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Am I the only one who gets annoyed when people think inception was some stupid-deep, hard-to-understand movie? It was (I thought) very straight-forward. The bi

• Splines 15y ago
  I'll agree that the "follow-the-plot" infographics are too common (we don't need more than one), but the meta-issues are particularly interesting (and I think have all been discussed before). At first watch it's clear (apart from the ending sequence) what parts of the movie are dreams and what parts are reality, but when you watch it again you may start to consider that it's a little more fuzzy than that.
• outworlder 15y ago
  Joel Spolsky says that some individuals appear to have been born without the part of the brain that understands pointers and recursion. Maybe that's the case here?
  • evincarofautumn 15y ago
    Joel Spolsky is as fallible as the rest of us. It’s very dangerous to mistakenly consider a skill an aptitude.
  • wisty 15y ago
    Maybe. It might just be that some people tune out when the rules are explained. Sci-fi geeks won't (because we know they are important). If you expected Inception to be an action flick, you might tune out during the techo-babble (since it's often just an excuse for blowing stuff up) and not be able to unravel it.
  • Androsynth 15y ago
    I haven't seen the movie, but reading this reminded me more of a state machine. It seems like it would be tough to keep track of 4 states at once and jump back and forth between them. (though it might be easier for engineers since we have been training these mental faculties more than most others)
  • ctdonath 15y ago
    Dunno about "without", but certainly not well used. Once explained recursion to someone using a simple programming example; we stepped thru it for two hours before he got it.
    • harshreality 15y ago
      I would have thought everyone learned that concept in grade school. Is it legal to graduate someone before they understand mathematical induction?
• evincarofautumn 15y ago
  You’re not alone. If you want a movie with actual complexity, watch Primer. Oh, you’ll probably think you get it the first time through, because the writing is great. Then you’ll rewatch it a couple times and see just how much you missed, because the writing is brilliant.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • Cushman 15y ago
    > Then you’ll rewatch it a couple times and see just how much you missed, because the writing is brilliant. ...and the audio is pretty inconsistent :P But seriously, seconded. One of my absolute favorite films of all time, and made on a budget in the thousands. Completely stunning.
    • evincarofautumn 15y ago
      I would go so far as to say it’s my favourite film bar none, and I don’t say such a thing lightly. It has its flaws, but it speaks to me. What’s more stunning still is that most of the $7,000 budget was film stock. Because it was filmed. On film. Ain’t nothing like the 16mm look, truly.
      • maaku 15y ago
        > What’s more stunning still is that most of the $7,000 budget was film stock. Because it was filmed. On film. Ain’t nothing like the 16mm look, truly. And what's even more stunning is that most of it was done in one take because, well, they only had $7,000 to budget on film stock.
        • trafficlight 15y ago
          Shane Caruth also starred in the movie, wrote it, directed it, edited, and wrote the soundtrack all on his own dime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
• austintaylor 15y ago
  I read a review once where someone said it was "stupid and unrealistic" citing the van "falling through the air for half the movie".
• cletus 15y ago
  I get it but the fact that some don't neither offends nor concerns me and I certainly don't feel the need to belittle them or bemoan their existence. Seriously, get off your high horse.
  • irishcoffee 15y ago
    Am I the only one who gets annoyed when people get annoyed at my annoyances? Edit: Am I the only one who sees the irony of the annoyed pot calling the annoyed kettle black?
• Avshalom 15y ago
  A couple years back one of the people on the Writing Excuses podcast described reading science fiction as a skill and used as ancedata his friend who spent the entire length of a space opera book wondering how the teleporter worked. Similarly my mother (not a dumb woman by and large) got tripped up because there was a line in the movie that the dream machines were military technology, instead of taking this a handwave she spent the rest of the film assuming that it was a secret CIA sting operation. Basically not recognizing which parts of a universe you're supposed to just roll with and which parts you're supposed to puzzle out yourself. Possible side effect: you spend the whole movie/book trying to solve it through a completely broken lens and nothing ever adds up or you're too busy (mentally) to notice the real- straight forward- breadcrumb trail and you come out thinking it was much twistier than it was.
• 3pt14159 15y ago
  Here is something that most people missed: Reality was a dream the whole time. There are hints throughout the movie, but the entire thing was a dream. Most people point to the wedding ring theory as evidence that it wasn't, but that just shows the lead's state of mind, not reality.
  • jerf 15y ago
    Word of God is that this is not true and that the top level of reality was indeed reality. The camera panning away from the spinning top before it fell down was supposed to represent that Cobb is now dedicated to his children and no longer worried about whether it's reality, not a low-class cheap mindscrew about whether it's all a dream or not. Note that having the whole thing be a dream completely drains it of all interesting dramatic tension, turning an interesting movie into one in which nothing (or very little) is at stake and nothing really happens for any particular reason. (Remember, if the whole movie is a dream there's no longer any reason to believe his wife is waiting one level up.) It's an awfully stiff price to pay for a painfully dull, obvious twist.
