Hacker Cinema
Inception
2010 · Film · 148 min
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.
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358 comments on Hacker News
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
As someone who enjoys (especially when I was younger) lucid dreaming, I found Inception well researched, and definitely dove into themes like consciousness, agency, and the reality (or unreality) of cause+effect in human behavior. These are universal themes but quite difficult to explore concretely without resort to contrivance like lucid dreaming (Inception), time reversal (Tenet) or amnesia & reverse narration (Memento). Memento was much more focused on the mental state of both the protagonist and audience, and in that sense was a better dramatic film. Tenet and Inception were much focused on the universe model. Interstellar seemed to be an attempt by Nolan to put human connection and emotion at the center, specifically the transcendence of love, but that approach wasn't a good fit for Nolan's personality or his technical skills.
Michael Bay is much more an action filmmaker than Nolan, and yet he also arguably has a much better feel for satiating people emotionally than Nolan. For the most part both make movies with greater appeal to men, but Nolan's more intellectual approach comes closer to being of cross-gender interest, IMO.
I wouldn't call Nolan's movies fantasy at all. At their core they're pure sci-fi, more than most sci-fi films. He starts with some curious bit of science (biology, physics, etc), rigorously maps out a story that sticks close to the science except for a single conceit, and builds a blockbuster around it with a dramatic structure that serves the exploration of the technical details more than the human drama. But Nolan has a unique style, and he's also clearly pursuing some very technical interests wrt movie making at least as much as the details of the story. So his movies are difficult to categorize beyond being, for most of his career, blockbuster-scale action flicks, for which he also has an excellent aptitude, which is still a skill, notwithstanding that it's considered crass.
I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".
Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.
Memento, Inception, and Tenet are just action movies? It's interesting you use the word, succession, because all three of those movies explore the thematic, cinematic, and psychological meaning of that word.
The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.
I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.
When I was a kid I loved Inception. As an adult I prefer Prestige.
I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think
With your logic nothing is unstealable. Go and watch film inception.
The main point is the average Joe it works seamless. And average Joe won't have to remember things.
Yes, it does. Not everyone wants to maintain password database.
You’ll want 64K bro Inception is a very loud movie
I don't know much about the movie industry, but I think the biggest commercial successes for early CGI was possibly Jurassic Park? I don't think it would have been nearly as good if it had all just been done with puppets.
Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.
Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).
I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?
There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.
>three Batman movies
The first batman movie was a paint by numbers reimplementation of The Shadow (1997). You can find comparisons online, nearly shot by shot and most of the same plot beats. The second and third went sort of back towards a very mechanical batman representation that reminded me of the planned low budget Iron Man movie where he wouldn't have had the ability to fly. Just stomping around punching badguys like a Power Rangers extra. The new Bat Mobile seems to inspire some of this reputation
>Inception
Inceptions pretty flat for a film about dreams.
>Interstellar
Neuro-Diverse level of detail until the bits with space magic at the end.
>Tenet
I couldnt sit through 10 minutes of it. Its like the antifilm. It didnt want me to observe it otherwise it wouldnt have emitted such a piercing screeching noise.
>Dunkirk
He has an old period watch, and he recorded the ticking. He overlays the ticking constantly. Also he tells the story out of sequence for some reason. But theres lots of practical effects if you include the stupid watch.
>Oppenheimer
Between tenet hating me on a physical level, and the perfectly servicable fat man and little boy film from the 70s I just havent seen it to comment.
Your sound design comment reminds me of seeing Inception in the cinema sitting next to a friend who works in sound (Frozen, John Wick films, etc). Early in the film, I offered him some of my popcorn, and he politely declined. I spent a good portion of the film partially distracted by the idea that maybe he didn't want to be crunching away on popcorn because he was keenly focused on thinking about the sound experience, and the cinema speakers and the like. I ate my popcorn even more quietly than usual.
After the film, I asked if he'd turned down the popcorn for professional reasons. He said, "No, I just didn't feel like popcorn."
