Evening Reading
When my mission is to go "raid" a gang hideout, I expect to actually participate in some sort of "raid", not just press the 'F' key and wait for an item to pop-out of this unguarded hideout.
I'm going to give it a bit more time, but the MMO construct around the shooting is generally detracting from my experience. This isn't promising.
Also, indie gaming fans: check out this awesome post over at Shack sister-site Indie Games Channel with info, trailers, and screenshots of all 10 indie games being honored at PAX Prime 10.
Gaming News o'the Day
- Blizzard FAQ on Real ID, Battle.net, and Facebook.
- New Alien Swarm game from Valve. And it's free!
- Mafia II DLC announced including some PS3-exclusive content.
- Multiplayer beta sign-ups for Spec Ops: The Line.
- False alarm: No BF:BC2 Onslaught Mode for PC yet.
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Inception is a fantastic movie. Go see it so we can discuss it!
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What indicates it's a dream? I think that was the point of that storyline once you have that 'inception' of "is this world real?" you'll start assuming it's not therefore the movie gave you that idea and therefore you thought the ending was a dream.
I'm not sure one way or the other - I think cases for both sides could be made. -
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It could go either way. If you feel its still a dream shit gets very interesting.
- The kids look very similar to their dream versions and have almost the exact same post.
- Michael Caine's character tells Cobb that he "needs to wake up" at the beginning of the movie. Could be a throwaway line.
- The top looked ready to tumble and then regained its momentum.
- I believe it was still a dream. Thats why Cobb's memories started infecting other parts of the dream in a way that didn't make sense with the already established rules on architecting a a dream. Note that the movie starts in the middle of a job, we have no idea how they got there.
- Another theory from AICN: "Cobb has been coerced to join his father (Caine) in Caine's dream reality. Apply everything you know about Cobb's role to Ariadne - she brings Cobb to the deepest levels of his dreams/memories, she tells Cobb to trust her with his deepest secrets, she convinces Cobb to shoot Mal. All this after 'an idea' is implanted in Cobb's brain early in the movie - when Saito suggests that he can live his life happily with his children if he does one more job. They also made the point over and over that only the dreamer can populate a dream landscape - his kids and Mal keep showing up. One last hint - after escaping the van Ariadne states "He'll be fine" - because she orchestrated everything, and the rest of the cast (including Fischer) were part of her team, working for Michael Caine's character. There's no conclusion to the 'Level 4' story because he had already parted with Mal - goal accomplished, at which point the rest of the team (on the plane) woke him up."-
A lot of the datapoints for that AICN theory are much more easily explainable in their immediate context. I mean, Ariadne was very curtly explaining the situation to others who weren't there. It's a hell of a stretch, especially since we see him successfully use his totem several times throughout the movie. It could be his OWN dream since he knows what it should be, but it couldn't be Caine's dream because he doesn't know how the top works.
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Read this prequel comic:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/inception-comic.html
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I thought I saw a silhouette of his wife in a window curtain during what was supposed to be reality. I'm forgetting what exactly happened, but I thought there was a point before they started the mission planning that a 'wake-up' for Cobb occurred that wasn't obvious. IMO, whole thing was a dream (kids are same age, etc.).
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Yeah, I think the part with the train, helicopter were real. Like I mentioned above, there was a turning point for me that I can't remember specifically (which is obviously of little help explaining lol). Everything leading up to the mission (all the planning), the mission, and the end were Cobb's dreaming, I'm feeling.
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i think the ambiguity is to spite the underthinking sucksofts. What do you have to say about the recurring themes of guilt. The repetition of certain phrases from mal, saito, and cobb. The idea that it's a dream is that the 'Inception' is him freeing himself from the guilt of driving his wife to suicide. He attains that in the end
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There wasn't any context to how long Cobb has been away though. It could have been 6 months or years. Nolan I think executed a good amount of ambiguity to include keeping the clothing the same so as to limit everything to the Totem.
Obviously when Cobb turns around he'll see if the Totem was still spinning. The Audience is left to figure that out for themselves.
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"Our time" being post-80's cinema to me, that's a good 30 years.
I can't name another director who delivers has consistently and readily as Nolan. Fincher is close but he tends to draw things out and is sometimes afraid to cut the fat and he directed Alien 3 (not his fault...but still). Scorsese has had a bumpy couple of years before "The Aviator". Spielberg is a craftsman, not an artist (nothing wrong with that but his movies don't resonate with the same impact). Woody Allen has put out some absolute shit during the last 10 years so so (Match Point and Vicky Christina notwithstanding). Coppola has basically fallen off the radar making extremely personal films for the last couple of years after not doing shit for an eternity. Cronenberg has been putting out good stuff the last couple of years but he's too niche.
