So it's summer blockbuster time. Time for that film that you ask your mate if they've seen yet or that you overhear people talking on the bus about, to have it's metal tried and tested with the upmost of raised eyebrows and stroked chins. This summer we have our old friend Christopher-candonowrong-Nolan offering up the goods with his intriguing (from the title alone) Inception.
Now I'd heard from a number of sources that this film had been a pipe dream of Mr Nolan's since 2000 and that he'd been caressing the screenplay ever since. At the time of Inception's errr... inception, Mr Nolan and Warner Brothers had come to the agreement that he needed a little more experience-and probably as far as Warner Brothers was concerned success-with "big" films. With this back story in mind Inception was always going to be a big fat ego trip, which can for the movie goer result in a dire final product, think Kevin Costner's Waterworld. Fortunately though this flick is nothing of the sort. To start with the basics it's got incredible performances from everyone-apart from the Japanese bloke who on occasion I couldn't understand-and a nice hefty load of part matrix, part layer cake action sequences that make John McClane look like a morris dancer. Add that to the film's exemplary production design and special effects, you already have the foundations of a very solid Blockbuster. All this still pales in comparison to the marvel that is the overall concept behind Inception. I'm not even going to begin to describe all the brilliant ways in which this concept wows the viewer, mostly because I feel that a lot of the concept's appeal acts on numerous levels of the subconscious. Still a short explanation combined with a few pointers won't go amiss. As you may have heard already this film is about a bloke who, along with his compatriots, enters peoples' subconscious (using rather dubious technology) in oder to steel information from their minds whilst both he, his gang and the victim are all asleep. This involves all the respective characters being transported into a fancy alternate reality with loads of space for matrix-esque environment manipulation and that lovely feeling of questioning reality. Pretty much all of the film is however focused around one mission of epic proportions where the gang must go deeper than ever into the depths of one man's subconscious to plant information. So..... this is where it all gets interesting. To go deeper they must construct a series of alternate realities; dreams within dreams, so that the idea sticks within the victims brain. We also hear early on that within dreams time flows many times slower than reality and even slower as one goes deeper into the subconscious. So try picturing this; one epic mission where its events are spread across multiple realties, each one in some way influencing the next, all with their own relative time frames. For example there is one instance where the environment that the protagonists are in in one reality causes a complete upheaval of the physics in its subordinate reality, however the causes in the first reality (which only last a few seconds) cause effects with a feeling many times longer in the subordinate reality. The result is an epic point in the film (one of many) where we are being cut back and forth between action that is occurring simultaneously, involving a van falling in slow motion with the characters asleep within and on the other side a matrix like action sequence with a much larger time frame. You follow? If not don't fret, even with the film before your very eyes it can be hard. Either that or I'm rubbish at explaining things.
I do have one slight niggle about this film there are quite a few instances where Mr Nolan as used a little careless artistic licensee or overlooked a few things. Fortunately the film has such a wow factor, one doesn't notice them (first time round) but they certainly are reasons for lack of Oscars come the new year. There's no point going into all of them because-amongst other reasons-I feel that they are all encapsulated in the below video, enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment