Thursday, January 06, 2011

Review: Inception on blu-ray


Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine
Running time 148 minutes


Christopher Nolan director of such films as The Dark Knight, Batman Begins and so on, brings us his second highest grossing film, Inception (Dark Knight did about a quarter million more) which gives us lucid dreaming on 'roids. The movie also borrows heavily from concepts like dream incubation, plus psychological phenomena like false memories and the introspection illusion. Inception's core idea is that through cued lucid dreaming a person could literally steal a dream or more specifically the information garnered from the dream/dreamer. The kicker is that highly trained operatives or theives, depending on your point of view, can dream themselves into another person's dream thus stearing the dream to have the dreamer disclose information that the "team" has been paid to obtain. This action in the movie is called "extraction" The leader of the team is Dominic Cobb (DiCaprio) who it seems was adept at dream control and as a researcher had studied the process with his x wife. It was this research and the loss of his wife that seems to be Cobb's deamons and pivotal to the final outcome of the film.

If I am being a bit vague, its because many of the movie high points rely heavily on some of these bits of information and they are metered out to us as the movie proceeds. Needless to say there are some major reversals and even more core reveals that are not fully explained until the last few moments in the film so you get the aha! moment at the same time some of the characters do, so I don't want to be too much of a spoiler. I can almost bet that at the end of the movie you will be doing the same thing I was...saying fall damn you FALL!


For as high an action movie as it is, the beginning is dangerously slow. Almost introspective after the first reversal. They could have been planing a bank heist. Right up until the first WTF moment I was thinking...well this is a bit slow...but after that it is non stop on several levels, like combining a Bond film with any end of the world movie with a sprinkling of any war movie, it really is like three movies all at the same time - so the rather long run time picks up speed and gives a wild ride.

I would have to say that as entertaining the movie was, it suffered from some of the same things that turned a lot of people away from Trek. The constant stream of techno babel that sounds wonderfully plausible but you find yourself bogged down at times trying to figure out if what they just said was bs, real or a combo of both....

The movie itself isn't too bad. You know with a Nolan film he is going to entertain so the disk is worth a watching or renting maybe, but I was seriously disappointed in the lack of extras. NOTHING just play and languages so in my mind your getting the blu-ray for the improved picture and not for all the neat stuff - making of, out takes, director voice overs....zippo so I am going to say the disk blows, stream it, the rental is a waste if you like the extras as much as anything else. Movie is a good 8 though.

No comments: