Inception
*** out of *****
By Bob Clark
Back when the Matrix sequels had freshly come and gone from theaters, I had talked about them briefly with a friend from college, who thought that the Wachowskis had made a critical error in not simply having Neo and his cyberpunk comrades simply wake up and discover the war they’d been fighting between man and machines had simply been another virtual reality dream-world. I asked if that wouldn’t make all of their adventures feel all a bit meaningless, and open the door to a revolving door of dreams within dreams with no end in sight. After all, David Cronenberg pulled more or less the same stunt in his own virtual-reality thriller eXistenZ, which threw out its story of Jennifer Jason Leigh as a radical game-designer with a Salman Rushdie style fatwa on her head in favor of a new paradigm in which she was an anti-VR assassin herself. It’s the sort of last-minute turn of the narrative screw that might work fine for a stand-alone feature, I said, but would more or less ruin any sense of continuity for a budding multimedia franchise. My friend simply shrugged and said, “Turtles all the way down!”
At the time I thought he was just didn’t like The Matrix Reloaded (even as a fan, I can’t blame him too much for that), but perhaps there’s some method to that madness. Audiences love to have the rug pulled out from under their feet, but only when that rug is an elaborately woven of the finest thread and most elegant Persian design. It’s our own modern equivalent of the flying-carpet, with the sensation of flight coming not from a few choice magic words spoken by Douglas Fairbanks or Sabu, but instead from Christopher Nolan, one of this generation’s premier practitioners in the art of Byzantine tapestry. With Inception, we have something of a logical next-step from the mind-games of The Matrix to a portray a cinematic maze that eschews the Manichean power struggles the Wachowskis copied in pattern from Lucas and Cameron (premier filmmaking Dedaluses from yesteryear who still know their way around a flight of waxen feathers) to instead embrace a set of convolutions all its own. As with all cinematic puzzles, which have the potential to either provoke and enrapture us with curiosity or stymie us with endless frustration and confusion, the question isn’t whether or not you can find your way out of the maze, but rather if it’s worth getting lost there in the first place.
It helps that, at least in broad terms, the story is a rather simple affair, as far as these things go. Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCapprio) leads a crack team of dream thieves—hooking themselves up into a target’s subconscious in order to steal heavily guarded information in tailor-made reveries—who find themselves hired by shady industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe), who instead wants them to break into the mind of an energy tycoon’s young heir and plant an idea in order to manipulate him into breaking up the old man’s monopoly. In return, strings in high places will be pulled to allow Cobb back into the United States, where he’s been a wanted man ever since the suspicious death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who along with him pioneered their cutting edge (but vaguely described) technology, and now reappears from mission to mission as a hostile projection of his own memory of her who turns every dream he invades into a nightmare. With a Mission: Impossible inspired team including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the type of right-hand man who would ordinarily be expected to betray his partner at some point if the story weren’t already confusing enough, and Ellen Page as a young architect student turned apprentice dream-designer (not to mention handy audience-surrogate for all the expository psychobabble), Cobb dives into this one last job to clear his name and return home to his children, hopefully with at least some of his brain cells still intact.
It’s familiar territory for filmgoers raised with the likes of Phillip K. Dick adaptations and original works by Charlie Kaufman, not to mention perennial favorites by dreamers like Bunuel, Cocteau, Fellini and Lynch—indeed, no generation of cineastes may be better prepared for the baffling twists and turns that taken here, especially after the conclusion of television’s Lost and its reality challenging six-season run. If so much of the existential science-fiction on display throughout Nolan’s film seems familiar, then at least it provides a helpful map of genre roadsigns for an effort which seems insistent to defy most kinds of cinematic and narrative convention—as always, the director relies on Michael Mann’s mis-en-scene of a cold industrial-chic that rings true with his band of tech-savy professional criminals and presentation of dreamscapes anonymous as an amnesiac’s hotel room. Traces of early Cronenberg abound as well, from the Canadian director’s preference for corporate espionage and modernist architecture to Hans Zimmer’s synth-rich score, which sounds as though it’s doing its best to sound like a clone of Howard Shore from his Scanners soundtrack. With plenty more influences to be found throughout, both highbrow (a dreamer grown ancient beyond the dreamscape’s infinity and a rotating-set recalling Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as films and music-videos directed by Stanley Donen) and low (a third-act action sequence involving spies on skis resurrecting the ugly head of James Bond during the Roger Moore years), Inception is a bit like a dream itself that one might have after watching an eclectic movie marathon, and if the tailoring doesn’t always fit, at least it wears its influences on its sleeves.
As with Memento and The Prestige, Nolan creates a powerful piece of visually imaginative dramatics that seeks primarily to paint the bull’s eye on the back of a moving-target of a simple story evasively told. This isn’t a labyrinth you can escape from with the aid of a trail of breadcrumbs or a spool of string—instead, it seems at times that the entire maze is made of nothing but loose threads, a series of yarns within yarns and subplots within subconsciouses. The problem begins to set in, however, when he combines the same hypernarrative instincts that have served him well in his indie-fare with the propulsive blockbuster dynamics that made Batman Begins and The Dark Knight two of the most successful and respected pieces of big tent-pole entertainment from the past ten years. It’s a combination that other filmmakers have tried in the past, often with rewarding results—Lucas melded the artsy sci-fi tendencies of THX 1138 and wholesome populism of American Graffiti into the original Star Wars, and Cronenberg found success with the seemingly ordinary remake of The Fly, a genetic fusion of his gusty body-horror and mainstream emotionalism not unlike Brundlefly itself. But unlike them, for the most part Nolan keeps his indie and mainstream sensibilities at an arm’s length apart from one another, channeling most of his more challenging creative efforts into the script and his crowdpleasing Hollywood instincts into the visuals, and the two mix about as well as oil and water.
To be sure, there are plenty of jaw-dropping sights and imaginatively conceived moments throughout, but they don’t so much illustrate the film’s story as they do run parallel alongside it, seldom intersecting with any genuine substance. Sure, cities explode and fold over occasionally like pop-up books and laws of physics are taken about as seriously as Monaco speed limits during Grand Prix, but these scenes bear little import to the unfolding complications of dream invaders and their increasingly long cons. Instead, the vast majority of the story is communicated entirely through dialogue, which at times is overburdened with so much expository speeches that one would think he’d adapted his script from a novel the size of a phone-book. If the standard cinematic rule of “show, don’t tell” is to be taken seriously, then most of the time Nolan must be found guilty of showing us nothing of real importance, saving most of his big ideas for the telling, resulting in a largely verbal, surprisingly non-cinematic experience. At times it feels as though Leonardo DiCapprio and his team of actors are merely narrating the substance of the plot over a demo-reel of special-effect money shots seemingly written into the script for no other reason than to look good in the trailers. It’s especially ironic, given that the import of the movie’s title focuses on getting the dream-team’s target to come up with an intended idea themselves by their guiding manipulations, rather than having it be dictated to them via open suggestion or brainwashing. Whenever we are told what is happening without it being shown onscreen or given a chance to form ideas of our own, Inception proves unable to perform the job of “inception” itself.
It doesn’t help that Nolan insists upon supporting his complicated machinations with a set of increasingly commonplace domestic storylines, the same old set sob stories between fathers and sons or husbands and wives (indeed, alongside Revolutionary Road and Shutter Island it’s getting hard to imagine Leo in any other context than old-fashioned marital discord with pepperings of psychological delusions). Unlike Charlie Kaufman’s varying degrees of success with existential soap-operas like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, Nolan misses the chance to bridge the emotional undercurrents of his narrative with the intellectual demands of his sci-fi high concepts with the key ingredient of comedy—instead of laughing at itself with knowing absurdism, Inception takes itself dreadfully seriously, resulting in a humorless trek through various levels of reality and fantasy that at times resembles what the classic Jean-Paul Belmondo farce Le Magnifique might look like if it had been played for straight. The problem is further compounded by the degree to which the script forces much of its exposition into the mouths of non-native English speakers like Watanabe and Cotillard, who put on brace faces but can’t help but stumble over themselves tongue-tied in muddled accents and rushed deliveries, perhaps a result of the director’s total lack of pacing throughout.
As with all his work since Memento, a film that thanks to its backwards presentation necessitated a strict discipline to carefully composed scene structure, Nolan edits the film within an inch of its life, cutting as much as he can within scenes instead of deleting extraneous moments in whole, resulting in a film that moves too fast for audiences to keep up with. It makes Lucas with his infamous maxim of “faster and more intense” look like the slowed-down work of Andrei Tarkovsky, by comparison. It’s that kind of impatience that robs the rich premise of any real sense of atmosphere throughout most of the picture, and furthermore reduces most of its imaginative and ambitious sequences into broken, almost incoherent snapshots of fist-fights on ceilings and shootouts in the snow (on skis, no less). Nolan has shown this kind of unsteady hand with action before throughout his Batman movies, and as impressive as the games he plays with time & space through editing and sci-fi concepts are, one wishes that he had something of a firmer grasp of them when it comes down to shooting a goddamn fight scene. It’s especially disappointing, as no matter how confusing the geography and sequencing of all his car chases and firefights are throughout the movie, it’s impossible to deny just how compellingly structured they are, particularly during the extended quintuple-fold set of sequences that makes up Inception’s third act, as multiple series of dreams within dreams are nested within one another like Russian dolls, with the events of one reality affecting the next down the line.
This is where Nolan’s heavy losses and piling creative gambits finally start to pay off, building a finely tuned set of cinematic machinations that not only make for gangbuster entertainment but serve to illustrate the hypernarrative’s twists in ways that its soliloquizing script can only dream of. Intercutting between succeedingly deeper layers of dreamscapes with their own sets of rules compounding upon one another, it distils a blending of technique and theme that evokes both Griffith’s Intolerance and Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, weaving a tapestry of interlacing realities that impresses in the big picture, even if things are looser and more frayed upon closer inspected than anyone bargained for. In the programming code-like bracketing of interlocking action beats, however, Nolan finds himself following the example of fellow fantasist George Lucas, whose series of intercut ground, space and lightsaber battles in Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace provide the basic template for what makes up the most impressive aspect of the film’s design—conditional set-pieces. While the rule-sets in the third acts of the Star Wars films were always based in some concrete laws of cause-and-effect— Rebel fighters knocking out a power-generator on a planet surface to allow an assault against the Death Star or Jedi Knights and native aliens fighting Sith Lords and robot-armies as diversions from the real goals—Inception uses the conditional relations to play with an increasingly complicated system of temporal physics that cause time and gravity to slow down or even stop entirely. It’s the type of action-movie ambition that is seemingly inspired by a few stray lines from Richard Linklater’s own dream-opus, Waking Life, where Ethan Hawkes and Julie Delpy’s Before Sunrise characters cameo to speculate on how long one can live in a dream.
But no matter how much he raises the stakes in his cinematic shuffling of the deck, he still owes a large debt to Lucas’ initial experiments in conditional set-piece building, and by extension the pioneering efforts of Fritz Lang. As the director of The Dark Knight, he betrayed a strong influence from Lang previously in the Joker’s unmistakably Mabusian tactics, but it’s in this film that he shows his fullest debt to Lang and his geganspieler narrative outlook, constructing the plots of his films as deadly games of cat-and-mouse between two rival sides, “opponents at play”. Being a director of the video-game generation, like the Wachowskis and to a certain extent Cronenberg (recall those Atari joysticks on the living television set of Videodrome, precursors to the flesh-pod consoles of eXistenZ), Nolan goes further and deeper with the notion of narrative as a game in the past tense, spending roughly half his movie setting up elaborate sets of rules in the first two acts in order to play with them as freely as possible in the third. At times, one might wonder if he’d chosen the right metaphor in dreams when previous experimenters of the puzzle-film genre have tended towards games and virtual-reality as literal extensions of realities fabricated by man, rather than his subconscious. The “dreams” his characters construct certainly make far more linear sense than anything from Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, probably the best modern film to tackle the subject. There are no non-sequitors, no surreal moments beyond those that are outlined in the expository phase. Freud, Jung or any scientists of REM sleep might have trouble even recognizing them as dreams at all. Indeed, all of his rules are followed to the letter. Even lucid dreams aren’t this lucid, but games are.
As a game-designer myself, I find these new footholds of conceptual power upon cinema as encouraging, yet at the same time somewhat frustrating. Despite its faults, Christopher Nolan has delivered a piece of experimental blockbuster filmmaking well worth watching and even enjoying with Inception, but still, I can’t help but feel that so many of the same ideas and substance that he plays with on the screen here are perhaps better served by the medium he and his generation have gleaned so much from. If you want an experience that bends time and space with the same expert manipulation of origami, play Valve’s Portal or Jonathan Blow’s Braid. Or if you want to see M.C. Escher optical illusions come to life in twisting series of primrose staircases, play Sony’s Echochrome. If you want yet another Orphean attempt to resurrect the beloved dead through Hollywood fantasy/action set-pieces that would make Peter Jackson or James Cameron blush, play Fumito Ueda’s Ico or Shadow of the Colossus. Or if you want to feel the gestalt-thrill of sneaking past enemy agents in elaborate, reality-bending existential espionage (complete with snow, but without the skis), play Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid games. Still, there’s a sign of hope to be found in the way that Nolan has at least somewhat successfully been able to coin an original currency in the creatively bankrupt marketplace of Hollywood, and with any luck perhaps we’ll see the ripple-effects of this cinematic bombshell up and down the nested dollhouses of studio and indie dreamers alike. As above, so below—if it’s turtles all the way down, maybe it’s also turtles all the way up.