If you go really arthouse and pretensious and pull someone like Vincent Gallo out of your hat I'm going to find a way to crawl through the internet and punch you in the throat. I'm saying in the last 30 years in terms of making smart, accessible, entertaining films that satisfy - no one touches Nolan. -
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Accessible was my follow up. In terms of accessible, mainstream entertainment with brains - Nolan trumps all. I like the directors you picked but you're skirting arthouse with your choices. Cohen bros. being the most mainstream of your choices but they've had a couple weak films (Burn After Reading and the noir they did with Billy Bob Thorton come to mind).
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Hijack question:
For those that thought the end was another dream because of the kids not aging. You don't know how long Cobb was out of the country for, it could have only been a week or something, it never says in the movie. So it's probably left for the audience to pick the ending themselves.
I think it was real life personally. If it wasn't, whose dream was Cobb in, his own dream? Couldn't be. :(
And another question I had was this: Why didn't the other people get cobb and saito out of the van when it went in the river? wouldn't they have drowned making them stuck in limbo? Oh but that's where they were already? who trippy :(
I'm gonna have to go watch this again, haha :D -
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Back from it. Wow it lived up to the hype! The debate about the ending is funny though I guess it is to be expected, especially on the shack. To me it's obvious that there is no definite answer hence why it ended like it did. Sure its fun to discuss clues and possibilities, but arguing about it is just silly
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I'm sure they looped it as you say secondly the rules of that specific totem is if it does not stop spinning then you can't trust the reality, this is laid out directly to you by a character. So when the top doesn't stop spinning in the end i think it's pretty clear. There are of course many other reasons, why it's a dream.
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yeah i thought it was great. i have a question though: since they are in a dream and can change stuff there, shouldn't they be able to heal themselves if they get hurt? or was that because of the whole pain is in the mind line? the ending could go either way for me. and ellen page is getting prettier the older she gets i think.
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I think it's safe to say their avatars or whatever have all the same physical limitations as they would; same reason they can't just fly or grow big or whatever.
It's important to note that Nolan's conception of dreaming is deeply intersubjective, and that intersubjectivity strips out a lot of the traditional dream-logic weirdness, if not all. -
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from imdb:
The Plan:
Level 0 - reality. Everyone's asleep on the plane.
Level 1 - the city - Yusuf's dream. He stays there while everyone else gets hooked up to go to level 2, but Saito is slowly dying.
Level 2 - the hotel - Arthur's dream. He stays in the hotel while everyone else gets hooked up to go to level 3. Saito still dying.
Level 3 - the mountain - Fischer's dream, but he thinks it's his godfather's dream. Saito dies and goes to Limbo. Inception should occur here, but Fischer dies, thus bringing him to Limbo. Cobb and Ariadne voluntarily enter Limbo.
Level 4 - Limbo - not a single dreamer's dream, but a collective dreamscape, most of which was built by Cobb and Mal, since they're pretty much the only ones who have been there before.
The Escape:
Waiting for the sedative to wear off would take too long, so instead they use kicks. In Limbo, Ariadne and Fischer jump off the edge to wake up in level 3. In level 3, Eades uses explosions to cause the building to collapse and the fall brings them all to level 2. Level 2 had no gravity because the van in level 1 was falling, so Arthur uses explosions to kick them all back to level 1. Once the van hits the water in level 1, they all wake up in reality on the plane
But Cobb and Saito are still in Limbo. Saito was there longer, so he's now an old man and has built himself an empire. Cobb convinces him that it's a dream.
Now one of two things happens.
1. Saito and Cobb used the gun to kill themselves in Limbo and wake up on the plane.
or 2. Cobb never escaped Limbo. He imagined he did, and convinced himself that he was reunited with his kids, but he was actually still dreaming.
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This is an absolutely fantastic movie that succeeded on so many levels. It has an original, intriguing concept of exploring your dreams yet it draws from and integrates ideas from different genres like heist and con movies to action and drama in a way that can be enjoyed by everyone. It has well done action scenes, impressive and varied locales, and some really memorable sequences like the entire zero grav portion that would appeal to almost anyone. Also, after the movie was over I realized that the violence was really tame and I couldn't recall any vulgar language so people who have hangups about that kind of stuff don't have to worry.
It was just such an exciting movie to watch. I was really hyped going into it and it's really rare for something to not only live up to it, but also surpass my expectations.
