hardercore

Who am I kidding, I have nothing to add to the gushing praise. I still don't think it's better than The Dark Knight, but it is a very fucking good, perhaps great film.

roger_d

This movie I would hope get some kind of recongnition from the Oscars. Instead of some of the crap they have given the nom in the past. I know its still early in the year but this movie definitely needs to be recognized.

slop101

Further dream theory: We never actually ever see the top stop spinning - the few times that we think it does, it's really just miss-direction and cut-aways to something else that make us think it's stopped spinning when it really hasn't.

Jay G.

I'm pretty sure we see it stop spinning once. In the hotel room after the Saito dream, he spins it on a table, holding his gun near his head and keeping it there until the top stops.

kefrank

I haven't actually weighed in with my thoughts, so I'll do that now. I intentionally went into Inception with very few expectations. I'd seen the trailer and read nothing, so basically I just knew who was involved and that it had something to do with dreams.

In short, I loved it. I haven't had such an exhilarating and intense theatrical experience in a long time. There were multiple sequences in the film that were literally jaw-dropping for me. The varation-on-a-heist-movie plot worked really well and the relatively complicated fictional mechanics of shared/lucid dreaming were presented in a way that did require me to think, but never bogged things down. I thought Cobb's pathos was introduced and developed wonderfully and offered plenty of emotional involvement for me to stay interested and care about the outcome. This was a movie that engaged my senses, my emotions, and my brain in a way that most movies don't. As is almost always the case, it wasn't perfect, but none of its minor flaws took me out of the movie while watching it - I was completely immersed the whole time and enjoyed being taken on one heck of a ride. It's a movie that I think I'll appreciate even more on multiple viewings and I can't wait to see it again.

johnnysd

Wow, thought the score was completely unremarkable. In fact, several times in the movie I remember distinctly disliking the score and thinking a different composer would have been a better choice. An Oscar for this score would be a crime.

The more time goes on the less I like the movie. It makes me feel like the butt of the "pink elephant joke". I just completely do not get the incredibly effusive praise this movie gets. I just don't see it.

I find the movie very proficient technically, but intensely sterile and clinical. I thought the characters were very one note and there is no connection for me with any of them. In fact, Page is purely an expositionary prop: a character whose only purpose is to ask questions to provide the "rules" of the movie to the audience. It was very cloying.

In fact I think it is the rules and extemely rigid structure of the movie that makes it fail for me. The director seems to be trying to impose a logic and structure to the most free form and unstructured of all experiences- a dream.
It's like a very dry intellectual thesis to try and define and categorize something that he does not really understand at all. This conceit did not fit with me at all, and to be honest the whole concept is silly.

This structure flows through to the dream "mazes" which are completely unimaginative and rigid, nothing at all dreamlike. I found them boring to be honest and not interesting or awe-inspiring in the least bit. In fact the most creative it gets is to allow the world to flip up on itself -again completely unimaginitive and rigid and way way too grounded in normal reality.

Then the plot setup is a complete disaster. So we are going to assemble a team to convince the son of a company's president to dismantle his corporate empire so that another company can completely take over the energy industry-seriously? It's just laughably stupid.

Cobb even organizes all his memories into floors on an elevator.

In the end, I couldn't really care whether he was in a dream or not, or whether he saw his kids or not. It is not a particularly compelling mystery it's just intentionally obtuse and vague. And a cop out.

This movie to me is really like a wax sculpture. It is expertly crafted and extremely detailed, but it is also heartless and in the end completely useless.

I guess having written this, I realize I kind of hate this movie. I just do not see at all what others see in this and all the fuss that is being made about it.

hardercore

I can only see nominations for Best Picture, Directing (much harder to crack but perhaps as a 'we fucked up' admission for 2008), Editing and Supporting Actress (Cotillard). Maybe Original Screenplay where Nolan has been recognised before. That depends if they are favouring the dialogue side of screenwriting (serviceable), or the concept/storytelling aspect (amazing).

TheMovieman

Disagree on both counts (though I don't think Zimmer's score should be nominated). I loved the score and the more I think about, the more I actually love the movie.

That statement, though, does describe my thoughts for Avatar as I didn't get anywhere near emotional after seeing it and in fact, started liking the movie even less as time wore on and I looked past the 3D spectacle, so I can see where you're coming from.

DonnachaOne

BRRAAAAWWWWMMMM<beef>M
BRRAAAAWWWWMMMM<beef>M
BRRAAAAWWWWMMMM<beef>M

Solid Snake

lol

RagingBull80

kenbuzz

I just got back from Inception.

First, some background. I rarely see movies in theaters these days. A combination of lack of time, high prices, and having to share the theater with cell phone wielding chatty idiots really ruins the me-and-the-movie experience that I want. Plus, with a 9 y/o, when I do get to see a movie it's generally a kid flick. This is only the third movie this year I've seen - I saw Avatar while the wife and kid were visiting her folks, and we all saw Toy Story 3 with free tickets from buying the TS1/2 DVDs earlier this year. I wouldn't've seen Inception except for (a) being on a business trip to San Diego, (b) our last days' meetings wrapped up early but too late for me to catch an evening flight back to the Midwest, and (c) I was able to catch a 4:30 showing before the chatty cell-phone addicts were likely to show up.

The movie had the following:
STAR - Snake, Train or Indian - Trains were a regular theme.
NO STAR - Blatant Sex/Nudity - No fem skin at all. Too bad
STAR - Destruction of Public Property - Even though it was during a dream scene, lots of street and light poles were ripped up early on.
STAR - Good/Creative Mort - I've never seen a dude killed by blowing up the power transformer he's hiding behind.
NO STAR - Memorable Line - It's been only 2 hours and I can't remember a single spoken line of dialog.

Per the USS Eisenhower rating system, Inception earns 3 stars

Solid Snake

.....that's an odd rating system.

Greg MacGuffin

I didn't understand why they felt the need to have the score underneath every single scene. It was as if they didn't trust the scenes to simply unfold. The Saw movies also do this. It reminds me of Jason Segal's character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It's just tones. I liked when the score finally opened up at the end after they get off the plane, but then I realized he was just ripping off his own Dark Knight score.

RagingBull80

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger darling.” – Eames

fumanstan

Pull yourself together Teddy!

Oh... wait...

RagingBull80

Son of Odin

not quite credible bringing up one of the worst written movies of that summer. wait....i think nero is still waiting for spock!

Michael Corvin

I really dug the score. It's rare that a score stands out these days and becomes a character in the film itself.

kefrank

I was going to address a bunch of your points about the movie, but I think it's fine to just accept the fact that not everyone connects personally with every critically-acclaimed movie and for whatever reason, you don't connect with this one. There's no sense in trying to understand why most people love it - it's just not your thing.

To use an extreme example, I've never been able to get into Citizen Kane with a genuine level of enjoyment. As a fan of film in general, I definitely see the technical brilliance of it, but that's pretty much where my appreciation ends.

iggystar

I agree. Hans Zimmer has always been a favorite of mine and I really enjoyed this score.

Trevor

I'm not sure on the score. My feelings are that if you notice the score in the film, it's a bad thing. It was distracting at times.

Pointyskull

Same here, though it would have been interesting if Cheap Trick's Dream Police kicked in right after the final shot.

cleaver

In my all time top 3 with The Godfather and Raiders of the Lost Ark, where some people see lack of emotional connection I see a movie without a second that doesn't kick ass. I'd watch 2 1/2 hours of Chris Nolan's CONception, like his parents in bed - that's how hardcore of a fan I am.

Hokeyboy

Psst... you missed the entire point... there's no such thing as time travel, see? And even if there was, nobody knows how it "works".