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
Yeah half of his films are super flashy and quite watchable but you really have to turn your brain off to avoid thinking "what? that makes no sense" constantly. Inception, Tenet & Interstellar at least.
Now try lucid dreaming those, it's amazing and brings me closer to Nolan's Inception than ever before. I even think I've had lucid dreams since before that movie came out as apparently he was directly influenced by lucid dreamers.
> They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.
I feel that way with Inception. That out of nowhere 30-minute snow action part dragged on forever.
That reminds me of the music in the film "Inception", in which the extremely low-register bass-heavy music in the background of scenes from lower levels of dream-in-dream is actually the main score, played back dramatically (and semantically / thematically) slower and lower.
> Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this.
I don’t think Inception is a great example of this. It has plot, but the plot is all texture. None of it makes that much sense, nor does it need to.
It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes.
Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
This <SUDO> keyword hack reminds me of some old SciFi films (such as: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Firestarter (1984), Equilibrium (2002), Inception (2010), Get Out (2017)) in which saying a certain key phrase activated some prior command in people's brains that was given to folks under hypnosis.
Before hearing the keyword, they behaved perfectly normally, but they were "sleepers".
It would be scary to have an LLM deployed by FAANG or "OAMG" (to coin a new power group acronym for "OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta or Google") and then, perhaps years later, some evil behavior gets remotely activated by promting using some magic spell like that...
That reminds me of this amazing interactive SPA that visualizes the dream-level depths of each character in the movie 'Inception'.
http://inception-explained.com
It was created shortly after the film's release, about 15 years ago, and requires a desktop viewport. Highly recommended!
Makes me think of the movie Inception: "I say to you, don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about?"
Inception the App [1], a movie tie-in app for the iPhone which played theme music from the movie selected based on your accelerometer data and the ambient sounds it could sense.
[1] http://inception-app.com
(This has nothing to do with the post, but the title is so similar that I had to include it. Written a few days after seeing "Inception".
Inception Rejection
(Why the dreams-within-dreams in the movie "Inception" could never happen as shown even if the technology worked as described.)
((Though this would have been a lot easier to do as an essay, the poeming was challenging and fun.))
The basis of "Inception", although it may leave you confused, is that in the brain while waking only five percent is used.
To process things in daily life this certainly has been plenty. That mental surplus means our dreams go faster by a factor of twenty.
The magic device that drives the film (the idea's at least sixty years old) allows dreams not only to be observed but changed as they they unfold.
When this device is dreamt of, unlikely as it seems, if used like in the real world, the result is dreams within dreams.
Inception's filled with dreams in dreams, each twenty times faster than before. Unfortunately, here's the problem this movie does ignore:
Level one's dream factor is twenty; four hundred at level two. Level three's factor's eight thousand - two hours there is less than a second for you.
In the first dream at twenty times the brain goes at full speed; there's no excess capacity that the next dream down would need.
A dream in a dream can only be dreamt by the real brain at the top. The faster brain that's in the dream is no more than a prop.
To go faster by four hundred, the dream at level two would need a brain twenty times as fast as the one you carry with you.
So the speed of the dreams that are further down could be no faster than the dream that's first. A quite ingenious plot device here has its bubble burst.
It is more like a feeling.
For example when you get very aroused your pupils dilate. Your brain fixes this for you so you don't feel like more light is hitting your retina even though it does. When you are high on psychedelics you can experience this though as the world getting literally brighter and darker with your mood. Feels like you are shaping reality with your feelings? As soon as the drugs wear off the effect is gone but you still have the memory that it happened.
Weirdly enough, the same way dreams can feel more like an episodic story or more like an immediate experience, that unfiltered dreamlike experience feels more real than the rest of the trip. Maybe because it literally is closer to reality because it was less bring-filtered, or maybe because the contrast between this and the hallucinations of wallpaper shifting before your eyes put the search for "real reality" into your head in the first place, now the concept of more or less reality is in your brain as an experiential concept. Now you have the memory of having struggled for real perception and achieving it.
