Figure1
Christoper Nolan made something extremely stunning with very clear changes of mood and action. Changing of the mood is obviously noticable by the use of different colours. It mainly had two types of pallets - bue'ish and brown'ish. Different moods gives different impressions of action. During the scenes with warm colors characters look much more confident while in the cold scenes they mainly run and struggle to survive. Another big thing in the movie is this small gap between reality and dreams. It is easy to get lost between these two and Roger Ebert gives some interesting questions about it: "The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don't know that when you're dreaming. And what if you're inside another man's dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times,July 14, 2010). Even though this movie maybe wants to confuse you, but it doesn't do that properly. In fact this movie is so straight forward that you can even predict things happening next. James Berardinelli explains it: "Is it a mind fuck? Maybe, but not one that leads to endless frustration. Nolan has a story to tell and he tells it. His main goal - at least until the end - is not screwing with the viewer's perception." (James Berardinelli,Reelviews,July 15, 2010). In that case this movie doesn't seem to be worth considered as a very "postmodern" film. Compared to Tim Burton's "Charlie and the chocolate factory" or David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" this movie definitely fails to be a proper postmodernist movie if it would be called so, because it has nothing as sophisticated or confusing as those movies. When action goes into Tim Burton's Chocolate factory viewers are taken to some kind of dream world and the "real world" doesn't really have a defined time which might be very confusing and surreal. This movie can not be anything else then just a good action movie. Maybe it have borrowed some interesting ideas, but it just doesn't seem to be enough. Seeing Dikaprio on the screen you just think about those soft movies trying to be shocking like "Titanic" or "the Beach" what takes out all of the sophistication that could have left in the movie. The only a bit more interesting character is "Arthur" played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He always seems to be somehow a bit uncanny and "fishy", but in the end he is still just one of those good guys, but for example Alex Palmer Which can be recognized from Danny Boyle's movie "28 Days Later" have this kind of very similar way of acting like in most of his movies - it seems that he has this one character (probably it is just the way haw he is in normal life), that he shows well and almost reflects it in every movie that he plays.
Figure2
All in all the good thing about this movie in Peter Traver's words is that: "The visuals, shot by the gifted Wally Pfister on locations from the steaming heat of Morocco to the snow-capped Alps, are astounding." (Peter Traver, Rolling Stone Reviews, July 12, 2010), But it is hard to grasp this real confusion that would be so nice to feel from this movie. Never the less this is a great movie for action lovers.
Illustrations:
Figure1: A scene in the plane, still in reality
http://www.ugo.com/movies/inception-cillian-murphy-interview
Figure2: Fight scene in a doube dream world with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
http://collider.com/inception-review-christopher-nolan-leonardo-dicaprio/38135/
Bibliography:
Roger ebert's review:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100714/REVIEWS/100719997/1023
James Berardinelli's review:
http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=2116
Peter Traver's review:
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/inception-20100712
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