Review to a Kill

JULY 20TH 2010

Well May Day has let the cat out of the bag in the title, hasn’t she! No need to read on? Maybe. But wait, she needs to tell you just why exactly she thought Inception was the flawed, badly conceived, bore of a film that it undoubtedly is! After all, it goes to the heart of why these reviews exist, what’s really important for May Day, is that films, TV shows etc, that go down in the popular consciousness as ‘good’ or ‘great’ (like the Matrix, the Dark Night etc) are shown up for what they really are, pretentious twaddle. Put aside the fact that she has yet to review those two films, because she shall some day, for this principle is May Day’s guiding light. The other main reason she puts her self through it all, is for those hidden gems, the half forgotten, ignored, much maligned films and TV shows that really don’t deserve the scorn they get, and May Day is fighting a one woman Guerrilla war for them, in the style of John Rambo, of course. But she feels the first of these principles, the undeserved praise that some films get, very, very, strongly indeed, with regards to Christopher Nolan’s latest effort ‘Inception.’ And here is why…

First off, this film is ridiculously pretentious. It attempts to put across an air of intellectual authority, that it is somehow driven by big ‘ideas’. ‘Oh dear’ I here you say, ‘In a blockbuster?’ Well it can be done, and May Day gets all tingly downstairs when a film manages to pull this off. So don’t get her wrong here, read some other reviews and you will see this. But if you attempt to flirt with big ideas and concepts, and then fail, then you deserve to be brought to justice for it, right? If a film doesn’t make the pretence of course, and doesn’t really make much sense, then that’s fine by May Day, perfectly forgivable, a film does not need to be clever to be enjoyable. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to Inception, and even if it did, it wouldn’t help it become any better a film, but more on that later. First off, why is this film so pretentious? Because of it’s constant attempts to be deep with regards the subject of ‘dreams’. Dreams drive inception, the main character, played well enough, by Leonardo Di Caprio, is one ‘Dom Cobb’ an ‘Extractor’ a man, who for reasons never really spelt out, specializes in ‘sub conscious security’. The military have developed a device that allows for shared dreaming. It is possible to enter someone’s dreams, say, a business man, or a politician and steal their deepest secrets. Now non of this makes any sense to May Day. Enter her dreams at night, and you do not get access to her pin number. Because she dreams of other things… but the dreams here werein Inception are essentially identical to reality. And you can not tell the difference, or so we are told.

Yet May Day generally can. How about you? Dreams are fuzzy, often incoherent things, yet during most dreams we just do not take issue with them for being dreams, given that the rational and logical parts of our consciousness are powered down. And a shared dream, come on, is that even possible? Dreams are too unique experiences to share, it seems, and can plugging people into a suitcase with a what looks like a built in dialysis machine in it, can that make this happen? Can a shared conscious experience arise where there is no raw sense data being shared as a common point of reference? Is there any actual input of sense data, or is it just memory? Is memory the kind of thing that is identical, has a ‘object’ which can become an objective content? First year philosophy! It all smells like Kippers. If however, you think, as Nolan seems to (and I don’t know why we should agree with him here) that the brain is just a fancy computer, and that dreams are just the ‘software’ then all we need to share them, is his fancy router thing, developed by the military, of course. He should really have gone for the virtual reality option, not dreams, there is enough ambiguity there to be at least barely credible. Aren’t we are all just too familiar with dreams? we know they are not like they are in Inception, not literally. But we are being asked, simultaneously, to set aside our own experience of dreams, at the same time our understanding of dreams is still being called on as a device to understand the plot. This is all pretty stupid. Nolan doesn’t seem to know what dreams are it would seem, only what he would like them to be. Is this a big problem? Yes. In part because of the level of exposition in this film!

It’s just ridiculous! Every thing is taken so seriously, and yet so smugly. We are told, for instance, that time in dreams is different than in reality. That is the perception of time in reality, the further you go into a dream, the longer time can be in dreams compared to reality we are told and asked to believe. This is not really the case though is it? It’s more the point that time doesn’t matter in dreams, it’s not an issue for us. And it’s not as if we are running weird little movies in our heads on fast forward, we are being asked to accept a lot on faith alone here. If you are aware of time at all in dreams, you are not aware of ‘50 years of time’ in a few minutes, that does not seem possible to May Day, or even slightly credible. But the film thinks it can be, and it’s just silly. More than this, it’s integral to the plot, and it starts to grate, as we see the juxtaposition of the various ‘levels’ of the ‘dream with in a dream’. Clearly, this is Nolan’s whole reason for making this film. From Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, ‘A dream within a dream’ of course, this stolen line is taken far too literally. The characters say this about five times during the films length also, just to let us know how clever everyone is. It might be a good starting point for a film about dreams, but if it’s just a cheap trick to have a ‘Matrix effect’ of not knowing where reality ends and dreams begin, and I suspect that is all it is here, then you have a big problem.