“As with all cinematic puzzles, which have the potential to either provoke and enrapture us with curiosity or stymie us with endless frustration and confusion, the question isn’t whether or not you can find your way out of the maze, but rather if it’s worth getting lost there in the first place.”
and
“But unlike them, for the most part Nolan keeps his indie and mainstream sensibilities at an arm’s length apart from one another, channeling most of his more challenging creative efforts into the script and his crowdpleasing Hollywood instincts into the visuals, and the two mix about as well as oil and water.”
and
“It’s especially ironic, given that the import of the movie’s title focuses on getting the dream-team’s target to come up with an intended idea themselves by their guiding manipulations, rather than having it be dictated to them via open suggestion or brainwashing. Whenever we are told what is happening without it being shown onscreen or given a chance to form ideas of our own, Inception proves unable to perform the job of “inception” itself.”
and
“At times, one might wonder if he’d chosen the right metaphor in dreams when previous experimenters of the puzzle-film genre have tended towards games and virtual-reality as literal extensions of realities fabricated by man, rather than his subconscious. The “dreams” his characters construct certainly make far more linear sense than anything from Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, probably the best modern film to tackle the subject. There are no non-sequitors, no surreal moments beyond those that are outlined in the expository phase. Freud, Jung or any scientists of REM sleep might have trouble even recognizing them as dreams at all. Indeed, all of his rules are followed to the letter. Even lucid dreams aren’t this lucid, but games are.”
and the whole last paragraph. Fantastic Bob, I haven’t seen this film, but your opinion is really one I’d seek out on something like this and you certainly didn’t disappoint.
Jamie, I look forward to reading what you and Joel have to say about the movie. Like it or not, it’s a great conversation starter.
“It’s familiar territory for filmgoers raised with the likes of Phillip K. Dick adaptations and original works by Charlie Kaufman, not to mention perennial favorites by dreamers like Bunuel, Cocteau, Fellini and Lynch—indeed, no generation of cineastes may be better prepared for the baffling twists and turns that taken here, especially after the conclusion of television’s Lost and its reality challenging six-season run.”
Aye Bob, the reference to our greatest ‘cinematic dreamers’ and proponents of surrealism is warranted, and in fact are no doubt yet-to-be-addressed influences on some of Nolan’s own ideas, even in fact the basic deceit here. When something this auspicious and undisciplined is attempt the results are NEVER fully satisfactory. And this is one of those films where you find yourself whispering “Brilliant! Masterpiece” at a number of junctures, while uttering expletives at other times for seeming incomprehension.
I enjoyed the references to Cronenberg, Griffith’s INTOLERANCE, Kaufman’s SYCHEDOCHE, NEW YORK (I’ve been going with that one all week, even before this review appeared) and of George Lucas, whose work in this instance is absolutely a valid point of connection, in the sense that you pose.
It’s one of teh most challenging of films, and you’ve done a remarkable job with language and possible influences to move further to unlocking the mystery.
I think part of the reason everyone’s so excited about this is precisely because it’s so original, which is apart from considerations of real quality. It attracts attention because it’s not a sequel/prequel/reboot/adaptation, but that alone doesn’t make it a great film. That’s not to say it’s bad, either, but that the enthusiasm for novelty is somewhat exagerating all the positive estimates. It’s a big fish, no doubt, but it’s stuck in an awfully small pond.
Bob, I haven’t read the review yet (I’ll wait to see the movie, which may the only new film I see on big screens this summer) but I think you make an important point here. 80s cinema gets knocked, and I’ve been critical of it some respects, but (and here I’m just talking about American cinema) in one way at least it’s markedly superior to 00s film: originality (the blockbusters were by and large fresh and high-concept, think Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Gremlins, etc. – even adaptations like Who Framed Roger Rabbit essentially used their sources as starting points, going off in their own direction).
Yes, I know legions of great films were adaptations, but what we’re dealing with today are not just adaptations but a rather slavish brand of such – besides, adaptations are less the problem than the endless reboots and remakes you note. It’s almost as if filmmakers now see the medium as a minor form, one fit only for taking ideas from “fresher” media like comic books, video games, or television (forms I think they, rightly or wrongly, may have some contempt or at best condescension for; at least in the 30s they were adapting from sources they respected).
Maybe the coming era will be different – there’s actually quite a number of talented, relatively young directors out there, I would say more than there were a dozen years ago. So the potential’s there.
Yeah, and even the “originality” we see in modern cinema can sometimes be a bit misleading. “Inception” isn’t based on any pre-existing story, per se, but it’s let itself to loads of comparisons to other movies of the same themes and styles like “Dark City”, “eXistenZ” and especially “The Matrix”. In fact, with that last movie’s naked influence on so many other action movies in the past 11 years since its release, I think you have all the proof you need to the modern blockbuster’s derivativeness.
With only a little exageration, I’d argue that the Wachowski’s original film affected audiences and filmmakers the same way that Lucas did with the original “Star Wars”, or at least they came as close as anyone has since. The difference is in the nature and degree of their respective influence– “Star Wars” inspired a few obvious rip-offs (the original “Battlestar Galactica” being the most obvious), but for the most part opened the floodgates to a lot of movies that shared Lucas’ passion for well-told, imaginative adventure stories, and little else. “The Matrix”, on the other hand? Sadly, that gave us almost nothing but ten years of “Matrix” knock-offs, “Inception” arguably among them. That’s not the fault of the Wachowskis, of course, and in the end says much more about the largely inferior crop of fantasists of this generation. Maybe it’s because the Movie Brats had to reach back to the adventures of their childhood, while modern filmmakers barely have to reach as far as their adolescence. The memories (and hormones) are too fresh to kickstart any real innovation of their own.
The matter of too-close-for-comfort adaptations is another matter entirely, but related to the whole modern-day all-or-nothing fan culture. I’ll think about that some more.
Upon thinking about the movie some more, I think there’s another potential connection to Lucas with all the gravity shifts in the third act. Reminds me now of “Revenge of the Sith”‘s opening, where the Jedi rescue Palpatine from an enemy starship as it’s being attacked, causing gravity to momentarily go out while they’re in an elevator shaft. Obviously gravity-shifts and elevator shafts are both action-movie cliches nowadays (and both present in “The Matrix”, the primary source of “Inception”‘s inception), but there’s enough commonality here for me to asterisk it in a comment.
I would agree that Nolan’s ambition exceeds his grasp but he certainly gave it a helluva shot – an A for effort. This film is crammed full of ideas and I felt like as I was watching it I was only scraping the surface and another viewing was in order. I was too busy trying to absorb all the visuals.
The excessive expositional dialogue didn’t bother me at all and some reviewers have complained (i.e. Rex Reed) that they still didn’t understand what was going on! So, you can’t please everyone (obviously, duh!) but I guess the dialogue was so well-written and bandied about so many fascinating concepts and ideas that I quite enjoyed it and felt that it actually complemented the visuals.
Best of all, INCEPTION has got people talking and debating endlessly about its merits and what it all means. Can we say that about any film that’s come out this summer so far (or this year)? This film divides audiences in a way that a good film should. It sparks discussion which is pretty amazing for a major Hollywood blockbuster that one usually forgets as soon as you leave the theater.
And, I can’t say this enough, I give Nolan high marks for not making a sequel, remake, reboot or adaptation of an existing work. What a refreshing concept!
I can understand the enthusiasm myself, JD, in such a long summer drought for originality– I just wish people had picked a project that actually showed a little bit more of it, like Vince Natali’s “Splice” or something (a movie I also have problems with, especially its grotesquely out-of-character ending, but still prefer over Nolan’s movie). There’s some new stuff on display here, but mostly all the moving parts are cobbled together from other sources– one part “Matrix”, two parts Bond, a pinch of “Heat” and a dash of “Paprika”.
Bob,
I enjoyed your placement of Hawking’s little joke about “turtles” in a context of sci-fi exuberance and the logic of contemporary games. I agree there is something percolating that warrants close examination.
Cheers!
Jim
Jim, I’m familiar with Hawking’s relating of the Turtle incident from “A Brief History of Time”, but I didn’t quite think of the scientific connections it could have with this kind of reality-bending sci-fi effort (to think, between all those allusions to Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth, I missed out on such a good opportunity to make a string-theory joke). But the whole “world turtle” monomyth certainly has plenty of connections out there, and oddly enough quite a few related to dreams. Mamoru Oshii’s anime “Uresei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer” makes some pretty beautiful use of the image within the context of endless chinese-box dreaming. I remember half expecting the Island on “Lost” would turn out to be a world turtle of some kind.
Can we think of Hawks’ ‘The Big Sleep’ here?
This is a great description, in attempting to focus on what it all means:
***As with Memento and The Prestige, Nolan creates a powerful piece of visually imaginative dramatics that seeks primarily to paint the bull’s eye on the back of a moving-target of a simple story evasively told. This isn’t a labyrinth you can escape from with the aid of a trail of breadcrumbs or a spool of string—instead, it seems at times that the entire maze is made of nothing but loose threads, a series of yarns within yarns and subplots within subconsciouses. ***
I had largely the same response that you did to this movie, though I may have liked it a little better than you. My problem, and this is something you touch on in your piece, is the dream world is just too logical, too rational. I talk about this in my own review. I have never had a dream this coherent. Nolan could have done some amazing things but went halfway. I think all the plot tricks are a simple excuse to have an action movie. Nothing wrong with that but there is nothing deep either. This is what confuses me about everyone talking about all the “ideas” Nolan explores. The only ideas I saw explored were how do we have as much action as possible and then pull the rug out from everyone at the end. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but let’s not pretend there is anything profound going on here. And if you know anything about movies the twist at the end isn’t much of a twist. The real twist would have been if there wasn’t a twist at all and Nolan had told the story straightforwardly. This is an effective action movie, but that’s about all.
Yeah, that’s a big problem. Over on another site somebody described the dreams as all coming from the subconscious of someone who only watched Bond movies, but I think that’s giving it too much credit– even one of the bad Bond flicks has more chance for dream-like imagery than this. Nolan could’ve come up with an explanation for this in part of the rambling exposition by saying that their dream-technology or sedatives somehow put some limitations on how weird the dreams can get. It would’ve been a cheap explanation, but at least it would’ve been trying.
It also doesn’t help that the whole city-folding stunts that Ellen Page does are given spotlight attention both in the advertisements and during the movie itself, though they’re never followed up upon. Yeah, I know Leo tells her not to, but that just compounds the problem– in the reverse-psychology driven drama of narrative, forbidding a character to do something is tantamount to telling us that it’s going to happen (isn’t that right, Eve?). So when Ellen Page stops doing her crazy-cool dreambending, it’s severely anticlimactic in a movie that could’ve used a nice third-act pinch of spice.
I’m sorry but I don’t buy the argument that the film is being praised because of the originality of the ideas alone.
There’s actually more originality in some of the visual sequences, the city-bending and gravity akimbo action sequences, and even those owe a lot to “The Matrix”. Most of the ideas here have actually already been covered (and covered better, I’d say) in previous sci-fi movies about dreams and other virtual realities.
I’ve never liked The Matrix. When I started hearing comparisons of Inception to that late 90′s film I began to get weary. My misgivings were confirmed once I saw the film. What made something like Memento or The Prestige so wonderful is that they are not action films, in any sense, but more moody cerebral mysteries. In some ways Inception surpasses what those pictures accomplished. The problem is that it gets sunk by your stellar observation that he lets the “propulsive blockbuster dynamics” of the Batman films seep and mix with his unique narrative. I sort of hinted at this during Sam’s Monday Morning Diary. You laid it out perfectly in mentioning that “the two mix as well as oil and water”. That is my main problem with Inception….. its a merging of Memento with The Dark Knight. Unfortunately the union is a very uneasy one and the movie pales when compared to either. Nolan wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to continue with his unique brand of intelligent “puzzle” mysteries but have it fused with summer movie pyrotechnics. In fact that description best describes what The Matrix is all about!! I say leave the two as separate entities. Blockbusters are meant to be larger than life and relatively mindless. To inject more substance and be successful is a longshot that seems to risky a proposition. I admire Nolan’s ambition but can’t help but think that if he travels down this road the masterpieces will be far and few between.
