a philosophical inquiry as much as it's a literal mystery.
"his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study"
I think the same point is generally true about Memento.
[Massive spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen Memento and might be curious]
The "big reveal" in Memento isn't so much the unraveling of the mystery. It's that the mystery itself is a red herring. Leonard chooses his own reality, regardless of whether or not it's the factual truth, and regardless of whether or not he's caught in an infinite loop of his own creation. The same can be said of Cobb's choice at the end of Inception, running out to embrace his kids (and this particular version of reality) without checking on the spinning top. At the conclusion of both films, the protagonists basically surrender to subjectivity. They realize, consciously or not, that it's the only rational choice they have. They can never know the real truth, so they construct or embrace the truth that suits their needs.
This is what I meant when I said that both films are explorations of the same theme. That theme is basically our agency and choice in the subjectivity of our reality. It's about how we create the worlds we inhabit, literally (in the case of Cobb's "architecture" of dreams) or figuratively (in the case of Cobb's and Leonard's choices w/r/t reality).
Just imagine someone makes a new movie where Lenny, Cobb and Neo are merged into one character in/out of a matrix, a dream and a story with a loss of hippocampal LTP.
Great insight! I think my main gripe with the movie is that it kind of gets caught up in its own net of contrived mechanics -- for example, here are some of them:
Equally there are philosophy professors who don't appreciate it. One class that I was a member of was warned that our professor had not seen The Matrix and, given the number of essays that referred to it, never wanted to see it or read about it ever again.
I appreciate that sentiment. The Matrix is certainly interesting, but it's one of those things high schoolers use as a jumping off point and it is very trite and cliche. It's a lot like Ayn Rand actually, it's not that it's objectively worthless, but it's Twinkie pop philosophy that people are exhausted grading papers of.
Its also one of those movies where if the technology actually existed, it would be so valuable, it couldn't be made illegal or made limited. It would instantly be democratized. It would have uses in pretty much every human endeavor and be the ultimate gaming and recreational environment.
Essentially, it would be lucid dreaming and world building on demand. I think the idea that it would be held down by the world's governments is more than a little simplistic. Heck, the world's governments can't keep pot or data dumps from whistle blowers off the streets, let alone something like this.
Truest thing I've read today. I think we continually underestimate how transformative technology is. It moves faster than politics and once there's a positive impact foothold, it's hard to roll it back.
The dangerous time for any tech is when it invokes fear before or at release.
I see the tech/sci-fi part of Inception to be like the "unobtainium" in Avatar. It's merely a plot device to make the story work around it.
It could have been something else, like something similar to Tron or The Matrix, or maybe a magical background, but it needed the "multiplayer, multilevel thoughts" one way or another for the story.
What's wrong with "unobtainium"? The term wasn't invented for the movie, but has been used in engineering since at least the 70's. I thought it was a nice touch.
The reason it sounded stupid in the movie is because it was the name of the actual element that they were mining. The historical use of the word that you mention is for hypothetical things, e.g. in thought experiments. From Wikipedia:
"In engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, unobtainium is any fictional, extremely rare, costly, or impossible material, or (less commonly) device needed to fulfill a given design for a given application. The properties of any particular unobtainium depend on the intended use. For example, a pulley made of unobtainium might be massless and frictionless; however, if used in a nuclear rocket, unobtainium would be light, strong at high temperatures, and resistant to radiation damage. The concept of unobtainium is often applied flippantly or humorously."
I took it to mean that the geek character in the movie was deliberately dumbing things down for the person he was explaining to, out of disdain for their position. He was basically saying, "This is the most valuable substance in the universe, and we can only get it here" in as bluntly and impossible-to-misunderstand way as he could.
It wasn't in the context of "Quick, pass me that bar of unobtanium!", or other in-universe common-usage (a la "midichlorians"), but rather a deliberate simplification. ("What do we mine here? __important shit__! Now leave me alone and go back to your useless sociology experiment while I do something important!")
All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great
dominants of our contemporary life - science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of
these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
The way I look at it is that I saw it when I had a small child and was somewhat sleep deprived.
In that state I enjoyed it and found it pleasantly thought provoking but that's not to suggest it was a massively clever film as there were days back then when I found tying my shoe laces pleasantly thought provoking.
Nothing snotty about not liking Inception. I for one didn't like it at all. I agree that it borrows concepts from deep scifi but it painstakingly explains everything to you so that you lose the mind bending effect of deep scifi.
Then there is also the god-awful performance of Cotillard.
