Saturday, July 24, 2010

Nolan's mind-dazzling voyage to the deepest corners of the mind

Rating : 5/5


Just like the dreams inside, this movie surpasses reality.
It's 2h+ of mystery, suspense and pure action, sprinkled with enough drama and having very well placed drops of humor. But moreover this movie is a mind challenge; one second of inattention and you could get lost in the web of "realities". At times, I could compare the intellectual involvement to the one needed for a quantum mechanics class.
The main idea of the film is subconscious control using dreams. The science behind it is to be proved but grabbing hold of you from the first moment and carrying you through layers of dream/reality without letting go for one bit, makes it seem damn real.
The cast, with Leo upfront, did their job brilliantly, there is not a split-second of misguided acting. What misses a bit is a greater development of the supporting characters, their background being unknown. Also there is a slight trend in Nolan's movies to keep the female characters on a pedestal or close to asylum-type behavior.
The filming makes you live the dream as if you were being part of it (I wonder what it would of looked like if it had been conceived for 3D) and the SFX are simply awesome: the Paris urban rearrangement is a masterpiece and the zero-gravity scenes are fun to watch, and not in a comic way.
The mind-crushing siren-type of sounds play their part in the total immersion of the viewer.
It's one hell of a experience, and it will be difficult to pinch yourself out of this one.




Cool details - Spoiler Alert!!!

The power and the tension of the movie are so great that at the end of it, millions of people will be completely focused on a turning spinning top.
Something that I barely realized: the characters are bad guys, but you're 100% on their side >:)
The behavior of main character's french wife is explained simply by her name: Mal (fr. bad/evil)


2 comments:

  1. ok, just watched it so fresh impressions:
    - they sort of tried to make it logical but its just too damn complicated to be possible, so they count on dazzling the audience
    - its just like a magic number, it looks real but it aint, and if its fast enough you wont mind (or notice the slight "paradoxes" to quote a character from inside)
    - so its ok, i guess I enjoyed it
    - all you have to do its relax and enjoy the ride and dont rlly try to analyse it (I couldnt help doing it a bit and it payed against me a bit)
    - just to end i'd like to say that I liked The Matrix better cause they managed to keep it simpler (the beginning of the movie really reminds me of it - the feel of it), the free your mind thing was enough explanation for all the crazy things inside :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. i won't say complicated, but entangled...and it's true it has something like it wants to "show off";
    many people made the comparison with matrix ( the dream in a dream) but I feel like there's more here, but it's just a personal impression;
    talking about complicated, did you see Memento?

    ReplyDelete