I have never seen a summer blockbuster I loved. They are almost always disposable works of low brow populist art. Nolan has proved on 1 or 2 occasions that he is capable of making great films. I fear if he continues down this road, he will get sucked up by Hollywood’s never ending art destroying vacuum. To be honest he may be there already.
SPEEDRACER, the first MATRIX, TERMINATOR 2, ect. there have been some fun blockbusters out there. None great sure, but many pretty damn fun.
If you ask me, those are all great American classics (well, except for T2, seeing as Cameron’s Canadian, originally).
I think that the Wachowskis actually captured the perfect blend of puzzle and blockbuster dynamics in the original “Matrix” feature– the sequels are both fascinating, but rather mixed bags drowning in their own mythology. It helps that they actually know how to shoot all of the big chases, fights and shoot-outs that Nolan still doesn’t know what to do with– even if you like his films, you have to admit, he is NOT an action director. Furthermore, he’s unable to pare down his own expository-mythos enough to streamline all the narrative logic of his enterprise, making everything much more confusing than it has to be. “The Matrix” was simple, by comparison– plug into the VR world of the machines, and everything looks green, just like everything turned black and white when Roddy Piper put on his sunglasses in “They Live”. Nolan never attempts to visually code his realities like the Wachowskis or Carpenter did, which adds an unnecessary layer of confusion to the mix. I’d say he’s too intent on making a “serious” movie– he could use a little more blockbuster-simplicity to open up the art of his work.
Inception would of been better without the Bond chases and explosions. A smaller budget with a more personal and emotional center would of helped as well. He hurt the picture by having mind numbing action pieces that didn’t really advance the story but added wasteful running time. His direction of those sequences was also rather lame as you mention. I must admit though that the fact he was unable to visually show the viewer his ideas was very problematic. Maybe the relative lack of oversized ambition of Memento when compared to Inception helped in the former’s case. Your argument for “blockbuster-simplicity” for the overall concept is surly correct. That second problem with the film is precisely Juno’s constant bantering with Cobb over what is going on. The endless exposition seems to suggest that Nolan bit off more than he can chew. This may be due to his insecurity of having the premise fly over mainstream audiences heads. Leading them on a leash might of been what he concurred was needed. One last thing….. can Ellen Page disappear already. I’m tired of seeing her play that same annoying hipster chick role. She even haunts me in TV commercials now. There was one specific scene she did with Gordan-Levitt where it felt like they accidently walked into a Sundance indie flick. I was waiting for some twee indie rock to start playing or for Michael Cera to stroll on screen strumming a guitar!!!!
The sad thing is, a few times he DOES actually manage to articulate his “ideas” visually, or at least show us something more interesting than all the Bond nonsense. It’s funny that all the posters and trailers advertise this as a movie where cities fold over, people fist-fight on the ceiling and gravity goes akimbo at a regular basis. Granted, this is what all commercials do– sell us on the money shots– but very little of this movie reflects on the visual potential as much as those key moments. Instead, Nolan wastes our time with a lot of stuff we’ve already seen before. It’d be as though in the original “Star Wars” we saw lightsabers and star-ships only a couple of times, and then spent the entire movie watching non-stop shoot outs with laser blasters. Instead of putting the pedal to the metal, Nolan sets his imagination on coast.
As for Ellen Page– I dislike “Juno” tremendously, but fortunately my first exposure to her was as Kitty Pryde (aka Shadowcat) in the last “X-Men” movie. And I thought she was pretty darn cute in it, too. So whatever, I’ll give her a free pass.
I agree. A great movie lurks within Inception.
Juno… teen pregnancy never looked so good!!! Great message for 16 year olds. The parents don’t even get upset!!! Oh and the father will stay by your side no matter what. The same people that championed that dreck cried about Coen Brothers nihilism.
For me, I can’t even get to the potentially moral offenses of the plot. I just can’t stand Diablo Cody’s hipsterer-than-thou dialogue. I never thought there’d be a screenwriter I could find more intolerable than Joss Whedon, but there she is. At least Whedon’s stories are occasionally interesting, if a little heavy on the rather odd combination of girl-power and sexist objectification (call it tramp-stamp feminism).
Yeah Diablo Cody’s screenplay is atrocious. I may be wrong but I think she won an Oscar? Sounds about right……….
Also – what’s with the African city chase setpiece? Is it a prerequisite for every Hollywood actioner that there must be one of these – preferably with a character jumping off of a roof?
On its own, I actually sort of liked the chase, especially how it used architecture and Leo’s entrapment within it to suggest there was something just a little off about that world. When he got stuck in the alley, it made me think– “Finally! This is the sort of thing that happens in dreams. Except this is reality. Oh, well, it’ll probably turn out to be another dream”. And I was right. Still, it’s nowhere near as good as the Bond vs. Parkour Guy footchase from “Casino Royale”.
Martin Campbell, man. He’s underrated.
Wait, that part was a dream?
If we’re to believe the spinning-top theory the film pretty much pushes down our throat. But hey, I guess we’ll all find out with the all-but-inevitable sequel, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad idea. The whole time I kept thinking it all felt less like a movie and more like the most expensive backdoor pilot ever greenlit. Some movies are built on a premise that just can’t be sustained by a single feature, and I’m not just talking about obvious ones like the Bond or “Star Wars” franchises– look at how Altman’s “M*A*S*H” flourished on television, or how “Ghost in the Shell” spiraled into both the ongoing tv-anime “Stand Alone Complex” and Oshii’s own sequel “Innocence” (not to mention Masamune Shirow’s follow-up manga “Man-Machine Interface”, which will probably the last non-porn work he ever does).
Something like The Prestige was not made for large summer audiences. Nolan could make it complex without the insane amount of exposition. I feel the endless describing of events and logic in Inception may be due precisely because he is trying to pack the cinemas with larger audiences. His catering to the blockbuster crowd came at a price. Leave no possible stone unturned and make every dream look as boring and literal as possible. We need to cover our 90 billion budget so explain everything!!! Yet his ambition still refused a simpler narrative thus our agreement on the relative failure of the movie.
Visual storytelling relies upon simplicity, so you can articulate as much of your narrative as possible through visuals, with dialogue serving to back things up or add emotional embelishment, not simply narrate the proceedings entirely. “Lost” is a perfect example of this– it relied mainly on showing, instead of telling, and used exposition sparingly, never overpowering the visceral feel of its sights and sounds.
I just returned from a screening of Inception. I was flirting with the idea of postponing my regularly scheduled pieces this week, and indulging in a rumination on the movie (focusing mostly on Christopher Nolan, his – and his era’s – filmmaking drawbacks, and branching off into a discussion of the role of criticism in discussing emotional experiences and speculating on depth). But I nixed the idea because I missed the first 20-30 of the film (I showed up for the 3:30 which was sold out, and had to buy tickets for the 3:05 which, oddly enough, was not) and this didn’t feel comfortable lodging conclusive judgements. Nonetheless, I’ll offer my abbreviated thoughts below.
But first, let me applaud and concur with some of your very well-phrased observations. We’ve already agreed, to a certain extent (though you’re fonder of the films than I am) that the Matrix conceit was a schoolboyish copout. Nolan goes a bit further with the idea, and I appreciate that a lot. But his work lacks formal vision and emotional resonance (or an irony to compensate for the lack of the latter, though I’m not sure how I feel about that missing ingredient).
Especially, I loved this: “Whenever we are told what is happening without it being shown onscreen or given a chance to form ideas of our own, Inception proves unable to perform the job of “inception” itself.” This nails my problem with Inception and the current trend (too light a word for what has essentially swallowed blockbuster filmmaking whole) of high-concept puzzle pics. They attempt to add, to varying degrees, intellectual depth and greater “realism” to the whiz-bang charms of spectacle, but this costs them a good deal of the original appeal and the return in sophistication is not very high. Indeed, because they lose the innocent sense of wonder Speilberg’s and Lucas’ films convey, without gaining very much in adult power (which, contrary to their obsession with head games, has always had more to do with emotion than intellect, or rather the two together) – these new films tend to represent a “flattening” of a once appealing type of movie, at least for me. But I do not Inception is a prime offender in this regard; Nolan’s films in general I find more entertaining and less draining than many of the other post-’99 adolescent films. But they are still very much a part of that school.
As for my own thoughts…
I’m beginning to find Nolan fascinating as an auteur – and a particularly representative one. It feels peculiar to use that word with him because he has almost no sense of visual style. Sure, he can dress up the film and in their Michael Mann Lite quality you not, they do have a somewhat common aesthetic thread. But there’s no there there, they function the way mainstream films are supposed to and go no further. At its strongest (and it’s not always at this level) Nolan’s films could be used as textbook examples to teach film students how conventional filmmaking works, circa-2010. Hardly the stuff of a model auteur.
Yet I find him fascinating because his films are very strongly tied together – by their screenplays. Nolan’s character and vision rest entirely on his writing laurels, even though (oddly enough) you get the sense that he’s writing just to give himself something to direct, that directing is what he really considers his speciality. In that sense it would be misleading to characterize him as “the writer who directs to protect his material” but the same general principle is at work: these films are created on the page and everything after is just window dressing, demo-reels so to speak.
That leads me to Nolan’s second drawback, which I think is related. His work has little emotional resonance – hardly a unique trait among big-budget Hollywood films, and yet what is unique is that they seem intensely designed around emotional experiences. Unlike, say, Transformers (to use a crude but not atypical example) which will create characters and story situations as clotheslines on which to hang their effects sequences, Nolan’s big-budget movies (and, I suspect to a certain extent, his lower-budget ones as well, though I’d need to rewatch Memento and The Prestige to confirm) do not use the characters’ motivations and desires as an excuse to parade nifty effects or brainy concepts. Rather, they are so intricately wound in with the movie’s concepts that we get the sense we are supposed to be responding emotionally to the material.
Now, I differ from you just a bit if I correctly understand your implication that Nolan needs comic irony to bridge the story’s emotional pretensions and its genre trappings. I think the personal aspects could be sincere and still work; I’d even go so far as to say that effects and concepts don’t have to be sidelined for them, or that a rewrite would be in order to milk the proper pathos. I think Nolan could have worked with what he had and evoked more resonance – the problem is less the material (though it admittedly contains all the seeds which sprouted in eventually glib fashion) than the delivery.
Nolan, unlike Spielberg (who borrowed heavily from humanist filmmakers like Robert Altman and Howard Hawks – yes, I think Hawks was a humanist – in his direction of actors, at least in his early blockbusters), has no touch for naturalism. He directs actors to make only the necessary surface gestures and there’s no sense of discovery in line readings, he stages sequences like the children playing in the yard or the wife’s suicide with no feeling for inner lives, and he never employs unconventional strategies like long takes, depth compositions, or graceful camera movements which allow us to step outside the glib predigested stylistic framework of Hollywood filmmaking, in which to be frank it’s almost conditionally impossible to feel a thing.
In this he is, sadly and totally, a man of his times. I put this down, among other things, to the influence of video games and comic books – I think those mediums have their values, but their virtues are different from those of the cinema (as I’ve written about before) and when their strategies are transposed to an at least partially documentary form, something is lost on the receiving end. (By the way, the problem is not just limited to younger directors; older ones have trended this way as well, just look at – speaking of Leo headtrips – Shutter Island with its unaffecting family murder and glitzy Holocaust porn, surely intentional in both cases yet one has to ask to what purpose? /Digression).
Nonetheless, there are intriguing threads here – the idea of believing reality is a dream, while hardly original, will always be provocative and enticing; and the hint of family turmoil, both in Leo’s marriage and his wife’s past, could have been further exploited, or put more palatably, explored, too. The dollhouse of Leo’s wife is never explained, unless I missed something (and indeed I did miss about half an hour so perhaps all these caveats should be taken with a grain of salt; nonetheless, I’ll take that salt and season my shoe before eating if viewing the opening of Inception changes my overall impression). It’s stated that she had some deep repressed secret, which she chose to hide away in the (very decrepit) house she loved in, and that Leo used this spot to plant the idea that reality was a dream – but it’s never said precisely what this secret was.
Perhaps it’s the Lynchian in me, but I was expecting a reveal of incest or at least abuse in her past – something that could have made her whole storyline more powerful and resonant (though, in this case, Nolan WOULD have needed a loosening of the action sequences and conceptual trippiness to let this idea breathe). I’m not sure if keeping her secret under lock and key is a dramatic missed opportunity, or a tasteful invitation for us to use our imaginations (we can probably invent a trauma or even an amporphously defined existential ennui, more acute and painful than anything Nolan could come up with, if the rest of his characterizations are any indication). Actually, I fear it may just be another piece of glib laziness, another example of Nolan’s reliance on signifiers as if they can carry the weight of resonance without their signified: that maybe he didn’t include this detail because he didn’t consider it important. A decision which would speak volumes about the humanity he’s able to bring to his films (as an artist mind you, I’m not trying to get personal here) but which is sadly believable.
