*ing : Leo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-
Levitt, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe & Dileep Rao
Directed by : Christopher Nolan
The stuff that dreams are made of, not quite..... because
Levitt, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe & Dileep Rao
Directed by : Christopher Nolan
The stuff that dreams are made of, not quite..... because
There is a thing called watching films because of the simple pleasure involved in watching them. But seeing Christopher Nolan’s Inception, gives you watching a video game feel. Audiences claim that it bends your mind but looking at its action sequences I thought it bends gravity more than the mind.
Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) plays a corporate thief, whose métier is dipping into people’s minds when they are asleep, He and his team infiltrate people’s dreams and steal ideas. Their new assignment involves a client Saito(Ken Watanabe) wanting to “plant” an idea in a target’s (Cillian Murphy) mind in order so that he can break up his business empire. This is easier said than done because the mind always knows the genesis of the idea, explained to us by Arthur(Gordon-Levitt),a team member. So an extra team of specialists is assembled with world-designer Ariadne (Ellen Page), identity forger Eames (Tom Hardy), pharmacist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) who each in turn explain their fortes and impact on a dream to us.
But these dialogs are added in the narrative in a very instructive manner. Hence the sequences become verbose and go on for too long and I felt I was always waiting for the big jaw dropping sequence that never arrived. What happens is by the time you are digesting the overload of information in the previous sequence, a new action sequence comes along that leaves the attention divided and our verdict on the scene’s astuteness, if any compromised.
Nolan is a clever director and dares us to think that something might be wrong in the set up. There is no doubt about the novelty of Nolan’s ideas especially the dream inside a dream conceit. The problem then with the film I have is not with Nolan’s idea but his ultimate script that is tethered by his own mechanical way of thinking. Dreams are after all dreams, abstract, moody and weird. Then why, do we ask that these expanses of mind and the characters to whom they belong to are not explored further, made more colorful or vivid(case in point Tim Burton) but instead culminate in a succession of action set pieces stacked one over another that could be readily found in an expensive potboiler.
It isn’t helped by the fact that, Nolan right from his Batman Begins days hasn’t yet learnt the art of choreographing actions scenes and the same problem is on display in Inception. Some of them dazzle like the bending of Paris or the city of cards SFX but most just fizzle out in a muddle of harrowing movements across the screen.
Leo DiCaprio is painful as the humorless protagonist(for no apparent fault of his) while the others are just there because they are a team. Not one from the cast of Gordon Levitt, Tom Hardy, Ellen Page or Dileep Rao stays on the screen long enough to register an impact. The only performance worth watching is from Cobb’s beautiful but estranged and scary wife Marion Cotillard but she too is his projection or so it seems.
Look, Inception is not bad. It is entertaining as long as it lasts but the bottom line is that with a lack of peripheral character development, the movie feels unsatisfactory almost scolding us to observe something “deep and unusual” in what is after all just a heist movie with not one but 3 time clocks ticking. It just gets too cool for its own good. People who think that ,they would find something more profound, with the help of multiple viewings, must be dreaming.
Rating : 3/5 - Unsatisfactory
But these dialogs are added in the narrative in a very instructive manner. Hence the sequences become verbose and go on for too long and I felt I was always waiting for the big jaw dropping sequence that never arrived. What happens is by the time you are digesting the overload of information in the previous sequence, a new action sequence comes along that leaves the attention divided and our verdict on the scene’s astuteness, if any compromised.
Nolan is a clever director and dares us to think that something might be wrong in the set up. There is no doubt about the novelty of Nolan’s ideas especially the dream inside a dream conceit. The problem then with the film I have is not with Nolan’s idea but his ultimate script that is tethered by his own mechanical way of thinking. Dreams are after all dreams, abstract, moody and weird. Then why, do we ask that these expanses of mind and the characters to whom they belong to are not explored further, made more colorful or vivid(case in point Tim Burton) but instead culminate in a succession of action set pieces stacked one over another that could be readily found in an expensive potboiler.
It isn’t helped by the fact that, Nolan right from his Batman Begins days hasn’t yet learnt the art of choreographing actions scenes and the same problem is on display in Inception. Some of them dazzle like the bending of Paris or the city of cards SFX but most just fizzle out in a muddle of harrowing movements across the screen.
Leo DiCaprio is painful as the humorless protagonist(for no apparent fault of his) while the others are just there because they are a team. Not one from the cast of Gordon Levitt, Tom Hardy, Ellen Page or Dileep Rao stays on the screen long enough to register an impact. The only performance worth watching is from Cobb’s beautiful but estranged and scary wife Marion Cotillard but she too is his projection or so it seems.
Look, Inception is not bad. It is entertaining as long as it lasts but the bottom line is that with a lack of peripheral character development, the movie feels unsatisfactory almost scolding us to observe something “deep and unusual” in what is after all just a heist movie with not one but 3 time clocks ticking. It just gets too cool for its own good. People who think that ,they would find something more profound, with the help of multiple viewings, must be dreaming.
Rating : 3/5 - Unsatisfactory
