INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

[Ire]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

The Wild Bunch is the perfect movie.

Yes and yes.


It does say something about Inception that there are almost 500 posts about the movie and 10k views. That doesn't make it perfect by any means, but the ideas it explores and the universe it constructs generate speculation and enthusiasm and intellectualizing and there have been few movies in recent memory that have engendered that kind of response,

[wildzero]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

I just have high standards and refuse to lower them simply because Hollywood has lowered theirs.

Yeesh. If I had a nickel for every time I saw Bio post this...

[Biohazard]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Yes. You expressed your opinion very well.

I suppose it's also just my opinion that Leonardo DiCaprio is in the movie, too?

Better than having a temporal lobe lodged in your sphincter.

Yeesh. If I had a nickel for every time I saw Bio post this...

It's my new catch phrase.

It was either that or 'Girl, that's bananas!', but that was already taken.

[NePatsFan]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

1 - The hero stops actively pursuing his goal of planting the idea. Instead, he goes gallivanting with his dead wife.

To plant an inception was not the hero's goal in the movie. His goal was to get back home to his kids, which depending on how you choose to see it, he either accomplished or failed. Planting the inception was just a means to get to his goal.

[thirdman23]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

To plant an inception was not the hero's goal in the movie. His goal was to get back home to his kids, which depending on how you choose to see it, he either accomplished or failed. Planting the inception was just a means to get to his goal.

Don't bother. He couldn't make the connection between the train running through level 1 and the one that took Cobb & Mal out of limbo. I don't think he was really paying attention much.

[Mycroftbrett]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Bad movies make money all the time. That doesn't make them any better. It make them more profitable, which has zero to do with the shortcomings in the screenplay of a film.

Using your formula fails to expose the shortcomings with this film, is like using Phrenology as a recipe for paella.

[MacG]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Granted I haven't read every post in this thread...but has anyone mentioned just what a lame goal Cobb and his team have been charged with? The mission is to get a guy to break up his father's company? Huh?

Maybe I'm more pedestrian / low-brow that I would care to admit, but why not have the stakes a little higher? Why not have the "inception" be to plant the idea of killing someone? Why not have Cobb double-crossed in the dream world so the inception is placed within him, he finds out about it somehow, and then he has to enter the dreamworld to figure out how he was set up and how to stop it?

Again, maybe you guys will snicker and say, "Go watch a Michael Bay movie, dude," but I'm truly puzzled that no one has called out what a weak A-story INCEPTION has.

[Rantanplan]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Granted I haven't read every post in this thread...but has anyone mentioned just what a lame goal Cobb and his team have been charged with? The mission is to get a guy to break up his father's company? Huh?

Maybe I'm more pedestrian / low-brow that I would care to admit, but why not have the stakes a little higher? Why not have the "inception" be to plant the idea of killing someone? Why not have Cobb double-crossed in the dream world so the inception is placed within him, he finds out about it somehow, and then he has to enter the dreamworld to figure out how he was set up and how to stop it?

Again, maybe you guys will snicker and say, "Go watch a Michael Bay movie, dude," but I'm truly puzzled that no one has called out what a weak A-story INCEPTION has.

Totally agree, the stakes never felt that high or the plot that compelling. Lost opportunity to, I don't know, save all of humanity by planting a thought in Ossama's mind or something like that

Or to set the story in 2003 and do the inception in Bush's mind and avoid invading Iraq. Lots of possibilities !

There still would have been all the dream stuff, but the film would have been attractive on more that just that one level.

Off the top of our heads, most of us here could come up with more engaging plot scenarios.

[Gwai Lo]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Off the top of our heads, most of us here could come up with more engaging plot scenarios.

Makes you wonder why Nolan's the one making blockbusters and we're the ones d!cking around on the internet, doesn't it?

[lordmanji]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Granted I haven't read every post in this thread...but has anyone mentioned just what a lame goal Cobb and his team have been charged with? The mission is to get a guy to break up his father's company? Huh?

