Inception-Early Reviews, VERY GOOD!....Updated....MY REVIEW-A TEN OUT OF TEN!!

[octothorp]

I finally watched this last night. I didn't like it as much as I hoped I would (certainly not my favorite Nolan film, possibly not in my top 3). Still, lots to think about.

The good: Most of the cast, except for exception noted below. In particular, Marion Cotillard was stunning in what I felt was the most important role in the movie. I appreciated the way that Nolan structured this like a heist movie: a one-last-job is presented, a team is assembled, a plot is constructed, and everything unfolds, with the team adapting to some unforeseen obstacles along the way. I also appreciated the fact that there was no huge ending twist; this film didn't need it but I was half expecting Nolan to throw something more in.

The bad: Ellen Page. Her character did not work at all for me. For one thing, she was way too much the standard outsider to whom everything is explained. But she was also completely unbelievable as this incredibly emotionally perceptive and assertive person. I'm not sure how much was her and how much was the writing. The music: Zimmer his hit and miss for me, and here, it was a huge miss. Heavy-handed and obvious. As for the writing/directing, the pace really lagged toward the end. I understand what Nolan was trying to do here with showing the multiple stories passing at different speeds and it worked more than most experimental timeline films, but it did feel like it was taking forever. As well, after the initial expository scenes, few of the dream sequences actually felt dream-like. I know that he provided a reason for everything needed to feel as real as possible, but the more interesting exploration would have been through dreams that were appropriately surreal. Even inside Cobb's subconscious, there was the opportunity to be much more creative than they were.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Gozer

Ok, I just saw this movie and I came to this thread to find the answers to a couple continuity questions...

It's a funny thing about continuity: I am currently reading a very interesting book by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon entitled The Invisible Gorilla, and the Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Without going into great detail about the book itself (I am thinking of making a separate thread about it), they deal at some length with continuity errors in films as a way to demonstrate what psychologists call "change blindness". The point perhaps pertinent to this thread (or perhaps not, I don't know), is that continuity errors are often NOT good indicators as to the overall quality of a film. When interviewing script supervisors (who are responsible for ensuring continuity), one of them said that "...the more into the story I am, the less I notice things that are out of continuity." It is a bit of a catch-22: on the one hand, continuity errors are likely to occur with more frequency in very good movies, in large part because fallible script supervisors will necessarily encounter more difficulty in avoiding the sorts of distractions from the story that result in such errors. On the other hand, films in which one will notice a number of continuity errors are probably not very good in the first place if they cannot maintain the attention of the viewer enough to miss what will unavoidably occur.

As for a film like Inception, I submit that to make something as complex and intricate as this movie WITHOUT a number of continuity errors is an utterly impossible feat. Christopher Nolan deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off as cleanly as he did, because I suspect that it was a far greater challenge than anyone on this side of the camera can fathom.

[Gozer]

Imagination is surely in a bad state if filmmaking is unfathomable.