


This was the biggest surprise for me, and is actually the quality that I think most endeared me to the movie. Refreshingly, Inception's story-telling model is classical through and through it has added a few extra floors to the bank, but the overall structure is still recognisably that of The Asphalt Jungle.ģ.) It doesn't take itself very seriously. You're given all the clues and all the elements of Cobb's back story with Mal whatever revelations follow are entirely logical and by no means streamlined for maximum surprise. I'm not even sure if there is a twist per se in this movie. There are no big "Aha, it was really this all along" moments the idea that Cobb may be in limbo from the get-go is an unresolved suggestion that is present from the very beginning, and is at no point hammered down as a hokey last act reveal.
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Despite a premise with ample potential for trickery, and a degree of ambiguity which I will discuss later, this movie has a strikingly straight-up narrative. Much to his credit, Nolan has completely eschewed that approach with Inception. Considering its reality-bending premise, the big fear with Inception was that it would fall into this category - that it would hinge on some cheap, contrived, manipulative twist. This was also a decade in which a peculiar mania developed for narrative tricks and gimmicks - what I like to call the Dark M. It wasn't all good in the nineties, though. When synopses of Inception first began to leak out, it was immediately apparent that this was a movie whose heart was firmly in the nineties - that strange decade of The Maxtrix, The Truman Show, Groundhog Day, and Vanilla Sky, when suddenly speculation about the illusionary nature of reality became as routine in the omniplex as car cases and rom-coms. This meme seems to be entirely in the mind of critics who have either spent too long trying to second guess the intelligence of mass audiences, or have themselves succumbed to the depleted attention span they are constantly ascribing to the movie-going public.Ģ.) It isn't a twisty, tricksy film. I think he has been entirely successful in this - I saw Inception first with a really non-cineaste/hipster crowd, and didn't get any impression of confusion after the screening. Nolan knows he is working with some elaborate narrative conceits, and really couldn't have been more obliging in trying to make it a smooth ride for audiences. Fair enough, a couple of little details require a greater degree of alertness than others, but there is no duplicity, no deliberate obscuration of any kind. This movie literally works overtime to be user-friendly - it patiently and explicitly lays out all the rules of the game, all the information you need, in the first half. The most virulent meme surrounding Inception is that it requires some kind of Mensa super-brain to begin to get a handle on the plot. I was enjoying the sensation of not knowing what to expect: I might walk out shaking my fist in an irrelevant fit of curmudgeon rage, or eyeing the world with the glazed and giddy eyes of a new convert.ġ.) It isn't particularly difficult to understand. So I was happy to be caught in the buzz of a must-see picture: buying your ticket in advance, slavishly reading the reviews as they accumulate online, even though you know from experience that a thousand slavering raves could still translate into a movie you hate like cancer. Nolan's latest, regardless of how it might pan out in the end, provided this year with the much needed frisson of a must-see ticket, a movie you had to see opening weekend on the biggest screen in town, that you might love or hate, that you knew you would be talking about one way or the other. A sense of occasion and excitement is something that has been distinctly lacking in 2010, in terms of mainstream Hollywood and American auteurist pictures. So, despite my misgivings, I was getting excited, and tentatively hopeful, for Inception.
