Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Inception

Wow. Best film ever. At all.
At least, that's what I'm gonna think for quite a while.
And the film nerds of IMDb almost agree, ranking it 3rd of all times on the IMDb list of Top 250 movies. Given my taste, I don't like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption that much - don't get me wrong, they're nice but I demand more from a movie.
At some point, Christopher Nolan will have to disappoint me, but he didn't manage yet to come even close to that - I love every single moving he's done, and this one's beating even Memento for me. And he does such mind-blowing films while still being accessible and understandable, unlike other mind-blowing movies such as Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Well... let's see what happens with what he's working on currently - some untitled Batman 3 movie (which will be the conclusion of the story) and something on Superman (but maybe he won't direct it himself).

But let's go back to this movie.

Philosophers have been wondering about the subject of this movie, what is and isn't reality, for quite a while, and they didn't solve the problem. That's why this movie can exist - we can't know that what we have around is real. The Matrix already explored the topic a while ago (and even Nolan references it, see Wikipedia's page), but this one's far better.

Hey, guess what - Nolan's been working on it for some nine years, and such ideas about dreams have been in his mind since he was sixteen. However, working on a film for so long doesn't mean it has to be good - think to Avatar, first imagined fifteen years before its release (no, I didn't like it, I expected much more). I wonder how he can do better next time.

Of course, Nolan's been doing other work meanwhile in those years - he had to get experience in directing such a colossal, otherwise you just can't shoot such sequences. He interleaves scenes from up to 4 different interacting worlds for a good part of the movie, and he pictures the world surface bending together. Quoting Wikipedia:
He soon realized that a film like Inception needed a large budget because "as soon as you’re talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale."
And for sure, I'm gonna watch it again and again, until I get the finest details, especially since I've been watching it in English without subtitles - I missed quite a few details and I really want to get them.
UPDATE: I did, the same day :-D!