Ok, I need to check myself though: I actually enjoyed the movie. Had I written the review it would have included praise for the fun of the picture, the inventiveness of its delivery (the layering of dream-realities was particularly strong), the appeal of some of its set pieces (I loved the final city, though I would have loved to see much, much more), and the flavor of Nolan’s plotting (even if, as Bob points out, he does not balance dialogue and action appropriately) and his ability to explore ideas in a compelling fashion within the blockbuster framework. It’s just that, at the end of the day, I wish he could explore feelings as compellingly, particularly as he seems to be hellbent on utilizing emotionally tormented protagonists in every film he makes.
I will say that at the end of the picture it started to click a little more for me – that is to say, while I wasn’t exactly deeply “moved” by the conceit of the ending, I was affected and provoked by it (as well as the climactic flashbacks focusing on Leo’s troubled wife – though his “Noooooo!” is just as weak as Vader’s, to use a favorite Clark comparison). But for the most part, it felt like empty gestures and half-baked symbolism, rather than a lived-in reality. We always have only our own emotional experiences to go by, but I think there are various ways of at least estimating what the director put in, how it’s connecting to other audience members, and whether there’s a “higher” experience to be had even if one’s not having it at the moment (and, contrary to what I understand to be the tenets of postmodernism or deconstruction, I think these are worthy guesstimates to make). I’d bet the house on Nolan NOT putting much thought or effort into evoking resonance, on other audience members NOT being moved by the story (then again, I found it very difficult to see how anyone could be moved by what seemed to me the very trite, very underdelivered romance of The Fountain – yet numerous people were moved to tears by it so it’s not like my judgement of this is foolproof), and finally on there NOT being a “higher” resonance whose frequency I was not tuned into, except in the sense that a particularly sensitive person might be moved by every halfhearted attempt to pull or pretend to pull heartstrings, including those of TV commercials (actually, commercials are often more effective in this, albeit due to recourse to shameless tactics which Nolan at least avoids employing). In other words, I think I’ve diagnosed the film correctly here.
Dreams work on us not through trippy visuals or intellectual concepts but on a stream of pure feeling – something Ellen Page observes at one point in the movie (though we can’t sense what she’s talking about based upon what’s onscreen). In this regard, the movie fails but in a weird way I do kind of give it credit (and attribute some of its rare, distant zings of resonance) on its willingness to embrace the dreamworld rather than the virtual one, even though as Bob points out, the latter might have been a better match. At least it shows its head – if not quite its heart – are in the right place.
Yikes, I guess I wrote my review after all – ha ha.
Joel, you’ve written quite a lot here, so it’s hard to know where to go in from. It’s unfortunate that you missed the first 30 minutes, because some of that was actually my favorite stuff from the movie. The opening series of dream-within-dreams have a very nice Bunuelian medias-res feel to them (or maybe it just feels Bunuelian because of the train they’re riding on). If I’m not mistaken, you probably missed all of Ellen Page’s cool dream manipulation moments– though perhaps that’s a good thing, because it’s something Nolan never follows up on. He comes up with a few cool money-shots for the trailers and posters, but all the city-folding is wasted in regards to the rest of the story. Hell, you even miss out entirely on Lukas Haas’ character (it seems as though all he does nowadays are cameos designed to make people in the audience go “Hey, wasn’t he in that movie with Winona Ryder, or something?”).
Re: Mal’s secret– That was just pure laziness on Nolan’s part, I think. The decaying home and dollhouse inside made me think “traumatic childhood” too, but really the “secret” she’s burrying is the idea that she’s in a dream. Nolan kinda screws the pooch with the over-the-top ambiguity of the top in those moments. Frankly, I didn’t like Cotilard much in the movie at all, her accent threw all the nuances of the role off. Watanabe was the same at times, but his role is lighter, and he has at least some humor to pull it off. He was much better, at least, than the painfully telegraphed jokey “charm” from Eames, who’s really little more than a British accent and a few days without shaving.
Nolan might be part of the video-game generation, but I think part of his problem is precisely that he seems to avoid the video-game aspects of the ideas he’s dealing with. The Wachowskis and Cronenberg embraced them fully, and as such movies like “The Matrix” and “eXistenZ” succeed where “Inception” mostly limps because they know what they’re about. They can use the lexicon of gaming and the modern technology that surrounds it, while Nolan fumbles about with really clumsy exposition for endless amounts of time.
I liked Watanabe too. Oddly enough, I thought Leo had a bit more gravitas here than he usually does (maybe it’s just because they paired him with Page) but he didn’t have much to work with. I’m not sure how much I missed – I came in when DiCaprio & Gordon-Leavitt were talking in a room and then Leo called his kids (after which Watanabe, whom I liked as well, unveils the central plot device). Some beat-up guy was in a helicopter (Haas?) but I had no clue who he was.
So I did see the cool in media res dream sequence with Page, where I thought the “you’re dreaming now” gag worked quite well and, as you say, did have a rather Bunuelian air about it, come to think of it.
Well, at least you didn’t miss the city-folding. You did miss the first dream-within-a-dream sequence from the opening, though, which is what I thought was Bunuelian (again, probably just because they all wake up on a train). Leo and Watanabe’s scenes, at times, felt the strongest emotional stuff in the movie, though really in the exact wrong way. When Leo pleads with Old Watanabe to “come back so we can be young men together”, it seemed as though it belonged in a movie in which they were gay lovers, and Leo was on some sci-fi Orphean quest to save him from the abyss of his own subconcious. And you know, I think I would’ve liked that movie a hell of a lot more than what we got here. But it shows the danger of pushing your actors to be too emotional sometimes, because it is easy to read stuff into any significantly charged reading.
Re: Nolan’s lack of humor/irony. You point out Leo’s pained scream at Mal’s death and compare it to Vader’s cartoonish “Noooo!” in ROTS. What makes the Vader scream excusable, I think, is the fact that over three decades time, Lucas had turned the “Noooo!” moment into something of a “Star Wars” cliche, so playing it up so ludicrously OTT dramatic has a nice B-movie style self-parody effect to it. It’s intented unintented laughter. A little bit of that somewhere in Nolan’s film might’ve helped, especially during the extended “No, seriously, spies on skis!” sequence. By playing it straight, it’s a classic example of trying to have your cake and eat it too, trying to go for the Bond feel but not willing to be true to the sheer ridiculousness of a Bond premise. Kaufman gets the balance right in his cerebral satires, I think. Enough laughter to get the gestalts to come out naturally.
The spies on ski’s sequence made me laugh, since as I said below that Nolan just wants to make a Bond film so bad he’s willing to re-shoot sequences that Bond films old enough to have Roger Moore in them attempted.
I mean a dream jump to an arctic GI JOE base? WTF.
Ha, Stephen Sommers’ “GI Joe” was a far better Bond movie than “Inception” was. At least it had the common sense not to take itself too seriously. Joseph Gordon Levitt was cool enough as Cobra Commander (too bad his mask sucked, though), but it was cooler to see Mr. Eko again.
And, of course, IT HAS NINJAS!!! “Inception” could’ve used some of those.
Finally saw ‘Inception’ today. I must say, A) Bob, you’ve offered a rather spot on review here, and B) Nolan has finally (almost) made the movie he’s always wanted to, or at least made the biggest move towards doing the film he wants to, and that’s a Bond film with at least two or three ‘Heat’ moments (specifically the long bank robbery/street shootout that ends ‘Heat’s second act). I certainly wouldn’t call him an auteur, yes I think is films have some relation… but this does not make one an auteur in my eyes. Also, man does that man love him some enhanced interrogation technique(s).
I think the thing that struck me the most about this film though was how the actual film is an ‘Inception’ too; the press and reviews for it had planted some idea in my brain that the film was about dreams or dream worlds when it fact it says nothing coherent or enlightened about either (and I don’t really think it pretends to either). Rather it’s a curious (to me) public that wants intellectualism, or finds intellectualism when none is present that has commented on this film in media circles. Consider this thread and this review, it’s all about dream analysis, and portrayal and yet this is nowhere to be found (a point Bob is rather clear and correct on). Nolan needs to stop pretending he’s an intellectual art filmmaker, he needs to just concentrate on reality-based action-thrillers/whodunnits. He’s not Stanley Kubrick, and at this point I’m not even sure he’s Steven Spielberg (who is no genius in my eyes). Actually I think the director Nolan is most like, to me, is M. Night, his films are all ‘twists’ or ‘concepts’, where the film is about the concept rather then the other way around– Nolan is better then M. Night’s in that he has less of an ego and doesn’t believe himself to be a great screenwriter too, so his films are typically not monumental disasters.
So as such, since the film is not many of the things I think it wants to be, and often doesn’t even try to be, I think it’s a completely fine 2 hours of summer entertainment. I think most of the action set pieces (specifically an early one involving a footrace) are quite a bit cleaner and crisper then most of what ‘The Dark Knight’ offered, so that shows a leap somewhat, or that Nolan at least to some of the criticism to heart. But damn some of the hyperbola around it in the press is beyond absurd.
Oh and Joseph Gorden-Levitt (or whatever his name is) is going to be a super star if he isn’t already. He could act circles around Shia LeDouche, and handle a franchise quite a bit better too. I also like Ellen Page, she’s easy on my eyes, and surprisingly, I think she could handle more range though she seems destined to hipsters role typecasting.
I can see your Nolan comparison to M. Night Shitamalan. The one difference is that there will never be a Memento from the latter director. He can only dream of making a film that good…..
“Unbreakable” was a damn good movie, I thought. Shyamalan found a nice place to play with varrying degrees of seriousness and play in the superhero-origin mythos of comic-books, and one that’s familiar enough for people to latch onto it. Problem is it wasn’t sold as what it was, but instead as another big MYSTERY movie, and people bailed on it. Too bad.
While I’m not a great fan of UNBREAKABLE, I think it’s easily his best film.
Shyamalan needs the tight confines of a genre to do anything interesting. “The Sixth Sense” is a pathetically obvious movie, but a passable attempt at a ghost-story. “Unbreakable” is a genuinely surprising and authentic feeling superhero tale– it’s just too bad he never developed it beyond the first chapter. “Signs” is mostly a rather cool little UFO-paranoia story, until it takes an eye-rollingly lame turn into God-land.
“The Village” is where things started to go off the rails for him– there IS a genre it could’ve fit into (rustic dystopia, not unlike the classic children’s novel “The Giver”) but he doesn’t commit to it. “Lady in the Water” sorta fits into a bedtime story genre, but it’s so infantile it just comes across as blindingly stupid. “The Happening” almost works as a pure pulpy B-movie, but honestly I think he tries too hard to make it a “so-bad-it’s-good” flick.
I haven’t seen “The Last Airbender”, but I can say that it looks rather dark and joyless compared to the Nickelodeon cartoon “Avatar”, which is probably the best American animated series since “Aeon Flux”.
Oh, and has anyone else seen his first two movies? I’ve not seen “Praying With Anger”, but for a long time my sister really liked “Wide Awake” for some reason– a movie about a young boy getting over the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia!) by experimenting with different religions. It has Rosie O’Donnell as a nun. Really, it’s that bad.
I liked Unbreakable too. Everyone knocked the TV appearance of the alien in Signs (“it looks fake”), but I thought it was handled quite deftly, the footage being so casual and sloppy and then an extraterrestrial just casually strolling into frame. Good stuff (all I remember from the rest of the film, which I enjoyed at the time, is Joaquin Phoenx wearing a tin hat – perhaps it told him to grow a beard? – and Gibson faith-healing his son or something to that effect).
Like Bob, I guessed Sixth Sense’s secret in advance (though apparently not as early in the movie as he did) but re-watching it recently I was still entertained. Thing is, Shymalan is a skilled director; he knows how to put a scene together and has that visual storytelling touch that few mainstream directors of his generation can muster. What kills him is bad dialogue and a bigger problem that’s part of – a strained seriousness which the silliness and self-importance of his conceits can’t contain. He branded himself too early, and now he wears it like an albatross.
The Village was what killed it for me – not the secret, or said secret’s predictability, or the overall conceit, which I actually kind of liked. No, it was the wretched dialogue and stilted performances and generally ridiculous-but-not-recognizing-ridiculousness of the whole thing that did it in. I wonder if he’ll ever come back, or if he’s dug himself in too deep. I didn’t see Lady in the Water or The Happening but based on The Village, I’ve no trouble believing the worst…
“The Village” lacks the courage to let its dystopia be a dystopia. It ends on such an odd note, seemingly endorsing the adults’ decision to create a backwards fantasy world out in the middle of the woods. It’d be as if “The Prisoner” ended with Patrick McGoohan realizing that his captors at Port Merion were actually the GOOD guys, all along. The script/performance problems I could’ve stomached, if it weren’t for the gutless ending– I would’ve even preferred him rooting for the status-quo like he does if he’d at least tried to be clear about his message, instead of caring only about the shock of the revelation. The sooner he stops caring about being such a cinematic Chubby Checker, the better off he’ll be.
Bob,
The film does not ‘endorse’ the decision. It shows it.