Maybe I'm more pedestrian / low-brow that I would care to admit, but why not have the stakes a little higher? Why not have the "inception" be to plant the idea of killing someone? Why not have Cobb double-crossed in the dream world so the inception is placed within him, he finds out about it somehow, and then he has to enter the dreamworld to figure out how he was set up and how to stop it?

Again, maybe you guys will snicker and say, "Go watch a Michael Bay movie, dude," but I'm truly puzzled that no one has called out what a weak A-story INCEPTION has.

the stakes were more, if cillian retains control of the company they will monopolize 50 percent of the world's energy. not a very good event for half the world's people.

that said, it's also not a very sexy goal. the immediate goal is to help one corporate businessman get a one-up over another businessman.

at the same time, it's no different than any heist movie where the goal is to basically get rich. i think its because the personal story is so engrossing that people tend to forget its basically a heist movie.

[amandag]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Maybe I'm more pedestrian / low-brow that I would care to admit, but why not have the stakes a little higher? Why not have the "inception" be to plant the idea of killing someone? Why not have Cobb double-crossed in the dream world so the inception is placed within him, he finds out about it somehow, and then he has to enter the dreamworld to figure out how he was set up and how to stop it?

I think b/c it would mis-weight the story and require a fourth act. This keeps the weight/stakes on the Cobb's goal beyond the goal and allows the story to be told the way its told--with Cobb as the centerpoint. A murder goal, IMO, would require the plot to be reframed and move Cobb to the periphery.

[Gwai Lo]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Corporations are arguably more powerful and more influential than most world leaders these days anyway. Would the goal seem more relatable if the mission was to plant the idea of stringent safety precautions in the mind of BP's CEO?

[Rantanplan]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

Makes you wonder why Nolan's the one making blockbusters and we're the ones d!cking around on the internet, doesn't it?

Well, gee, Gwai, with that reasoning no single bad movie or book or song ever gets made

Come on, I know you loved the film, but do you actually love that particular part of it? Did you care whether or not one company would achieve global domination? Were you invested in that element of the story?

I'm betting no. So why not take that one part of the whole that isn't very compelling and make it more compelling?

[Gwai Lo]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

I didn't think the fact that it was a corporate heist made it weaker. I wasn't sitting in the theater wishing the stakes were higher. And like others have mentioned it's not simply "get a guy to break up his father's company", but to break up an energy monopoly on which the entire world depends. I mean those Ocean's guys were just stealing sh!t. I was definitely invested in the story and the success of the heist. And like NePatsFan I'm pretty sure Cobb's A Goal was to go home to his kids, and the heist was the means to that end.

But more to the point, I usually find it kind of obnoxious when people start in with the "it would be better if"s. Because most of the time their ideas are nowhere close to being better. Usually they're of the head-slappingly obvious cliche variety. I mean Nolan spent 10 years writing this movie. We saw it once or twice, gave it some cursory thought, and now we're going to pop in and announce the so-called obvious ways it could have been better? It's kind of like on the Script Pages forum or TriggerStreet or something where people who have poured blood sweat and tears into a piece of writing have to deal with feedback from people who skimmed it. The suggestions often involve completely changing everything to fit what the reader/viewer expected, instead of finding the weak spots in what the writer/director wanted to tell/show us. And yes, sometimes the work/movie is truly terrible and there are ways that it could have been better. But how is "it would be better if it was this completely different story I just came up with off the top of my head" helpful or insightful at all?

[Biohazard]

Re: INCEPTION - Nolan's masterpiece!

To plant an inception was not the hero's goal in the movie.

In order to get home to see his kids, a highly skilled thief haunted by the memory of his deceased wife must enter the mind of a multi-billion dollar oil company heir through dream invasion and plant the idea of breaking up the company.

Is that not the plot of Inception? Because that's the movie I saw.

Who is the hero? - a highly skilled thief.
What is the hero attempting to do? - plant the idea.
What is standing in the hero's way? - the memory of his wife.
Why must the hero succeed? - to get home to his kids.

Hero - Goal - Antagonist - Stakes