Belated Inception

I purposely didn't write about Inception before, because I can't really add anything to Janeheiress' review, except that I saw it and I liked it.

But I just went to see it again yesterday, and now I really want to talk to someone about it. It doesn't often happen that I don't understand a movie. I think I understand Inception; I'm pretty sure I understand it--yet there's something confusing about it that I am not quite willing to attribute to its having holes in the plot. So here are some of my random thoughts:

I bought the soundtrack because I need new running music, and it will work quite nicely. Nice intensity. Nice integration of plot and theme into the sound. Cool instrumentation ... well, Hans Zimmer's instrumentation is all very similar, but I can't fault him too much for that, because I still believe that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." You can always count on Zimmer to have a fun mix of modern and classical sounds. Once I would have thought it too synthesized, but he achieves the right kind of power with that without overdoing it with the high brass that some composers have.

Just a really quick, stupid thing to say: I'm still reeling from pleasant surprise at how much I liked Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in this movie. In spite of being dubbed the character with no imagination (that's the character I usually can't like), he was really cool. Mostly, I think, because of how sharp he looked in that suit. There's something about a dark-haired man in a suit. I mean, you could practically smell his cologne.

I liked Ellen Page as well. I've heard good things about her but never seen her in anything before. Whoever did her costumes was cool. It makes sense for an architectural student genius to wear scarves all the time. Not sure why, but it worked.

I don't remember his name, but the guy who supplied the sedatives and drove the van. He was good--especially at that part where he did some daring driving moves, then smiled and accidentally asked the back seat full of sleeping people if they had seen that.

The first time I saw the movie, I didn't get what was going on with the forger. As soon as I did, I liked him quite a bit, and one of the scenes in the hotel made so much more sense.

On the contrary, as much as I want to, I can't say a lot about DiCaprio's acting ability. He's always going to be Baz Luhrman's Romeo to me, no matter how many "serious" directors love him. He's not bad, but he's still not great. I want to be fair here. I think some of that has to be attributed to the repetitious, unoriginal nature of the dialogue. I liked the ideas they were expressing, but he, as well as Ellen Page, had some very bad lines that I didn't notice the first time around because I was so engrossed in the action. Bad dialogue rarely gets past me, so it's a big compliment to say that even though some of it is bad, I was completely unaware of it until I saw the movie again. I wonder how much the actors have to say in the course of the filming--regarding their lines, I mean. Surely those two noticed that by the last 20 or so minutes, they were simply repeating everything they had already said? And last about him as an actor--I think it has more to do with his voice than anything else. Even though he's probably in his late 30s now, and he plays these serious characters with serious issues, he still sounds like a young boy. It's very touching.

Now to business. What was going on at the end? Did he go into "limbo" to save Saito, and get stuck there? Why was there absolutely no explanation of what was happening? They showed the scene twice, so it had to mean something. When they woke up on the plane, was it still Dom's dream? The top never stopped spinning, and they left it that way on purpose, obviously, but why? Why do that? Was Nolan just trying to say that what Dom and his projection of Mal were endlessly arguing about has no answer--that you can choose your own reality? In that case, why would he choose his children over his wife? Not that I think that's a bad choice, but is that really what he was doing? And if he really did wake up and go home, why did the kids sound so much older over the telephone? Why was everything about that house so surreal? But then again, there was a beginning to it--and one of the first things he told Ariadne was that your subconscious always jumps into the middle of a dream.

I'm sorry. I love the movie and think it's wonderful, but the ending doesn't work for me. I see holes. Anyone else's opinions are most welcome. I never intended to get so worked up about a movie like this; writing a blog post tends to do that to me.

Okay, I only have 8% of my laptop battery left, so I have to stop writing. Maybe I will amend or delete this post later, I haven't decided.