December 27th, 2010
Inception is one of the three movies I saw in 2010, and to get to three I’m counting a showing of Avatar that I took in post New Year’s Day. It was, as everyone agrees, really great.
On first viewing, I was blown away by the writing, in particular (1) the Nolans’ ability to convey scores of pages of exposition in a fully engaging and plot-directed manner; and (2) the way in which they were able to sustain enormous dramatic tension across three separate, concurrent plot-lines in the second half of the movie. I’ve literally never seen a movie manage to hold three ropes completely taut at the same time without ever allowing the tiniest bit of slack.
On second viewing, however, I’m struck by another writerly accomplishment: the way Nolan uses revelation to subtly reorient the audience throughout the movie. The best example of this is how they reveal information to us about Mal. Here is what we learn about Mal in the course of the movie’s first 40 minutes:
* There’s a beautiful woman who knows Cobb, and surprises him at a party.
* The beautiful woman is named Mal, and she is an adversary trying to derail Cobb’s mission.
* Mal is Cobb’s wife.
* Mal is dead.
* Mal was actually a “lovely” woman.
* Cobb is wanted for Mal’s murder.
In the hands of a lesser writer, we would have been given all of this information nearly at once. It’s not hard to picture how Michael Bay might have written it:
Nash: Who the hell was that?
Arthur: It’s Cobb’s dead wife, Mal. She’s always haunting him in his dreams. She’s why he can’t go home–the cops think he killed her.
Nash: That’s fucked up, man.
Instead, Nolan parcels each of those six pieces of information on their own (actually two of the revelations–that she’s dead and was lovely–are delivered at the same time) in such a manner that each one reorients the audience in how they view both Cobb and the entire world of Inception.
That’s awfully elegant stuff.
(Another thing which really impressed me this time around is how Inception features four, honest-to-blog leading men. It’s like a thinking man’s Ocean’s 11.)
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You forgot 1 GIANT revelation that completely changes how we view Cobb and pretty much the entire movie:
– Cobb was directly responsible for Mal’s suicide because he implanted the idea in her brain.
This revelation explains just about everything: Cobb’s guilt and his motives for the last mission, plus his confidence that inception works.
Watched the movie again last night (Blu-Ray, only way to go), it’s really a stunning masterpiece. Might be the best movie of the past 20 years. Juno is the weakest part of the movie, and even she was good. There is literally nothing bad about Inception. How many movies can lay claim to being:
– an awesome action flick
– a cerebral philosophical flick
– extremely well written
– extremely well acted
– a better love story than 99.9% of movies that are supposed to be “love stories” -
It would be interesting to compare the cognitive demands of Inception v. The Social Network. I’d say that they started out being pretty similar, but Nolan, through an enormous amount of hard work, made the movie accessible to the upper, say, 60% of the audience, while Sorkin-Fincher managed to reach only the top 25% or so.
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Spot on Skins Fan.
Cobb is a great, sympathetic protagonist, but not a good person really – or no better than me (or 60%) of the audience. His real and felt guilt and self-absorption really stood out to me on the 2nd time around as well. Everything is about getting back to his surface life (“stateside”) and redeeming himself in order to reclaim it and let go of the shade-wrestling in the cellar – he will put everything and everyone at risk to see his real kids’ naturally grown faces.
I would even go so far to say best in 30 years, perhaps more?…
Jason O. December 29, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Weak. While the post’s writer is obviously intelligent, his criticism boils down to ad hominems directed at Nolan and his own opinions re: how the movie should have been made.
1) Nolan likes explosions? Well, he does direct action movies.
2) The author quotes someone who wanted the city folding effects, et al., later in the movie? Fine, but a perfectly valid counter-argument is that the early training scenes with Ariadne and Dom were necessary to get the viewer to buy in to the world of the dream where the imagination of the architect is the only governing force: This is a critical point for later on in the movie and the whole Dom-Mal plot thread.