Monday 12 July 2010

Inception

I could tell you what I thought about Inception, but I don't think you want me to spoil anything before you go and see it for yourself. Which, obviously, you would be absolutely Crackers Patel not to do. So instead, here are some thoughts about a piece of promotional material I was given when I went to see it:


It looks absolutely beautiful; it's expensively glossy and the colour palette is gorgeous.

But it's not just about looks. It's also substantial and weighty, thanks to the way it folds in on itself. As you delve into its inner layers, it expands perfectly to reveal goggle-boggling images, a plot which reads like Dreamscape plus The Matrix but infinitely better than both of those films, and a bunch of people in some absolutely Incredible Suits.


Inside are some amazing actors. Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't look like he's holding in a window-shattering fart for once, Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks dashing but a bit silly with a massive shooter and there are too few shots of Tom Hardy and Michael Caine.

If you press your ear to it very hard you can hear Hans Zimmer having the time of his life inside a terrifying nightmare.


I can't describe the final page to you. It's the perfect way to finish but you need to see it for yourself to truly appreciate it.


It's not flawless; there are some parts of it that I need to look at again to work out whether or not they make any sense. Also from end to end it's about 62cm long, and if I'm being honest it could do with being about thirteen percent shorter.

Having said that, as promotional material goes, it is without doubt THE BEST I'VE SEEN THIS YEAR. Especially in comparison to certain others.


You can read what you like into any of the above.

To comment on this metaphor, click here

16 comments :

  1. I like that spoiler-free review. Here's another one: http://www.benkirby.net/index.php/reviews/film/inception

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  2. OH MY GOD! I can't believe you've seen this and then spend the whole review talking about a bloody pamphlet! How could you!? We need to know about the film! Etc.

    But seriously, I've been looking forward to this promotional material for ages and can't wait to have a flick through it. I am jealous!

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  3. Unfortunately the film was shit. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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  4. That last picture of the upside down designer 'A' ladies Ascot Hat would be the envy of Lady Gaga's milliner Philip Treacy. Some of the best ladies hats come from Habitat or Ikea.

    Is Inception all about hat making?

    By the way, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA is the gene responsible for going Gaga. Or mad as a hatter.

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  5. Ahh, I see... excellent post, sir! Really, very nicely done and written. More succinct than my blog anyway- I'm putting a whole week over to Toy Story 3 and you covered this one wonderfully in much fewer words :)

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  6. Parallels...interesting...

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  7. "Holding a window shattering fart"? Spot on - and worthy of the great Charlie Brooker. I honestly can't wait to see this film - it looks like proper solid sci-fi, done with a straight face. Very rare these days.

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  8. I'd describe it as mind-filling Mr Suit. Certainly no space left in my fizzog to worry about what I'd forgotten to buy from the supermarket or why the daft cow next to me is checking her effing blackberry AGAIN!

    Pretty damn ace!

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  9. You forgot to buy eggs and cat food.

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  10. Hey, are you an extractor and this website is just a cover to enable you to extract our hidden sub-sub-sub-sub-level thoughts? How very canny of you sir!

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  11. A story for you. I had two Gold Class tickets to Twiglet the Third for my wedding anniversary, but was nfortunately unable to get a babysitter for the required evening. So, love that she is, my wife asked me to go on alone (after unsuccesfully listing them on ebay AND gumtree). When I arrived, I realised that Inception was playing in the other screen of the Gold Class cinema. I cheekily asked if they could swap my ticket, as I'd already been getting rather strange looks from staff as they saw I, a mid-thirties man, had arrived at a late-night screening of Vampires vs Wolves alone...
    Anyhoo, they happily obliged after some 'checking with the manager', and even tried to refund my other half's ticket. I then found myself at the very front of an intentionally sparsely populated cinema, a reclining chair, a table, a beer served to my seat, and the awesome wonderment of a spectacularly crafted vision of the fifth dimension, the one we all enter each night. And I even caught myself a little teary at the end, and only just managed to resist the temptation to applaud. This takes its place at the head of a list of movies such as Memento, 12 Monkeys, El Orfanato and Jacob's Ladder.

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  12. Did the Mrs kick your ass when she found out you'd seen it without her?

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  13. Nope. I, of course, gentleman that I am, checked with her first, by text. (pssst...actually I'd already swapped them before I got a reply! But she was pleased for me. Of course she isn't now, coz I keep blabbering on about how good it was!)

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  14. My $0.02 This is a great & fun film, but it is only the 2nd best film of the year. Kick-Ass is easily as fun, but it also manages to have a plot & character development -- things Inception doesn't bother to get bogged down in. I still loved it.

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  15. The biggest hype and let down of 2010 award goes to 'Inception'.

    Someone put thoughts in my head that whizzing round and round like a spinning top gathering random locations together in a mixing and swirling whirlwind would evoke a cry of "...and the winner is Inception". But when I looked the wind died. The spinning stopped. The whole lot fell down. The mixed up pieces spliced themselves together into the locations where they belonged. All the ice mountain shots here, the beach here, Paris here and so forth. What I saw at once was that what happened in the scenes could be ignored, they just had time lines which in theory ran at different speeds but in fact most happened in real time when you looked at them apart from a bus falling off a bridge that was slowed down. Stripped to bare essentials Inception is just a lot of very well executed action sequences cut together with a story line about as deep as the plot of Mama Mia. No Memento thought provocation.

    Inception was made to the highest standards available today. It is a technical triumph without doubt. Unfortunately it is difficult to empathise with any of the characters in the film. We, the audience, are dumped into a dream, and as we are not involved we just gaze at the extraordinary which of course we all know is, yawn, oh look they have turned Paris upside down, yawn, just CGI and the actors could just as well have been CGI too.

    Floating around in a stretch version of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968) rotating set contributes nothing at all to the drama. The idea as I've just pointed out is not even new.

    So just as Avatar was a bog standard Western set in space, so Inception is a bog standard Mission Impossible edited by Edward Scissorhands.

    By the way, did you know that you are just a brain sitting in a jar of saline solution and each OS is fed by a matrix? That would make a good film.

    PS. The yawns are real. My wife can confirm that for me 'Inception' took much less than 148 minutes.

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  16. I have seen Inception a second time which served to reinforce my comment of 8th December 2010. Like a dream within a dream, each time I see Inception it seems to get longer and more boring than before. I'd cut out the entire ice mountain footage for a start. The whole film could be edited to 90 minutes and be a better movie.

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