I don’t think the ending is gutless at all. A gutless ending would be a happy ending – let’s all frolic in the streets. Instead we have a society so wrapped up in guilt and fear that they cannot escape the Village or themselves.
The revelation for me is not particularly important (I knew it beforehand and still thoroughly enjoyed the film) but the motivations and emotions of the characters which are clear and understandable throughout.
I thought The Happening was awful and UNBREAKABLE OK at best but the rest (not including THE LAST AIRBENDER) are really good.
Stephen, very good point. Perhaps I’m wrong about the way Shyamalan fence-sits on the morality of the Village itself, and the film is helped by the way he refuses to paint the adults as evil Big Brothers. It’s similar to how Lucas in “THX 1138″ never really makes the dystopian society outwardly malevolent by manipulative means– he just lets the enviornment and situation speak for itself, and lets the audience decide if it’s a world they’d like to live in or not (perhaps the fact that Jamie wouldn’t mind it so much for all the bald ladies is testament to how well the film works). I may have to revisit this film, Stephen, and that’ll be TWO movies you’ve gotten me to reconsider lately, along with “A.I.”…
I haven’t seen “The Last Airbender”, and judging from all the reviews, I don’t really need to, probably. I will say that all the publicity the film got motivated me to check out the Nickelodeon cartoon “Avatar” that the movie’s based on, and for that, I’m glad it was made. I’d count it as the best piece of American animation since the likes of “Aeon Flux”, and maybe even close to Ghibli quality (that might be hyperbole, but hey, why not?).
Yes,
I agree about THX. That’s a film that grows on me as time goes by. I don’t think Lucas has put a foot wrong in his career (AMERICAN GRAFFITI is really good too).
“perhaps the fact that Jamie wouldn’t mind it so much for all the bald ladies is testament to how well the film works”
Haha!
re THE LAST AIRBENDER, when it gets to TV or maybe super-cheap on DVD I’ll give it a try. I do feel sorry for films that are criticised like this and would always want to give them a chance (especially as I heard similar things for LADY IN THE WATER, which I did like).
I was about to watch some AEON FLUX re the animation countdown that I hope I’ll be doing soon. Are there any other recent American animations you’d recommend that I might not know of?
Ghibli quality, eh? That’s some mighty big talk. Next thing you know I’ll be saying CITIZEN KANE is overrated(!)
http://www.thepervertsguide.com/extras_zizek_thevillage.html
THE VILLAGE
Slavoj Zizek
Those who all too easily dismiss Night M. Shyamalan’s films as the lowest of the New Age kitsch are in for some surprises. The Village takes place in a Pennsylvania village cut off from the rest of the world and surrounded by woods full of dangerous monsters known to the villagers as ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of.’ Most villagers are content to live with a bargain they made with the creatures: they don’t enter the forest, the creatures don’t enter the town. Conflict arises when the young Lucius Hunt wishes to leave the village in search of new medicines, and the pact is broken. Lucius and Ivy Walker, the village leader’s blind daughter, decide to get married, which makes the village idiot really jealous; he stabs Lucius and nearly kills him, leaving him at the mercy of an infection that requires medicines from the outside world. Ivy’s father then tells her about the town’s secret: there are no monsters, and the year isn’t really 1897. The town elders were part of a 20th-century crime victims’ support group which decided to withdraw from it completely; Walker’s father had been a millionaire businessman, so they bought a bunch of land, called it a ‘wildlife preserve,’ surrounded it with a big fence and lots of guards, bribed government officials to reroute airplanes away from the community, and moved inside, concocting the story about ‘those we do not speak of’ to keep anyone from leaving. With her father’s blessing, Ivy slips outside, meets a friendly security guard who gives her some medicine, and returns to save her betrothed’s life. So, at the film’s end, the village elders decide to go on with their secluded lives: the village idiot’s death can be presented to the non-initiated as a proof that the creatures exist, confirming the founding myth of the community.
Sacrificial logic is thus reasserted as the condition of a community, as its secret bond – no wonder that most of the critics dismissed the film as the worst case of ideological cocooning: “It’s easy to understand why he’s attracted to setting a movie in a period where people proclaimed their emotions in full and heartfelt sentences, or why he enjoys building a village that’s impenetrable to the outside world. He’s not making movies. He’s making cocoons.” 1 The desire underlying the film is thus the desire to recreate a closed universe of authenticity in which innocence is protected from the corrosive force of modernity: “It’s all about how to protect your innocence from getting hurt by the ‘creatures’ in your life; the desire to protect your children from going into the unknown. If these ‘creatures’ have hurt you, you don’t want them to hurt your children and the younger generation may be willing to risk that.” 2
Upon a closer look, however, the film reveals itself to be much more ambiguous. When reviewers noticed that “the movie is in H.P. Lovecraft territory: severe, wintry New England palette; a suggestion of inbreeding; hushed mentions of ‘The Old Ones,’ ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’,” 3 they as a rule forgot to mention the political context: let us not forget that the 19th century self-subsistent community also refers to the many utopian-socialist communities that thrived in the late 19th century US. This does not mean that the Lovecraft reference to supernatural horror is just a mask, a false lure. We have two universes: the modern open “risk society” versus the safety of the old secluded universe of Meaning – but the price of Meaning is a finite closed space guarded by unnamable Monsters. Evil is not simply excluded in this closed utopian space – it is transformed into a mythic threat with which the community establishes a temporary truce and against which it has to maintain a permanent state of emergency.
The “Deleted Scenes” special feature on the DVD release all too often makes the viewer only realize that the director was right to delete these scenes – however, in the DVD edition of Village, there is an exception to this rule. One of the deleted scenes is that of a “Drill”: Walker rings the bell, giving to the community the signal to practice the fast retreat into underground shelters in the case of the creatures’ attack – as if authentic community is only possible in the conditions of a permanent threat, in a continuous state of emergency. 4
This threat is, as we learn, in the best “totalitarian” manner staged by the inner circle (“elders”) of the community itself, in order to prevent the non-initiated youngsters to leave the village and risk the passage through the forest to the decadent “towns.” The “evil” itself has to be redoubled: the “real” evil of late-capitalist social disintegration has to be transposed into the archaic magic-mythic evil of “creatures.” The “Evil” IS a part of the “inner circle” itself, IMAGINED by its members. Are we here not back at Chesterton’s Thursday, in which the highest police authority IS the same person as the super-criminal, staging a battle with himself? In a proto-Hegelian way, the external threat the community is fighting is its own inherent essence… 5
And what if this is true in a much more radical way than it may appear? What if the true Evil of our societies is not the capitalist dynamics as such, but the attempts to extricate ourselves from it (while profiting from it), to carve out self-enclosed communal spaces, from “gated communities” to exclusive racial or religious groups? That is to say, is the point of The Village not precisely to demonstrate that, today, a return to an authentic community in which speech still directly expresses true emotions, etc. – the village of the socialist utopia – is a fake which can only be staged as a spectacle for the very rich? The exemplary figure of Evil are today not ordinary consumers who pollute environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those (top managers, etc.) who, while fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation and pollution, exempt themselves from the results of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wild preserves, etc.
1. “Idiot. The case against M. Night Shyamalan,” by Michael Agger, http://slate.msn.com/id/2104567
2. Quoted from http://www.glidemagazine.com/articles120.html
3. David Edelstein, on http://slate.msn.com/id/2104512
4. One of the more stupid reproaches to the film (not unlike the same reproach to Hitchcock’s Vertigo) is that it spoils the suspense by disclosing the secret already two thirds into the film – this very knowledge makes the last third all the more interesting. That is to say, the film’s last third – more precisely, Ivy’s painfully slow progress through the forest – confronts us with a clear enigma (or, as some would have put it, narrative inconsistency): why is Ivy afraid of the Creatures, why are the Creatures still presented as a mythic threat, although she already knows that Creatures don’t exist, that they are a staged fake? In another deleted scene, Ivy, after hearing the ominous (and, as we know, artificially generated) sounds that announce the proximity of the Creatures, cries with desperate intensity: “It is for love that I am here. So I beg you to let me cross!” – why does she do it if she knows there are no Creatures? She knows very well, but… there is more reality in the haunting irreal specters than in direct reality itself.
5. Here, Nicholas Meyer is also right in his Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: within the diegetic space of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Moriarty, the arch-criminal – “Napoleon of crime” – and Holmes’ ultimate opponent, is clearly a fantasy of Holmes himself, his double, his Dark Half: in the opening pages of Meyer’s novel, Watson is visited by Moriarty, a humble mathematics professor, who complains to Watson that Holmes is obsessed with the idée fixe that he is the master criminal; to cure Holmes, Watson lures him to Vienna, to Freud’s house.
Dualist, I think Kaleem Hasan (who is also a Village fan) posted that essay here before. Fact is, I actually enjoy the Twilight Zone premise of the film – it’s the delivery, particularly the dialogue and performances, which I found grating.
Movieman,
I’m not that big a fan of Shyamalan and The Village in particular. But Zizek offers persuasive argument there.
“No, it was the wretched dialogue and stilted performances and generally ridiculous-but-not-recognizing-ridiculousness of the whole thing that did it in.”
I hear these points. This is also true of most of his films as you rightly note. It seemed okay in earlier films, but became alarmingly obvious (and annoying) as the ideas and the set-up in later films became farcical and thin..
What I like about his work is the ambiance, the aural-visual sense of immediacy. As much as the conceited theme of “Signs” puts us off in hindsight, consider the individual scenes on their own. The shot making, editing pattern, the sound mixing and background score, he’s able to create a gripping feel and grim mood.
I wish he hires a proper screenwriter to make more of his ideas, and allow his craft to make more of the text.
“(perhaps the fact that Jamie wouldn’t mind it so much for all the bald ladies is testament to how well the film works)”
Yes! I’m glad you remembered that comment I’ve made. Perhaps when you start your sci-fi countdown I’ll finally write that piece “Why I could live in the dystopia that is THX-1138 and by happy” that I’ve wanted too for a while. I’ll just have to find those notes, and revisit the film (which would be a treat)…
Stephen, like I said, my appraisal of Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is probably hyperbole when I say that it’s close to Ghibli quality, but I think it’s a reach worth making if it gets people to check it out (especially with how its reputation might be tarnished with Shyamalan’s film).
As for other American animation as of recent– I dig “The Clone Wars” (which is led by “Aeon Flux” producer Catherine Winder and “Avatar: TLA” director Dave Filoni), but fun as it is, it’s mostly just a footnote to Lucas’ work in general. We’re both fans of the classic “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” era of animated series, but I’d say that Bruce Timm and Paul Dini’s work only got better the more subjects they tackled from the DC Universe– their series for “Superman”, “Batman Beyond” and especially their “Justice League” programs kept raising the bar time and again, adapting figures and stories from the cherished continuity in ways both imaginative and definative. Whoever decided to cast Jeffrey “Re-Animator” Coombs as Steve Ditko’s the Question deserves a hearty pat on the back.
There are a lot of fans of Gendy Tartakovsky’s “Samurai Jack”, but I think it’s sorta overrated, frankly, as is most of Cartoon Network’s line-up. Craig McCracken’s “Powerpuff Girls” was okay, and I really dug his later “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends”, but even that’s not really in the same league as other stuff. Jackson Publick’s “Venture Brothers” is fun, but like so many Gen-X American cartoons, it’s more or less impossible to get into unless you’re already a hardcore fan of forgotten stuff like “Johnny Quest”.
I was about to call “ReBoot” a clever piece of American animation, a cool little blend of “Tron” sci-fi and Chuck Jones, but then I remembered, it’s Canadian. Maybe you’d best check up on their cartoons too, eh?
Dualist– I skimmed through the Zizek article (he’s written before on the ironically Christological connections in the “Star Wars” prequels, hasn’t he?), but I loved the point he raised about Holmes and Moriarty in Nicholas Meyer’s expert pastiche “The Seven Per-Cent Solution”. Ordinarily I’m not one to go against Conan-Doyle’s canon, but the argument of Moriarty’s “Napoleon of Crime” being a mere imaginary foil for the legendary Great Detective is one that makes a great deal of psychological sense– if Holmes were going to dream up a bad guy to represent all his sexual anxieties, he’d pretty much have to create an equal to his talents, a supervillain to his superheroic superego. Still, I prefer the Moriarty that appears in Alan Moore’s “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” the best– “M” can stand for quite a lot of names, can’t it?
And Jamie– I’ll be waiting for that essay. Should make for a very enlightening read. Seriously. Part of why “THX 1138″ works so well is that, with the right pair of eyes, it really doesn’t look all that bad. Hell, it doesn’t even really look all that hard to live in or escape from, when you get right down to it. That’s sort of the point. Its biggest defense is the way it conditions its inhabitants to never even try.