Ah the Matrix. It has got a lot to answer for. This film, has a lot of the Matrix feel in it. But unlike the Matrix, it really has done nothing to earn the ‘reality/non reality’ uncertainty that drives it. A fundamental disregard for what dreams are, is all we have here. Clever effects yes, like Ellen Page’s character who is the ‘architect’ of the shared dreams, designing the dream worlds, but this aside, the films aesthetics are generally dull, bland mega cities, with bland mega gun battles. Sigh… so boring! Give us something new! The opening scene, a darkened Japanese mansion, was perhaps the most interesting of all, but it lasted about fifteen minutes, out of a very, very long film (or was I just dreaming, slipping into the third level?). There was a major flaw here also, a complete lack of sexualized energy. The primary psychic force of dreams, is the libido, according to Freud, yet it was almost completely absent from the dull skyscrapers and the fancy modern hotels, as well as the ridiculous Metal Gear solid esque mountain fortress! The film’s obscene exposition reached its apex with the absurd ‘limbo’ notion of never waking up, trapped in a potentially infinite dream….. Say what?

But what about the experience of the film, niggling intellectual problems aside? I think you will be disappointed on the entertainment front. The film is too long. You want it to end about 20 minutes earlier than it does. More than this, the first scene is (quite obviously as you see it) linked to the conclusion, so you know that, as the film drags, we have to have the set up for that yet to come, as well as it’s replay. Which is a little irritating. The effects are good of course, but is this enough for anyone anymore? Who is just content with the same old: slow motion, CGI, gun battles and big explosions? Idiots? But you are not an idiot. You turned up to this film expecting to be entertained, and respected as a viewer for you intelligence. That doesn’t happen with Inception, which plays itself out like Oceans 11 crossed with Matrix Revolutions, and a T- Mobile advert. Not good.

But what about the plot? May Day endeavours not to give out spoilers. But it’s a bit naff in reality. It is a caper at heart, an attempt to break into a Business man’s mind (Mr Fischer, played by Cillian Murphy) in order to plant an idea into his head. Cobb agrees to do this, in an effort to be allowed to return home to his children. A good half of the film is turned over to this. And it was pretty boring. Mr Fischer had been trained to resist this kind of incursion into his sub conscious, and fight back, why not! The team, among who, only Tom Hardy’s character seems likeable, try and plant the idea ‘break up your Father’s company’ into Fischer’s mind. Why? They have been hired by another company to do so, because Fischer stands to inherit ‘Cobalt Industries’ which is set to control most of the World’s energy supplies, Oh no! Inception is essentially, the idea that it is impossible to plant an idea in someone’s mind without them knowing about it or detecting it. Why? Even if this is so, who cares? If someone turns up in a May Day’s dream and says, break up your Father’s empire, it may seem contrary to what she would want to do, but if it was a forceful argument, then she would assume that that was just an aspect of her ‘unconscious’ (a term never mentioned, in favour of sub conscious) that was telling her a truth she did not want to know, but She may well accept, or would she just assume it was what she really thought, deep down? The tension here, is not well explained. But it in May Day’s case, it might change her mind, or it might not. Would it make a difference if she had been tricked into thinking that she her self had wanted that all along? Maybe, but at any rate, this does not happen. What seems to happen, is that the Dream just tells Mr Fischer that his father never wanted him to follow in his footsteps even though he still thinks that at the moment of his dream discussion, due to Cobb and his team, who planted the idea in his head! So not that hard then! Why this was supposed to be so hard a task to achieve, May Day does not know, and may never know, so any answers, on a post card please!

But then this ‘Inception’ idea, is overplayed to such a stupid degree. A glib explanation of it is offered, put forward by one of the films characters: ‘Say I tell you not to think of an elephant, what’s the first thing you do? You Think of an Elephant!’ How stupid is this pseudo philosophical statement of impossibility? and this is surely only the case anyway, with negative requests, if I say, think of an Elephant!’ what do you do? You think of an Elephant. Now If I can fool you into thinking this is a dream, and then I suggest that you do this, you would get the point. Or I just put an Elephant in your dreams, if I can, and Inception says I can by it‘s logic, and I suggest, ‘think of an Elephant’ which can also be achieved by having Elephants running around! Now maybe, something better could have been made out of this, it could have been salvaged, but it’s just a mess here. Which applies to the film as a whole really. A missed opportunity. May Day sees more worth and value, in a single, quick scene from the Sopranos, which used dreams in such wonderful ways throughout its run, where Tony is dreaming at the sea front, about his friend Pussy being a rat. Pussy is a fish being sold on the promenade, talking to Tony. It’s fairly brief, and surreal of course, but it’s deep, even touching, and just one example of how dreams can be used to great effect. Brief, surreal, touching, non of these words apply to Inception. But should you go and see it? Yes, and who knows, you might like it, where May Day didn‘t, get a better grasp of it‘s nonsense, or just not care about that and enjoy the explosions. But do not, as some inevitably will, assume you have to like it, just because everyone else seems to, or because the people who made it, or acted in it, tried to make a half decent film. Because they did try, but, sadly, they failed. Watch out for the ‘deference effect’ too, where people come out of the cinema saying ‘wow that was great, I didn’t understand it, but that’s good! It really made me think!’ Because it’s not your fault, you are not in error. Just because a film gets made with big stars, and millions of dollars, doesn’t mean it’s not built on dodgy, nonsensical foundations. If you come out of Inception thinking ‘that didn’t make much sense!’ then good, because it just doesn’t!

Leonardo Di Caprio invades dreams of Producers wanting to cut the length of Inception by about half an hour..

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