I do not know why it has taken me 4 years to watch this film but i am so glad i have finally watched it. I think what has caused me to hold back from watching it for so long is the fact that it is undoubtedly a lengthy film that requires an immense amount of brain power to watch. Within the first 5 minutes i had to pause and recollect what i had seen and reconstruct the story to make sense in my brain... only then to have to explain it to my film partner who was equally as befuddled. And so i think i have really needed to wait for my brain to be able to maintain itself for almost 3 hours to decode each mind-boggling scene that was shown to me. And finally i found that time and it was worth waiting for.
To get the negative out of the way, there are a couple criticisms of which have only dented my impression to the smallest scale. Firstly, Saito's transformation into an old man was very impressive on a metaphorical scale, however his make-over on a literal scale was not the best i have seen. It was the first thing i noticed when Ken Watanabe came on screen and i could instantly tell that he wasn't genuinely old. I feel that too many areas on his face were used by make-up artists to show the stereotypical ageing processes and so as a result his face became disfigured and almost shrivelled. However, i appreciate it is very difficult to make someone youthful appear to be aged, this was just a minor let-down.
Secondly, the only other issue i had with the film was the clarity of speech. At various points throughout the film i was unable to make out what was being said influenced by either surrounding sound or mistaken intonation. Luckily i don't believe it caused me to miss any vital information, yet it was possibly one of the reasons i became confused within the opening scene of the film, as not all the words were identifiable. Once again however, it only served as a small hindrance and has not changed my overall perception of the film greatly.
Moving onto the positive... this film has presented me with possibly the most compelling concept i have come across so far in my life. I have an infatuation with the concept of time. How time can pass, to us, at such varying rates, but in reality be travelling at a constant speed is fascinating. So the idea of reality moving slower than dreams and time changing with each new level of extraction in this film was entirely captivating. Similarly i find the concept of the subconscious gripping. The scene wherein Page enters her first dream and witnesses DiCaprio's subconscious loathing her presence and her intrusion into his thoughts was engrossing. And what i love even more about this film is that your mind does not stop thinking once the scene or the whole film has finished rolling. You are continuously imagining and building on the thought of placing reality or new ideas into your dreams.And i am still wondering what my subconscious holds, which is quite ironic has i will never be able to enter that party of my brain... unless of course i partook in psychodynamic therapy due to suffering from a mental illness (AS psychology reference) which is still not proven to be entirely reliable.
I hope i am making sense and not being too brief on each point i make.
At the end of the film i was asked what my favourite scene was and my immediate response was the scene where the characters are 'kicked' out of each level of the dream they are in and eventually return to reality on the plane. By this point in the film i was so confident, perhaps too much so, that i knew exactly what was going on. In fact now i have said that i should probably admit to you that i did have to google 'how come the spinning top kept spinning' and a couple other questions at the end... so i obviously didn't know it all. Anyway, the reason i liked this scene was because i felt like i was at a point where my predictions could be met by the performance, not at all in a disappointing way, but to feel as if you understand a film such as this one is honestly quite an achievement... so when Page jumped off the building kicking her out of dream level 4 and the van hit the water kicking Gordon-Levitt out of dream level 1, i couldn't help but just sit in such awe and feel a strange sense satisfaction, especially due to the fact that there was enough time for the main task of the film's journey to be completed.
I could go on for hours but i know if i carry on i probably won't stop so thank you for reading and once again i hope i make some sort of sense,
Here is the imdb link for Inception,
Love and hugs... George x
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