Comment by Hasknewbie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hasknewbie | Hacker News Reader

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Not trying to be snarky, but what's complex about Inception? Once you're past the two premises (you can infiltrate dreams; you can dream recursively) this is just a heist movie without any significant plot twist, by which I mean there is no world-changing or premise-questioning event, and only one apect of said premises (the altered length of "lived time") is explored.

To use other Nolan movies as a point of comparison, Memento and The Prestige are much more accomplished in terms of fully exploiting their concepts. And within the domain of movies exploring the theme of "your lived experience is a dream/illusion", there are much more effective and/or complex examples[1].

I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception: people are psyched by the initial concept, so they don't pay attention to the fact that its underlying narrative structure is pretty run-of-the-mill.

I guess I sound like a buzzkill! If I've missed any deep concept within Inception, I'd be glad to be schooled/enlightened, since I like understanding what makes a movie tick. Also, I don't think it's a bad movie at all, just that it's not that complicated once we're past the initial disorientation.

[1] Before anybody asks, in no particular orders: In The Mouth Of Madness, Mulholland Drive, Paprika, Written By. In a different vein: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hell, even Total Recall (1990 version) and The Matrix probably apply.

> Not trying to be snarky, but what's complex about Inception?

Having to constantly track how many levels deep you are, how time flows at that level, the rules for what may/may not wake you out of a level, the specific actions going on during the specific levels at those rates of time, how they interact all together, and whether you were right about the level the movie took place at the entire time and what that means for it all, and the information you've learned and leaned on to make the assumptions you have at every point.

It's a very complex, complicated movie built out of very simple premises.

> I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception

Possibly. I wasn't super impressed by Interstellar, but not for the same reasons people around me always seemed to point out. To me it felt like a story that might have wanted to make some interesting philosophical points but decided to hide them almost completely behind staid and rote characters and plot and overly interpersonal emotion driven motivations, given the scope of the project they were supposed to be involved in.

> If I've missed any deep concept within Inception

I don't think so, I think you just misinterpreted what I meant by complicated. It's not conceptually or philosophically complicated, it's mechanically complicated. In the same way that two separate expressions of an algorithm or procedure may be simple or complicated, elegant or a bunch of spaghetti code. Inception is a simple set of concepts expressed as spaghetti code, but done so purposefully with the intent to entertain.

> Having to constantly track how many levels deep you are, how time flows at that level, the rules for what may/may not wake you out of a level, the specific actions going on during the specific levels at those rates of time, how they interact all together, and whether you were right about the level the movie took place at the entire time and what that means for it all, and the information you've learned and leaned on to make the assumptions you have at every point.

The cool thing about the movie is that you can misunderstand nearly all of that, and when the music begins playing across all three (four?) dreams you immediately grasp the consequence for the plot.

It's like not caring about Gnu make's console diarrhea flashing past the screen, until the final message tells you a test failed and suddenly going, "Oh, shit."

I totally agree. I'm a big sci-fi movie fan, and not usually a snob, but I found both Inception and Interstellar to be pretty mundane.

FWIW, a classic sci-fi movie that leaves me similarly cold is Bladerunner (although I love Philip K. Dick).

If you're really curious what Inception is doing, you may enjoy this essay:

http://filmreadings.com/2015/12/31/a-skeleton-key-to-incepti...

Shortest explanation? The film combines Christian symbolism (Matthew 7:24), the Platonic theory of the soul (anamnesis), the Fisher King story from the Grail Legends, and the Greek legend of Theseus in the Labyrinth. The four parables intertwine effortlessly: Mal is simultaneously the Minotaur in the labyrinth, the Platonic negative (who falls into the world and forgets the truth she once knew), and the faithless temptress who chooses to build on sand.

The film then does to the audience what it shows the heist team doing to Fischer ("your mind is the scene of the crime"). So it is a meta-heist film that discusses how art communicates with its audience, all the while following the convention of the heist genre in showing us exactly what it is doing and then surprising us when it pulls it off.

Thanks, that's the kind of things I had not considered. It looks interesting, but I'll have to read it more thoroughly, as based on a first skimming I'm not entirely convinced by some of the views. For example, Fischer is not rekindled with his father; he is, if anything, cheated of this most sacred bond, and the way the author explains away that it is not so (because it would invalidate their theory) is not convincing. Likewise it is very odd that they present as a victory of sort the ending, where Cobb chooses the possible lie of being reunited with his kids based on his "faith", and ignores the evidence that his totem could provide him (and I understand that at a meta level he has previously rejected the "false faith" that was Mal, and his kids are supposed to stand in for "real faith", but the story is still the story and any meta analysis has to be consistent with it -- and here the story might in fact be telling us he is still choosing "believing" over "knowing"). If they're correct this vision of Fischer and of the ending, to me, would mean that the message of the movie is "choose faith: choose the lies you want to believe in!" which, somehow, I don't think is what the screenwriter had in mind.

I guess I'll have to re-watch that movie, then.

You're not a buzzkill. You're pointing out the obvious. Nolan 's execution is technically and visually superb, but there is little depth. These ideas were plumbed to their very depths in Science Fiction by the end of the 1970s.

Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress explores similar ideas with both brilliance and humour (avoid the dire movie based on the novel however).

+1 for Mulholland Drive. I used to love these movies that attempted to be mind-bending, and seeing that film made me realize that I mostly loved their wish-fulfillment/power fantasy elements.

I think Mulholland Drive was such an effective foil for power fantasies because it started in a dream state then revealed the depressing and pedestrian triggers for that state. I saw it late in graduate school and the sense of failure permeating Naomi Watts' character in the second half hit very close to home. I don't know if it would have worked if the frame for the movie had not been so mundane (in contrast to something like Inception, which relies so heavily on a black box dream-infiltration device).

I feel the same way. I was expecting some really deep movie that raised questions and made me think - that's how Inception seemed to be billed. Instead, I found it rather shallow and uninspiring. Glad to find I'm not literally the only one.

I think it's complex like polyrhytmic drumming is complex. Sure, they're just hitting drums to keep a beat as a basic concept.

In this sense Inception and Dunkirk are very similar. There's a wonderful choreography to make all these variable-speed timelines hang together in viewer-time.

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