On 24/08/2011 09:57 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> OK, so I just finished watching Inception.

Well, now I can say that I've seen it. I don't think I will ever bother 
watching it again. It was certainly an interesting idea for a story. And 
the visual effects were pretty stunning. However, the actual story they 
made and the way they chose to tell it weren't all that great. Not 
/bad/, just not great.

The comparison to The Matrix seems unavoidable. I was worried that The 
Matrix would end up being a gratuitous festival of "I'm going to 
scramble your brain!" But actually it wasn't like that at all. Certainly 
I didn't understand the significance of little detail the first time I 
watched it, but I certainly wasn't anywhere near "lost" at any point. 
The computer-generated world is pretty fantastical, but both the real 
world and the imaginary one clearly follow a well-defined set of rules, 
which you gradually come to understand as you watch the film. The way 
they manage to explain all this at the same time as telling a story, not 
to mention the order in which details are revealed, is stunning.

Inception, on the other hand, is kind of the film that I was worried 
that The Matrix would be. Right up to the point at the end where 
everybody lives happily ever after but they carefully imply that this 
may or may not actually be the real world.

There's no clear delineation of what's real and what isn't. (That's kind 
of the whole point.) A lot of the intense action comes across as 
hurried, like it would have made much more sense if it happened more 
slowly. I didn't get "lost", but from time to time I has having trouble 
keeping up. The pacing isn't great; rather than a roller-coaster ride of 
ups and downs, it's *all* ever-increasing drama. It constantly seems to 
be building up to the final cataclysm, which takes forever to actually 
arrive.

And then there's the fact that, at the very centre, it's a overly 
sentimental story about True Love and unending regret. Perhaps more than 
anything else, the overly emotional touchy-feely stuff puts me off. 
Watching the psycho wife from hell just isn't very nice.

Also, the sucky noise that machine makes disturbs me slightly...

On the other hand, I was really impressed with how in the end they get 
the guy to convince *himself* to do what they want him to. True 
inception. I thought that /was/ rather nicely done.



Anyway, I don't know about you guys, but *my* dreams were /nothing like/ 
the real world. More like a random jumble of essentially unrelated ideas 
that make no logical sense at all. I don't see people pointing guns at 
me; I see flying pandas and molten biscuits. Every time I look in a 
different direction, my surroundings have completely changed. All sorts 
of weird stuff happens. And, most baffling of all, all of this seems 
PERFECTLY NORMAL to me at the time.

And then I wake up and think "Flying pandas? What the HELL...?!"

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