Dualist, on this we agree. Shymalan is a very skilled filmmaker – something people lose sight of because his the branding and the gimmicks get so grating. He would definitely benefit from collaborating with a writer (not sure if he did on The Last Airbender). I had pretty much the same reaction to Signs as you did, that it quite masterful as an exercise in suspense. Indeed, that general film didn’t bother me very much, and it was not until The Village that I was turned off. And I still think that alien cameo in a home video was brilliant (and actually pretty scary)!
Jamie, I’d like to read that too. The blurred line between dystopia/utopia (though it’s not really present for me in THX) is a fascinating one – Brave New World and The Giver are two other works that pop to mind.
Bob,
Thanks – that’s quite a list. I have seen a few. “Clone Wars” is a good addition to the universe and the DC cartoons are better than I expected. I started to watch AEON FLUX yesterday and I’ll get to the others.
The more thorough you are, unfortunately, the more you rue the stuff you haven’t seen.
I will say– there’s a clear difference between the earlier Tartakovsky 2D “Clone Wars” (which I’m not a big fan of– it’s just “Samurai Jack” in “Star Wars” drag) and the current CG animated series from Lucasfilm animation (which I’m assuming is what you’ve seen).
Also, I have loads of affection for Art Clokey’s “Gumby” series. There’s a great surreal, absurdist flair to both incarnations of the show, and really, stop-motion isn’t something you see every day for television. Very time consuming and expensive.
Joel– “The Giver”? Really? I mean, sure, it’s a good book, especially for children. But I don’t think it really fence-sits in the same way that THX or “The Village” do, really. Yeah, Lois Lowry takes a long while to allow the full extent of the community’s menace to really become clear, but once it is, I think you’d be hard pressed to find any reader willing to live there. It reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short, “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which makes a rather chilling point about the psychological price for any so-called perfect society, and how basically the only difference between utopias and dystopias is whether you think the sacrifice is worth it.
But my point is that it’s a dystopia disguised as a utopia. I think this is more clearly the case with The Giver than, say, THX 1138. Actually, I’d say it’s even more the case with The Giver than Brave New World – Huxley’s world is completely devoid of spiritual value, whereas The Giver makes a pretense (a thin one when the depths of pain and pleasure outside The Community are revealed) of “nurturing”, and “community,” and all sorts of other new-agey, PC values. I always saw the world of that book is particularly frightening because it is comforting in a way, because it’s soft, because despite ironing out complexities it leaves a residue of domestic contentment and communal spirit. It’s very much a dystopia belonging to the late 20th century, incorporating all the ideals that have taken form alongside increased disillusionment with the chaos of modern society; unlike Brave New World’s shrill consumerism it has a tempting quality for those who have shaken off the clarion calls of past, more rigidly rational utopias.
I suspect you may agree, but I think it’s a masterpiece of children’s literature, one I’m revisiting now. It shook me probably more than any other book ever has and if I’ve one pipe dream project, it would be to translate The Giver onto film (it’s nearly been adapted numerous times – I remember once Elijah Wood was attached – but never followed through on; IMDb has had an “in-preproduction” listing for it for years now). This would be quite a challenge – particularly as so many of the book’s devices are very much literary conceits; an adaptation true to the spirit would have to not be by the letter. Ultimately it might be a futile exercise, and The Giver might belong best to the page, but the notion fascinates me nonetheless.
Weirdly, and rather perversely, I always imagined Harrison Ford as the aged Receiver. Not sure why…
You see MovieMan, as Bob and I discussed my ‘THX-1138′essay idea before, I wouldn’t be arguing that it’s a dystopia parading as a utopia, I’d argue that it is just somewhere I’d happily live in. It’s not a dystopia at all (if I thought it was and still wanted to live in it man would I be a glutton for punishment), rather it’s a world that presupposes all our current wants and desires–things that if we removed them we’d think we are living in a dystopian hell, but if we were never conditioned to want them I’d gladly live in that world. The fact that it’s sexless, and everyone shaves there head is just a fantastic bonus. Oh and it’s clean as hell, and public transportation is efficient.
I’ll leave the rest to the essay, that I think I’ve decided I must write now to coincide with Bob’s future sci-fi countdown.
Jamie– it’s also, when you get right down to it, rather easy to game the system and live get what you want out of it, so long as you know what you’re doing. That’s one of the film’s main messages– a prison without walls is ultimately one of your own making, and one that you can escape from without much struggle other than that of your own interior will.
Yep, and the chief reason I like the film. It’s Sartre-ian in this way… we define our world/lives. If it’s shitty then it’s becomes we refuse to alter it, and if it’s good then it’s because we’ve made it such.
Really a section of Godard’s ‘Vivre sa Vie’ comes to mind (I’ve watched it again recently), I wish I could find it. It’s where Anna speaks in the bar about how life is what we make of it, if it’s bad it’s only because our perception of it doesn’t change (we are really prisoners in the mind), ect. It’s where she speaks with a female coworker. I can pop the dvd in and transcribe it if you don’t know the part. Or the part in CLOSER where Clive Owen (Larry) speaks to Jude Law (Dan):
Dan: I want Anna back.
Larry: She’s made her choice.
Dan: I owe you an apology. I fell in love with her. My intention was not to make you suffer.
Larry: So where’s the apology? Ya cunt.
Dan: I apologize. If you love her you’ll let her go so she can be happy.
Larry: She doesn’t want to be happy.
Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.
Larry: Depressives don’t. They want to be unhappy to confirm they’re depressed. If they were happy they couldn’t be depressed anymore. They’d have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.
but damn, I won’t speak on it any more, gotta leave somethign for the essay.
Yes, it’s an interesting worldview, even though I don’t really know if I believe in it myself. It’s certainly useful as a device for empowerment and motivation, but to a certain extent it’s a little unrealistic. Modern society poses all kinds of very real obstacles that can’t be overcome quite as simply (if not to say easily) as they are in THX. It’s funny, in that sense, that between the two, “Star Wars” is actually the more realistic picture of how man deals with conflicts, be they military, spiritual or political in nature. Sometimes it’s not enough to simply get up and decide to run away, as Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance and Don Pedro Colley do– sometimes you have to put up your dukes (literally or figuratively) and give’em the ol’ one-two.
At the other end of this extreme, I’d say, is the rather opressive worldview you have in something like “Lost”, where the source of everyone’s troubles can all be fairly easily traced to one thing, the Island. That scene at the end of the fifth season, where Ben Linus, a man who’d lost pretty much everything in serving the Island, finally came face to face with Jacob, his elusive and ultimately uncaring leader, had a palpable, heartbreaking quality to it. What if Job had been given the means to avenge himself of all the misery God had allowed to happen to him?
Sometimes we’re just looking for people to blame for all our suffering, but sometimes that blame is deserved. Right now we’re only just at the end, I’d say, of a decade-long cultural fascination with revenge-stories, which oddly stretches right back to Nolan’s own “Memento”. “Inception”, on the other hand, seems to be more consumed by a fascination with personal guilt, something TDK had shades of before it. Instead of looking outward, for blame, we’re looking inward, developing a cinema of psychological self-flagelation.
Oh, and Joel– I think there’s more potential in a cinematic version of “The Giver” than you seem to. Most of it would probably work in a fairly straight transition, and some of the most interesting stuff (gradual freeing of the mind marked by loss of chemically imposed colorblindness) could actually fare far better on film than the page (then again, that particular morsel has already been swallowed by “Pleasantville”, itself a lite form of dystopia, one that really isn’t as good as it seems to think it is).
As for Ford, I always saw the Reciever as an late-stage Sean Connery, say from the period where he did aged lotharios in stuff like “Medicine Man” and “The Russia House” (which I’m oddly fond of, nowadays– too bad they didn’t actually get a REAL RUSSIAN ACTRESS for the love interest).
Well, I suppose dystopia is in the eye of the beholder then? Or to paraphrase the terrorist/freedom-fighter conundrum, one man’s dystopia is another man’s utopia.
The only problem I have with your formulation vis a vis THX though, is that as I remember it they aren’t allowed to escape – Duvall gets away, but aren’t the robocops intending to kill him for wanting out? This seems to make it more akin to the 1984 dystopian paradigm rather than the Brave New World one (which seems to fit more what you’re talking about here).
As for the worldview, I can’t say I share it 100% because I see human beings as heavily conditioned by their environment. (At times I humor a purely deterministic worldview, but the problem is that if said worldview is true it makes no difference whether or not I accept whereas if it’s untrue it’s actually harmful if I accept it. So I would rather make the assumption of free-will, seems like a better idea all-around.)
Which means, aside from all questions of freedom and responsibility, that happiness is so variable and so conditional I don’t think it’s all up to the individual. Even if I COULD choose to live “happily” in the THX world, my happiness would not be the same as it would in another. And it might very well be lacking something in comparison. But I’ll try to save the rest of my thoughts for this eventual essay, which like Bob I eagerly await!
As for the shift from revenge to guilt, that’s a great point Bob, and worth an essay in itself. Dark Knight could be seen as transitional in that regard, as it incorporates both themes but eventually transfigures the revenge desire into guilt (with Batman willingly accepting the martyr role at film’s end).
P.S. Jamie, your thoughts on this matter seem very akin to Buddhist/Hindu thinking, which I find intriguing. Though I’m not sure if the happiness you speak of is a truly sublime consciousness or just contentment. Btw, Have you read Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy? I once owned it (though my cousin took it and never gave it back!) and find Huxley’s notions fascinating – that all mystical experience points to the same phenomenon, regardless of whatever the cause or the tradition within which it arises. I’m not totally sure I buy it anymore, though I think there’s a grain of truth there (or rather several tons of said grains).
But the paths to happiness or liberation are different for everyone and I don’t think I could find mine in a THX world. Ultimately I think the optimal society for pursuing happiness is a pluralistic one with greater opportunity than our own currently provides, rather than a limited, narrow world such as that of THX (where the citizen is cut off/”protected” from the outside world, even if we remove the more paternalistic elements like the robocops).
Same thing goes for, to return to Huxley again, Brave New World. The people there are content, but there’s so much they’re missing out on – again back to The Giver. You give up pain but with it deep pleasure, you sacrifice knowledge for security, you stay in Eden (best-case scenario) but at the cost of remaining blinkered. As Bob says, is the sacrifice worth it? Maybe so, maybe not, I suppose – but maybe the best model if the Matrix one where you choose which pill to take (then again, is it possible to go back? the questions continue)…
Oh I definitely think that there’s potential (one reason it keeps getting put into development) but also that there are big challenges – a good thing, imo (one reason it keeps getting stalled, though; this isn’t such a good thing inside the industry). Re: Connery/Ford, unsurprising, they are father & son after all…
Quick point with the robocops (I like to call’em MicroCHiPS– Get it? Get it?): They’re not trying to kill THX, just put him back in prison. And as we already saw in the prison itself, they’re actually not that hard to beat if you’re determined enough (funny bit– the guy who pouds the robot’s face in is named NCH, another sly/cheap philosopher joke). The only deaths in the film are either accidental, like the various plant explosions, SRT/Don Pedro Colley’s car crash, or ambiguous– we never do find out what happened to LUH, though it’s implied that her name was passed down to the child she and THX had concieved, perhaps suggesting complications with her pregnancy, thus making her another possible accidental casualty. The only death resulting from outright violence is when THX kills one of the garage monkey-things in his escape (and all his friends get sad and mourn him– poor garage monkey-things!). So again, everything is functionally up to the audience to decide.
I see – I misremembered/misunderstood. So then it’s closer to the Brave New World paradigm, inasmuch as the repression is more or less passive (the robocops are still there, but provide a weak barrier). Still, no thanks for me!
That’s the natural conclusion. Still, it’s important that the film remains objective enough for you to reach that conclusion on your own, rather than being explicitly told that the system they’re in is EEEEEEEVIL. If nothing less, there’s a liberating quality to the way the movie can successfully engineer a response like yours most of the time, as long as the mind remains open (even if only on a near-subconscious, “Matrix”-like level of awareness) to the idea of that world being not so bad. Sure, every once in a while you’ll get someone like Jamie who sees the bright side of it, but THX is a clasic because it successfully wins over most every other viewer as a convert without preaching to the choir.
Come to think of it, this very kind of objective filmmaking is exactly what Nolan lacks, himself. It shows how he’s still in Lucas’ shadow, more or less– “THX 1138″ is better at inception than “Inception” is.
but still MovieMan you are rejecting the THX world because you know an alternative, the point of my argument will be two fold: 1) it presupposes knowledge of any other world (which is the reality of life), meaning that if you were born into the THX world you probably wouldn’t mind it–and you’d have no reason to because nothing about it is damaging to innate human behavior. And then 2) I hope to make a secondary argument that even with preknown knowledge of another reality it STILL holds up as a livable desired world (a major reason I think this is because it presents a future, a future that looks brighter then the one that looks to be in our sights 50 or 100 years down the line). From my perspective anyway.
And no I haven’t read the Huxley you mention, and actually as long as we are on the subject, I’ve never read ANY Huxley, though I do own ‘Brave New World’ (who doesn’t?) but I haven’t gotten around to it. It seems to write this piece I probably should huh?