I feel like such a faggot fanboy writing that but I was just really really impressed with Christopher Nolan did with this movie. It further solidifies the fact that he is probably the best director to come along in the past 15 or so years. -
I really like how "It was all a dream!" is typically one of the worst and most cliched endings to a movie but in this one it totally works. I hope that Nolan never comes out and says either way whether or the ending was real or a dream. I hate it when directors open their mouths and ruin perfectly ambiguous endings.
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I think ultimately in these cases it should be looked at more on a broader level. There should be interpretations of things. You can look at plenty of books, plays, short stories and get great interpretations. I think that's where the focus of this should go. I think there are some that are probably more complex and rewarding than the obvious ones and it should be looked from that point of view rather than 'right' vs 'wrong'
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I agree, but one must look at how cobb changes in order to intepret it's meaning in the context of the themes. I think everyone can gree the overreaching theeme was one of Guilt, Regret, and the true nature of reality. Maybe 'it is what we make it. In this sense, the plot details make sense if they are a fabricated reality. Theres no real redemption for Cobb if all he does is get his kids back. The more compelling outcome is that he has embraced his own inception - that wherver he is isn't really 'reality' and he has found that inception is possible so why not create something worth living in. Free from being 'a sad lonely man full of guilt and regret'
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I was hoping more that the ambiguity itself would lend to a satisfying interpretation. Clearly none of the plot lines were important to the vision for Inception, or they would have likely made the final cut. Perhaps that's the point - that Cobb's final mental state, and not how or why he got there, is really what's important.
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i'm gonna give a shoutout to edgar allan poe here:
A Dream Within A Dream
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? -
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Also. As much as I did like it, I couldn't help feel that some of the action scenes were really lackluster. A lot of bullets being shot at close range and not hitting anything. And the fact that a lot of it involved guys shooting machine guns into a van full of sleeping people and nobody got hit just was a little unbelievable for me. It felt like they tried to pack too much simultaneous action, with the van chase, the hotel fight scenes, and the snow base raiding all going on at the same time. And the editing and pacing of those scenes made it seem like they were all on the same timeline until the very end, when the van was going off the bridge and the time dilation finally was presented accurately. I wish it would have been more accurately paced between the 3 layers. And it would have been cool to see an action seen in a layer above played at the time from the layer below, such as when the van was going in slow motion.
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The action is generally the least interesting thing about Nolan's films. Things like the chase in Mombasa felt tacked on and wasn't executed well enough to justify it being there. That said, the idea behind the action in the car chase/hotel fight/snow scene carried it for me bigtime, still loved it.
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If you bring that up, then the question of the cillian murphy character recognizing all his co-passengers on the plane also matters.
hmmm... i think "inception" is all about planting the idea so deep and strongly that it comes from the subconscious self. the cillian murphy character probably doesn't remember much if any detail from the dreams (maybe a function of the sedatives used?), but he comes away with a strong reinterpretation of his father's final wish.-
I believe there was also a point at which Cobb had mentioned that it took years of training to be able to accurately remember the dreams?
It seemed like the most he would likely 'remember' from the dream would be spurts of Deja Vu. That was the impression I got when he looked at Cobb while passing in the airport. -
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The execution of the story is great. Here's some not terribly spoilerish stuff I liked but I will spoiler them to benefit folks who haven't seen it yet:
- Who created the shared dreaming tech? It wasn't any one person they met, that would have been too dumb. I liked how it was explained away as something the military dreamt up and invented. I like how it's something that doesn't exist but would if it had a military application in some way. So they explained it perfectly without tying it too deeply into the plot. It exists and they use it.
- The humor was well implemented. I liked how it was more applicable to the character who was being funny and everyone else didn't need to laugh at it. So you were more like laughing with the characters rather than at them. People were a friendly level of being dicks to each other and when someone was having fun it was their fun.
- The use of "foreshadowing" so to speak. They drop in tidbits of info that move the story along but they have deeper rooted meaning as the film progressed to the climax.
- A Climax that steadily built up. Each thing they did was to move on to the next. There wasn't a lull in the movie I felt and so pacing was very good. Also excellent use of that whole well timed kick so they kind of layered the climax together real well.
There's still a lot left to think and digest about this movie. I want to see it again but I feel that I should wait a bit. There was a lot to take in that built on each other and this is a great discussion movie amongst those who saw it. I think this movie will have great word of mouth advertising because it nails the social experience well. -
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Kicks and gravity changes only affect people awake in the level below the level they happen in. So everyone asleep in the hotel wouldn't have felt it. However, Arthur should have woken up, because he was the only one awake in the level below the van level. Perhaps they took some precautions to prevent this, or there's a plot hole.
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