    • mortenjorck 15y ago
      The cut away from the totem was simply the film's final inception: a seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.
      • egypturnash 15y ago
        IMHO the whole film IS an inception: it's planting the "wait what if MY LIFE is all a dream" idea in the viewer's mind.
      • AndreiVajnaII 15y ago
        I agree - kind of a cheap magic trick if you ask me...
    • muhammadatt 15y ago
      This seems to be an overly simplified take. If Nolan had intended to make it clear that the final scene was indeed reality then he could have just as well shown the totem falling while Cobb walked away. It seems pretty clear that Nolan explicitly intended to leave it up to the viewer to decide what was "real" and what as not. This ambiguity between dream and reality is one of the most important themes in the film - Cobb spends the entire movie preoccupied with keeping track of reality, to the point that one could argue that Cobb's had been incepted to remain obsessed with identifying reality to the same degree that Mal had been incepted to perpetually believe that she was dreaming. When Cobb sees Mal in limbo at the end, she also makes point explicit - pointing out that Cobb has simply chosen to believe that his children "up there" are what is real and that Mal "down there" is not. The final scene preserves this ambiguity, while underscoring the fact that the obsession with reality is no longer important to Cobb - he is finally at peace with where he is - real or not.
• pharrington 15y ago
  Inception's plot was certainly straight forward. But just about every movie that exists is packed with layers of meaning and open to wide spectrum of interpretation. Inception may seem deeper than the average movie only because talk about dreams is a fairly reliable way to trigger philosophical thought in people. The -confusion- around Inception is probably just because the narrative is fairly dense.
• theycallmemorty 15y ago
  I agree that the concept of the movie is not hard to understand. But then I read trevelyan's post above and I feel stupid.
• mechanical_fish 15y ago
  No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated for many people, but probably not if you're a computer programmer in which case you literally have years of formal education in the structures that this plot is built on, and even a formal vocabulary to describe it with. (e.g. "Inception is a movie that keeps pushing other movies onto the stack.") You're suffering the mathematician's disease, ably satirized by Feynman in that quote I can't stop paraphrasing: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because once proved any theorem is immediately seen to be trivial." But I think Inception succeeds as a film only because following the plot thread in real time isn't of the essence, just as I was able to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony long before I was taught its formal structure. Without the education required to really dissect that structure, you nevertheless sense that it's there, and it enhances the emotional experience that the work is trying to convey – in Inception's case, the experience of being a man (well, two men, actually, and possibly also a woman) immersed in a dreamlike world full of symbols, mazes, masks, bluffs, and distractions, a world that he himself is creating to distract his own attention from the pure, simple, but unthinkably awful pain at the center of his life. --- EDIT: Fixed my prose, which got away from me. So tempted to just delete this whole thing, but I try to avoid erasing history even if it's really embarrassing and exhausting.
  • pharrington 15y ago
    Just to be sure, you're getting downvoted because you're claiming non-programmers can't easily understand the concept of an activity having -multiple layers-. An execution stack is but one example of this. The construction of a cake, for example, is another.
    • mechanical_fish 15y ago
      It's nice for someone to actually say so, thanks. I'm getting tired of all the reflexive, unexplained downvotes. HN is an unfriendly and cold place, these days. Meanwhile, sure, it's easy to understand that Inception is a cake. I'll concede that. But: it's not so easy to frost all three layers of the cake at the same time. The part where Inception gets tricky for me is where they start intercutting from layer to layer, and taking actions on one layer that have ramifications on the others.
• libraryatnight 15y ago
  You're not alone, as others have pointed out, but I'll add my name to the list. I came out of Inception with my fiance and we almost simultaneously said, in different words of course, "That seemed a fairly straight forward twist on a heist movie, to me." And every viewing after I've felt the same way. It's a very cool heist movie with very cool effects and a clever plot. It does lend itself well to interpretation and general musing, but sometimes I feel people are reaching too far for allegory and symbolism. It's good to find those things, and to take art and run with it, to let it seed ideas and interpretation, but some are a little over zealous.
• enneff 15y ago
  I agree. I recently re-watched David Lynch's Lost Highway. That is a wonderful and complex film that on the surface seems nonsensical and surreal, but - once you make certain revelations - reveals its beautiful and elegant construction.
• qntm 15y ago
  All of Inception is a dream except the final scene. It's a movie about a father (Michael Caine) trying to rescue his son.