As long as we are at it Bob and MovieMan, and I am writing what I am in regards to THX, you two should take the exact idea I’m talking about and watch de Heer’s BAD BOY BUBBY and apply your same thinking. There is a film that is dropping a person with a blank slate as a mind into OUR real world and showing the horrors that we don’t feel because it is our reality. Whereas a world like THX you see as ‘scary’ or ‘horrific’ for no real reason, other then it seems to be limiting in some way from what your current reality is. BAD BOY BUBBY is THX but in OUR real world, and as such quite a bit more dystopian to me.
Either way if we all wrote about these two films together it would make for a hell of a round table discussion.
Jamie, I’m actually sort of somewhere in between yours and Joel’s way of thinking here. I wouldn’t want to live in the world of THX indefinately, and were I born into it I’d like to think I’d be like Duvall’s character and aspire to escape (if I were lucky enough to be mated with somebody like LUH– she’s the real rebel). But if such a world existed, I’d DEFINITELY want to visit it for a short period, perhaps on a post-apocalyptic student exchange program, or something. It may be restrictive, but MAN would it be a fascinating place to bum around for a while. Just like I might’ve wanted to visit the Soviet Union back in the day, a dystopia like that would be a great place to learn from, but I’d be in no hurry to get a green card.
Thanks, Bob.
I’ve made a note of GUMBY.
Jamie, if you’ve got time I’d definitely give Brave New World a whirl. It’s very pertinent to what you’re discussing – both because it implicitly poses the same question (“What’s wrong with this world? Everyone seems happy.”) and because its dys/utopia is quite different from THX’s.
To me, THX is a prison. Our own world is far from perfect – I don’t think I need Bad Boy Bubby to remind me of that (though I’m intrigued to see it – never heard of it till now); but it – even at its worst – is not AS drenched in ignorance and repression as THX’s. In some regards, it’s much worse but overall I would rather live in a world where the freedom and the responsibility are mine to make what I will of it. Yes, we are born into conditions and circumstances which direct our thoughts and actions though I’m not sure I believe they are as ironclad as you do (and now we seem to have come 180 degrees, as originally I was arguing for the more deterministic outlook). But THX does not resolve that problem, it makes it worse. I think going for it would be to fall into the old “well, we’re all prisoners anyway so might as well select the cushiest prison” which is one of the most dangerous tricks in the book.
Have you read The Giver? Despite being written for a young audience, and using simple language (or perhaps because of this) it’s very powerful – might be another good read before the THX essay, just to draw in another comparison (and it will be a pretty quick one too). I’ll try to save the rest of my arguments/thoughts for when that essay goes up!
Jamie, looking at the summary for Bad Boy Bubby, it seems to have some overlap with The Wild Child and The Engima of Kasper Hauser. I haven’t seen either of those films, but I’m given to understand that Truffaut is more or less sympathetic to the “civilizing” of the titular boy, while Herzog views it, at best, askance if not with downright hostility.
A comment I left on Allan’s review of Hauser a while back sums up my ambivalence about whether or not ignorance is bliss:
http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/the-enigma-of-kaspar-hauser-no-31/#comment-9768
No, I’ve never read ‘the giver’ either. perhaps I’ll have to seek that out too.
I also think you’ve misunderstood some of my arguments, (but as I’ve consciously saved my central points for the essay that’s more then understandable) I actually am not arguing for a ‘better prison’ I’m actually arguing for a more defined and easier to break out of prison. The central goal of life is for ultimate freedom, and that’s more easily understood (and oddly enough achieved) in THX-1138. I’m a Sartre devotee as I’ve said in the past, it’s a similar argument as to the one he makes, which was that basically the perfect world for him to achieve ‘perfection’ (realize being, existence, revolution, and freedom) was in Nazi-occupied France. Day to day you are confronted with real death, and each day you say ‘No’ you have achieved something profound, eternal, and most importantly, real. In THX-1138 it’s never even that severe…
But yes, like you I’ll (really) stop now as I’m giving to much away and ruining the essay… which I began writing last night, jotting down notes and what not. Already it’s about three pages, so like ‘Back to the Future: Part III’ I’m past the point of no return. I assume though it won’t be seen until Bob’s sci-fi countdown that is going to appear after our horror countdown which is November at the earliest. Am I right here Bob?
And yes, I think you should watch ‘Bad Boy Bubby’, it’s interesting (and would just make for an interesting contemplation by you from what I know about how you think/feel), and de Heer is a master in my estimation… and he’s largely unknown. I understand putting a work order in is weird as I don’t know how busy you are, but you do have a few months until Bob’s sci-fi countdown.
Oh, yes I see. A whole different beast there, indeed, and one I don’t at all disagree with, at least not necessarily. I now look forward to that essay even more.
I will see Bad Boy Bubby before or at least as soon as that essay is unveiled, likewise with The Wild Child & Kasper Hauser.
Yes, ‘Bubby’ is like those two films you speak of. I’m ambivalent about the Truffaut (I’m not great admirer of him, though I do like a few of his films a great deal), and I really like the Herzog. I recommend the de Heer because I think it’s more ‘out-there’… it’s like the Herzog, without the poetry in a post-MTV cinema world, in a phrase it’s more ‘experimental’ as a work of art (he used a different cinematographer for ever sequence for one).
I don’t really know when my sci-fi countdown will be. I had wanted more time back when I was intending to write each film up somewhat like I had for other films, but I’m thinking I’ll just try and wing it a bit now, perhaps go out of my way to save everything till the last minute. A more spontaneous, less stuffy voice might help here. I was also considering putting together video reviews, but unfortunately the only people I know around me who are experts at that have moved away, so it’ll be strict text, in all likelihood. So in other words, Jamie, I have no idea.
THX and “The Prisoner” are my favorite cine/visual dystopian stories out there– THX mostly for its aesthetic sensibilities and cinematic perfection (that’s not to say it’s the greatest film of all time, just that it works on all its own terms, more or less), and “The Prisoner” for all the clever variations it provides on its core theme. McGoohan’s take is one you’d find interesting, Jamie, as for the most part it’s a Sartean struggle to keep saying “No” despite increasingly difficult odds, the most dangerous in this case being the temptation to give in. Of all the “dystopias that wouldn’t be so bad to live in”, I’d say the Village would easily rank at the top of my list. The Port Merion location is beautiful, the people are friendly, the everyday life is active, sociable and rewarding. Sure, you have to make certain sacrifices (privacy, freedom, individuality, secret information), but even if you don’t talk, you’ll still be well taken care of (they don’t want to damage the goods). And hey, if you resist long enough, you might even be made king of the whole damn asylum, too! Perhaps the biggest price in a place like the Village, I’d say, are all the other people there being victimized, like yourself. Number 6 can take care of himself pretty easily, but there’s so many other people brought to the Village he’s unable to save, or who he winds up accidentally hurting thanks to his own actions (of course, just as many of them turn out to be Number 2′s themselves, so it all evens out).
THX is probably my favorite dystopia all around. “The Prisoner” is the tops for television, “Aeon Flux” for animation (there, living in Monica/Bregna isn’t so bad as long as you’re fearless leader Trevor Goodchild), “V For Vendetta” in comics and “Nineteen Eighty Four” in print. Huxley’s take is one I’m not too fond of more for literary stylistic reasons than anything else– I can apreciate the experimental qualities, the way it hops from one protagonist to the next without allowing us to identify with anyone for too long, but still, a lot of it is just too unpleasant for me to sit through (I especially dislike reading about how they raise children, which frankly amounts to institutionalized sexual abuse– yeah, I get that’s the point, but still, it’s not fun to read). Orwell’s book, on the other hand, is sort of the opposite– the world is incredibly bleak and hopeless, the story so hopelessly doomed from the start, but the language (and his games with it) is just too beautiful for me to resist.
When I get to writing my “Metal Gear” essays in earnest, I’ll explain why Kojima’s first game is my favorite video-game dystopia, and why in some ways it might be my favorite of any medium.
A question, however, to lead us back towards “Inception”– is it possible, that in the way it imagines the real world as filled with corporate agents and spies hunting for fugitive dream-thieves, and populates its dream worlds with militarized subcon projections persecuting invading dreamers, whose intent is nothing less than to steal information and/or brainwash unsuspecting targets inside elaborate long-con scenarios, that Nolan’s film is in its own way a dystopia? I’d argue yes.
Well if you don’t know the exact start date of the sci-fi, we can say that it is the next countdown after horror right?
I like the rest of your post, some good recommendations of stuff I haven’t seen.
To me, off hand to add to something like ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ is the book ‘Jennifer Government’ (which I’ve heard George Clooney and Soderberg own the film rights to). that is about as terrifying as I’d think a dystopia can get.
I’m also curious if you’ve ever read any Murakami? His ‘Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ and specifically ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ have cyberpunk sci-fi elements. I adore him, he’s one of my absolute favorite contemporary authors, and I think you’d go nuts for him as well.
Back to ‘Inception’, yes one could consider it a dystopia, for the exact reasons you list.
Funnily enough, I do have “Wind Up Bird Chronicles”, something I bought after reading a review of Kojima’s “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” which made extensive comparisons to the book (that game, by the way, is an incredible piece of military-cyberpunk dystopian adventure). I’ve never actually read it, though. Add it to the to-do list.
Come to think of it, I’ve also got “Jennifer Government”, too, but never read it. Obviously I’ve got some catching up to take care of.
My sci-fi list may be the next one after yours, Jamie, but I think it’s a poor choice for the holiday season. That would be better filled with musicals, or something a bit more cheery. Sci-fi’s good for spring, or even summer, the same way that horror has to be done in the fall. Also, seeing as we’re going to have a lot of overlap (especially with Cronenberg) I would like some distance between our countdowns, so it doesn’t feel too redundant.
Back to “Inception”– thinking about it as a dystopia helps it improve a bit, in my eyes. At the same time, I think that Nolan missed the best ways of articulating it as such, and actually missed the best potential of using the logic and fabric of that mental landscape. Dreams can be seen as the ultimate gestalt, the psychological process by which an uncomfortable idea from the Id makes its way to the conscious Ego by way of masking itself past the self-censoring Superego. To me, the relationship between those three psychological tentpoles always reminded me of something rather espionage-like, especially the brand of espionage practiced in the “Metal Gear” games. There the player (as soldier-spy Solid Snake, a very rich Freudian name) must sneak past whole military bases’ worth of enemy guards, security cameras and infrared laser beams to reach the goal and complete the mission. Being spotted puts the whole base onto high-alert, and sends everyone running after you. The point there is not to simply eliminate your enemies, but to evade detection by them.
It’s a near perfect illustration of the Id/Ego/Superego construct, and one that’s quite a bit better than “Inception” and its rather lazily done action beats. Nolan almost gets it right at the beginning, where Leo stealths it up in Ken Watanabe’s mind, sneaking in the shadows and shooting guards behind their backs with a silenced pistol, but the rest of the movie’s too big, loud and obvious to get past any psychological security system. There’s too much action-movie, too much “Heat”, and not enough true spy-movie (except for the rather limp Moore-era battle in the snow).
It’s especially disappointing, because “Inception” has the potential to stand as a great dys/utopian narrative, existing as it does in the world of dreams. Both dystopias and utopias are, after all, fantasies of our own world, merely allegorical dreams or nightmares depending upon your inclination, so it makes sense to house that same kind of perfect-society speculation inside a dreamscape of its own, doesn’t it? Even the word “utopia” itself means “nowhere”, and Thomas Moore might not’ve been too surprised to see the connections in the way dreams themselves are ruled by rather dictatorial seeming police-states of the mind, full of surveilance and security directed against our most primal and individualistic urges. Dreams are already dystopias or utopias depending upon the level of your own lucidity. Too bad Nolan took his own all-seeing eye off the target just to keep his scratching his itchy trigger finger.
Bob, not sure what you have in mind and it would probably be too complicated to transfer files over a computer (though if you live in NYC, we could meet up when I visit in the fall) but I have Final Cut Pro and enjoy/have experience video editing – if it’s not too time-consuming, maybe I could help you with that. E-mail me and we can discuss.
Bob, Huxley is really an essayist rather than a novelist. Brave New World is often stylistically inventive, but its heart is not really in character or story, but in the ideas at play. I love his Perennial Philosophy (which I was only able to read part of, my cousin stealing my copy!) and Heaven & Hell, the essay that goes with Doors of Perception. But Brave New World turned me onto those, so I thank it for that. Taken as a novel, 1984 is much stronger but I find BNW more compelling, not that I’d want to pick and choose between them (in terms of dystopias I’d want neither, as books I’d want both). What’s interesting about BNW – and this comes further into focus when you read Huxley’s later essays, but I noticed it right away which is what led me to them – is that there’s a spiritual aspect, or rather a lack of spirituality which the characters notice and which makes them restless. Orwell’s story is humanist but not really spiritual; I’d say his focus is more materialist, about physical limits, concrete oppression, and coldly rational mind games, whereas in BNW the “what’s wrong with it?” question relies on yearning for a sense of transcendence or sublimity.
