Inception

[darthfar]

I caught Inception on the big screen with my aunt and cousin this afternoon. If you haven't heard of the movie, it's a science-fiction action film written, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan of Batman Begins fame, and deals with the subject of industrial espionage by extracting information from victims while they are dreaming, and the far more difficult task of implanting ideas in a sleeping person's mind (called "inception"). I won't give the story to anyone who's planning to watch it, but, as a lucid dreamer (and one who, after once having been caught in a series of false awakenings, once wrote a story fragment about a fake existence in which a person never woke up, but tripped from one dream level to another endlessly - and this was long before I'd even heard of Neil Gaiman's Sandman), it was a pleasure to see someone who'd pondered the same idea have the vision and creativity to develop it fully into a movie, where characters lucidly moved into deeper and deeper levels of dreaming. While there are definitely influences from past movies there, it's still about the most inventive show I've seen in a long time, and certainly the one most worth watching in these past seasons of remakes, remakes and more goddamn remakes. And for the first time since Titanic, it was actually possible to accept Leonardo diCaprio as a character in the movie rather than a pretty-boy actor who'd been cast in the role. (It probably helped that he's now 16 years older and more grizzled).

My aunt and cousin, on the other hand, firmly believed that Christopher Nolan was an insane escapee from Arkham Asylum. When told what the ending of the movie suggested, their reaction was along the lines of, "Whaaat? then what's the point..." *facepalm*

[Can I just say how much I appreciated Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wardrobe in this movie? Seriously, everything he wore was made of Win.]

Comments

[coloneldespard.livejournal.com]

Oh, goodness - not the dreaming one is awakening but still in a dream lucid dreaming! I think I'll skip this one. I get enough of it in RL. Had another one the other day where it was almost a joke with my subconscious. I did a rather weary "I'm not really awake, am I?" and was just grateful for the immediate lack of zombies or lurking murderers.

Saw an hilarious skit on a British comedy show the other night. Guy wakes up and keeps seeing girlfriend with melted face, changing into a hellish figure. Then he thinks he's woken up, but of course he hasn't...girl, after consoling him, turns into a demon. It gets further and further along each time, and takes longer for it to all to turn into a nightmare and for him to realise it's a dream. Finally he gets jack of it, tells off the girlfriend (pre-melting face and demonic transformation), calls his boss and tells him to in rather graphic terms that he's a git and is quitting, and then suddenly decides it's not a dream. He walks horrified out of the bedroom, thinking he's just trashed his life...then melting face demon arrives and his response is "Oh, thank GOD!"

Erm...much more amusing in the original...and if you have these dreams.