Dude Rates Movies

Inception

E
Poster of the movie
Christopher Nolan | 2010 | USA, UK
Saturday 5 September 2020 (rewatched) (downrated from D to E)

I've understanded it better than when I watched it in the theater, but I'm still losing it near the middle. Architecturing dreams still feels like cheating to shoot cool action scenes in arbitrary scenery. Hard to believe inception is more efficient than awake manipulation by a good salesman. I don't really care about the characters, and stakes feel mechanical (this one wants to get back to his children, this one wants a concurrent to abandon, yeah whatever gets the story going). Why are limbo dangerous if you can just kill yourself to get out? Why do the kicks need to be synchronized? Why isn't a single kick from the root level sufficient at all? Why aren't they weightless in the snow level? What the hell is he trying to do with the elevator? Please don't tell me the elevator is supposed to go down because of the blast from the explosion (weightlessness doesn't disable friction and it certainly doesn't make an elevator massless so that it can be moved fast by a tiny explosion). Why not slap them in the face?

None of those questions matter, because the screenplay brings up answers out of thin air in the middle of the movie anyway, so I'm sure we can find answers for everything.

Wednesday 14 August 2013 (watched)

Christopher Nolan sets the action into dreams so that he has an excuse to show us whatever the fuck he wants. Fans will come up with all sorts of explanations to fix holes in the ambiguous axiomatic so that they can keep convincing themselves that it’s a form of highly intelligent art. I mildly enjoy the show from a perplexed eye.