Actually, if I remember correctly, Doniphon is supposed to go next with the Westerns. So breathe a bit easier, Bob
Joel, that sounds interesting. I’m a bit behind the times with video tech (I got some stuff that would work digitally, but I’m not familiar with it), so I’ll consider. Let me know when you’re around.
Huxley is definitely an interesting thinker, and in a lot of ways BNW is probably the more interesting piece of science-fiction, if 1984 is the more interesting piece of literary fiction. I’ve been interested in picking up Huxley’s follow-up novel, “The Island”, which I’ve heard plenty interesting things about. Still, 1984 is a classic, and not just for the standard ideas of a politically opressive police state, but for all the little minutia. “He woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips”– gets me every time.
Westerns for the holidays? Makes me wonder where “Three Godfathers” will show up…
Something else that just came to me– one of the reasons I love THX is because it feels like a really well done mash-up of BNW and 1984. It has the fully imagined world of the former, full of scientific advancements, consumer driven society and drugged-out inhabitants of the former, and all the constant surveilance, anti-individualistic conformist police-state sentiments of the latter, contrasted with the same “forbidden love” transgression against an anti-sex authority. It blends the best points of Huxley and Orwell alike– philosophical theorizing of one, poetic humanism of the other– and as such revealing his own best traits as a filmmaker, as well.
I can also see a fair bit of Orwell in “Star Wars”, when looked at from a full six-episode standpoint. There’s a similar look at war as a tool for constant political power, no matter who the enemy is (The Empire/Republic is at war with the Rebels/Separatists/Jedi; The Empire/Republic has always been at war with the Rebels/Separatists/Jedi).
Again, to steer us back to “Inception” (granted, it says something that our conversation keeps gravitating towards stronger works of sci-fi, but still), is the world that Nolan imagines the kind of dystopia that anyone would want to live in? For all the faults I have, I find the movie compelling as a rather well developed imagining of a world in which the technology exists to take conscious control of dreams– a kind of technologically/drug assisted form of lucidity. It shows the benefits (create whole worlds out of thin air with godlike power, with all the benefits that entails) and drawbacks (leave your mind open to thieves, dream addiction, never being quite sure of your own existence) well enough to give you a complete picture of how this tech would affect your life, even if it never bothers to explain how the tech itself actually works. Is “shared dreaming” a cool sci-fi concept you’d be willing to live with and accept all the negative aspects for, or is it just a nightmare you’d want to wake up from as soon as possible?
Jamie, re: the movie Nolan’s always wanted to make being a mash-up of Moore Bond movies and “Heat”– yeah, he definitely doesn’t have too much skill at resurrecting the spirit of his cinematic favorites while imbuing them with his own unique perspective. Plenty of guys have been able to do it (Lang, Godard, pretty much all of the Movie Brats, Tarantino), but Nolan just can’t make his stuff rise above mere mimicry or rather bland anonymity. At times his work reminds me of David Mamet’s KISS method (Keep It Simple, Stupid) in the way that all of his industrial/warehouse sites and criminal enterprises all have the same flavorless look to them, devoid of the special stylistic touch that Mann can conjure up. He’s a very generic director, all things considered– the Brand X of Cinema.
Re: Enhanced Interrogation– Maybe he should just focus on modern-day torture for his next movie (after the ubiquitous sequel to TDK, and another one for this, probably). A really unified single subject matter could work wonders for him, but hell, he’d probably overcomplicate that, too (imagine if he had directed “Death and the Maiden”).
Brand X of cinema – this is one thing that annoyed me about Batman Begins. His Gotham was so bland compared to Burton’s – yeah I know he was trying to be “realistic” but it’s not like reality has to lack personality!
“Uh oh! He don’t look happy! He’s been usin’ Brand X!”
Burton’s Batman movies are due for a rediscovery, I think. It’s stupid the way he turns the Joker into the thug who orphaned Bruce Wayne, and especially stupid the way he turned the Penguin into a bloodthirsty psychopath, but they’re both great balances of gothic imagination and clever fun. Joel Shumacher’s first wasn’t half bad either, come to think of it. Still, the best version of Bats was from the animated series, but still, Burton did a better job than he’s given credit for nowadays. Nolan’s movies are okay, but at the end of the day they look like any given “modern classic” on TNT. The only way to tell you’re not watching “The Fugitive” is all the costumes. I’ll take the outlandish Art-Deco and Nicholson’s grinning Clown Prince any day.
“Love that Joker!”
yeah I agree with both of you… I loved and continue to love Burton’s Gotham, which strangely enough seems more realistic to me. Think about where they go in those two films: dark shady alleys, art museums, news rooms, etc that’s more of a realistic urban environment then Nolan has offered. Sure it’s hyper realism but often that’s what (a) is true about urban environments, and (b) what film calls for (specifically comic book films). I’ve always remarked to friends that Nolan’s Gotham, which is created by using Chicago locals is never really scary… and I always tell them that the real, living, breathing Chicago is much scarier then the supposed ‘scary Gotham version’. Nolan’s Lower Wacker chase sequence pales to a Lower Wacker stop and kill in HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER too.
I still laugh about Burton’s first film, that he had Joker and his crew drive pea green dodge darts… my father still gets a kick out of that to this day. As movieman alluded to it’s the little things and personality of this stuff. (I admit though that I’ve probably seen Burton’s first Joker film at least 12-15 times all the way through then another couple dozen as clips or segments)
Great points, Jamie. Burton’s Gotham may be a litle outrageous in the way that it looks as though the city-planners essentially handed it to a bunch of art-deco architects on adrenochrome and said “Never mind about the budget”, but it’s an excellently well imagined and populated picture of urban lifestyle, with its newspaper offices, TV studios and high-class art museums. It reminds me of why I liked Coruscant so much in the SW prequels– over three films, we got to see it from all different angles and environments. It was a genuine city with neighborhoods, something that TDK’s Chicago-clone of Gotham lacks.
I wonder if that might also be a problem with “Inception”. Each imagined world never realy has a personality of its own, save for that Bond fever-dream at the end. It’s still all just a bunch of ritsy cityscapes, with little differentiation between one district and another. If dreams are a continent of the mind, then Christopher Nolan’s is pretty gentrified.
Another thing I find interesting– lately the big names we tend to think of as Nolan’s primary influences are Mann and Bond, neither of which are known for being particularly daring in terms of narrative innovation, which is primarily what Nolan himself gained his reputation for. Mann’s works and the Bond franchise are both fairly straightforward in their stories and storytelling, relying mostly on style and imaginative substance to carry audience interest. Nolan, on the other hand, lacks those creative drives– he can certainly be an imaginative stylist when it comes to how he structures his stories (the backwards flow of “Memento”, the conditional set-pieces of “Inception”) but other than that, his work is fairly uninspired. As much as he breaks with formula, he’s pretty much a slave to it.
Oh, and another thing on your point, Jamie– when you get right down to it, Nolan already made his Bond movie + highlights from “Heat” with TDK. The difference there is that he didn’t try and inject his custom formula of hypernarrative puzzle-film into the mix, and that’s what makes the combination lethal. You can make an art-blockbuster, but I’m not sure a puzzle-blockbuster is really a viable option. At the very least, Nolan isn’t the right man for that job.
What bothers me is that in the last two films the HEAT references aren’t even subtle. I mean they are like almost xerox copies. Hell in TDK he even cast William Fichtner, and then in INCEPTION he has guys hiding behind cars in a crazy traffic setting ripping off m-16s. At a certain point wanting to make a HEAT or Bond film is just saying “I want a visceral shootout”, or “I want to change the way heists are done/shot”, rather, from these last two films it’s like he’s said “I want to transplant a few HEAT sequences right into my film”. It’s not longer being inspired, it’s just ripping off. I am not a great Mann fan (though I do like him, I just want to say this as he’s not like a top 5 director for me or anything), but with Nolan rising to such fame it’s really made me appreciate Mann quite a bit more. I watched MANHUNTER for the first time in about 15 years about 2 months ago, and I’ve thought for Nolan to make a film with that many visual flourishes he’d have to try and make like a Malick meets Kieslowski film–he’d have to get that interested in arty imagery. And there Mann is just making a typical (to him) police thriller/procedural.
I basically thought the same thing during the ski sequence. I mean it’s so similar to that Bond with Moore. I chuckled during it at the theater and a friend asked what was so funny, (and he’s no where near a film buff) and all I could say was “If you grew up on Bond you’d get the joke I see”.
Yeah, this is a problem. The Ski-Sequence might be sort of excusable, because it’s an obvious reference that’s almost impossible for audiences to miss, and as such is invoking the spirit it’s coming from. Homages have to travel a very delicate line between obviousness and their own spin– sometimes all it takes is a brief picture of recognition in an alien context (the “Blade Runner” and “Searchers” shot-for-shot glimpses in AOTC) or a prolonged use of a familiar element in a new setting (Uma Thurman’s “Game of Death” yellow jumpsuit in “Kill Bill”). Nolan’s problem is that when he borrows, he doesn’t add anything new of his own. Even when he borrowed in TDK, he was really just injecting “Heat” and Bond-isms into a Batman story, and he’s certainly not the Caped Crusader’s creator. Even with “Memento”, he was working from his brother’s story, instead of his own. “Inception” is the first truly original film he’s made since the tepid “Following”, and maybe its biggest relevation is that the most original voice in movies isn’t really as original as we thought he was.
Memento may be his brother’s story but it’s still a rather original and rewarding film….
“Memento” is still Nolan’s best movie, by far. I’m just using it to illustrate that his talents are probably best geared towards adaptations, not original works.
That reminds me– before Nolan was tapped for the Batman renaissance, I recall him trying to develop a couple of projects that never got off the ground, including a Jim Carrey-starring biopic of Howard Hughes, and a movie version of Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner”. Perhaps those two properties– both largely dealing with modern-day paranoia– are the closest to his heart, and the lens through which we can find the other path he might’ve taken, had he not adopted his mercenary success route through DC Comics territory.
The ski sequence made me think of Pineapple Express – same spirit on the surface, yet Inception doesn’t quite seem to be in on the joke.
The ski-sequence was lame, primarily because we didn’t really need such a glaring reminder of the film’s Bond influence– unless you’ve got a killer action sequence planned, all you need to do to invoke 007 is have a character carry a Walther PPK. Remind me, though, did Marion Cotilard take hers out of a purse? Because that would be a nice, sly little joke there.
It also reminded me of how Sommers used the stupid scuba battle from “Thunderball” as a springboard for the finale of “GI Joe”. The difference, however, is that Sommers only took a little inspiration from it, and turned it into the underwater equivalent of “Star Wars”-style dogfighting. Even in a dumb little movie like that, you can see Bond-isms done better than they are here.
I agree with most of what you said but re: Schmacher’s 1st, I used to remember Batman Forever as relatively ok, at least compared to Batman & Robin. Then I watched it again a few years ago, and no: it is bloody AWFUL. But yes, I’d even take Schmacher’s decadent disco style over Nolan’s drab nothing. It may be comic-booky in the most obvious and garish way, but at least it’s comic-booky.
Mask of the Phantasm is due for a re-view. I loved that series as a kid.
Shumacher captures a feeling of Batman comics from the mid-to-late 70′s, when there was still an element of high-concept adventure amidst the darkness, where it was recovering from the camp of the Adam West series but hadn’t yet fully devolved into the bloody pulp of Frank Miller. And I think that was the right spirit with which to tackle stuff like the Riddler and a modern-day motorcycling Robin. Two-Face was done poorly, I’ll admit (Nolan got that character mostly right in TDK, but killed him off just as he was getting interesting), but I still like Carrey’s Edward Nigma. And in my opinion, Val Kilmer made the best live action bigscreen Batman of all.
I thought you’d all get a kick out of this (especially MovieMan and Bob)
http://videogum.com/208132/caught-inception-ripped-off-scrooge-mcduck/remakes-and-spinoffs/
probably purely coincidental, but pretty funny. I mean if Nolan read Scrooge McDuck comics then he’d be up to way more then any of us have given him credit for.
Actually, if Nolan is as influenced by Lucas as I think he is, then the Scrooge McDuck thing might not be total BS. Lucas has been frequently quoted as a big fan of Carl Barks, the cartoonist who created the character, his town of Duckburg and much more in comics that were famously turned into the Disney cartoon “Duck Tales”. Lucas even wrote a foreward to one of the Uncle Scrooge books, and Spielberg and he noted that several of Barks’ stories inspired their work, especially “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. Comics luminaries like Will Eisner have praised his work, as well.
So yeah… Another hole in the “Inception” hot-air balloon (frankly I think there’s more plausibility in the idea of it ripping off “Paprika”, myself, but damn, this is a hot find).