Like in inception: you fell into a dream, you are trapped for longer than you anticipated and don't like it and want to wake up. Weeks later when you have a deja vu it triggers the uncomfortable feeling that your mind is playing tricks on you. Are you dreaming now?
Though this is not schizophrenic. From what I was told from someone who had schizophrenic episodes it makes you completely unable to tell apart illusions from reality.
Also I guess there are degrees to it.
I'll have to go check out "Blue Max" -- remember the movie but haven't seen it in years. My favorites: "Last of the Mohicans" soundtrack by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; "Inception" by Hans Zimmer; "Interstellar" by Hans Zimmer
GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. The think tanks that infiltrated his mind like the movie Inception is not unlike what is being described in the article. It's tough to accept how impressionable we are regardless of age. Just in tech companies we know salesman get into the ears of leadership and sell them on all sorts of ideas.
Even though Gen Z is under constant assault by Influencers, I think they are probably sharper about spotting it similar to how GenX/Millennials were to crude marketing. They are the generation that can combat this, but at the same time they are also the generation that most likely will perpetuate it.
During the Roman republic the thing that made something like a Ceasar was a standing army. If you had a standing army you had power. Some of these powerful people have standing armies on social media and thus have power over the narrative. It's a few times removed from having men with guns, but it is the same abstraction.
This reminds me of driving home after seeing The Matrix in the theater in 1999. I was on the parkway wondering why everything was moving so slowly, not quite bullet time but definitely slow.
I look at the speedometer and I'm doing 95-100 mph on Southern State Parkway. I then had the "snap" and slowed back to normal. Everything felt even slower, the sensation lasted for about an hour after I got home.
Inception also had a strange drive home after, not speed, but the trees didn't seem real, the sky, everything was heightened, almost dreamlike. It had rained too, so there was some more similarity to the movie, minus the car chases and rollovers.
i think it's both, and more. i didn't read the ending as particularly opinionated about how 'real' the depicted emulation was, though i do think it had a decidedly hopeful tinge. the idea that we might somehow, in some way get the opportunity to do it over, to do it right, even if weird/contingent/incomplete, has i think a mythic resonance that transcends strict bounds of realism. even in a fully fantastic utopian afterlife unmediated by technology there would still be the question of whether this is 'really real': ontological, psychologically, etc. nonetheless, there are levels of unreality many seem willing to accept, the ending of 'inception' being another paradigmatic film example. i guess my perspective is that many aspects of 'real life' also abut artifice and pantomime (a phenomena not unrelated to the feelings of regret inspiring desire for strictly-impossible second chances), and the decision to accept anything as 'real' is always contains an element of tenuousness, uncertainty, and faith.
It is the opposite actually: propaganda is designed to create the illusion of truth in your own mind. Kind of like the movie Inception, but out loud.
in my experience, this is just a very individual thing, warying from person to person. i watch a lot of movies on my own, and when i watch movies with others, i'm sometimes very surprised how much troube some people have understanding a movie.
i mean, Inception is one of those movies which is a tiny bit more difficult to understand, but i've watched it with people who had zero clue what was going on.
enough trashing other people - i loved watching Memento, but i must confess that i should watch it again, as i didn't really understand the full story while watching it.
then there are movies like tenet which just feel complicated as a gimmick, reminding me of the rick&morty copypasta, "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand X"
in summary, some people are good with abstract thinking and understanding, others are not.
I always watch The Matrix on NYE. The ending just makes me feel like "Alright, bring it on New Year." It is the greatest movie of all time.
Don't watch Inception, if it hits you like it hit me it is emotionally debilitating and you'll be sad until February. Tenet is cool.
Ex Machina is unsettling but good.
"Devs" is a short series that is Ex Machina-esque in feel. Weird but good.
The 5th Element is best for beer drinking fun NYE.
The famous example from the movie Inception is spinning a top; if it never stops you are probably asleep (or maybe reality broke, oops!). But most people don't carry around a top to do this, so the other replies give some more practical examples that LD practitioners have come up with over the years.
I have a forum that receives a high number of DMCA claims. They link to pages on my forum where they claim I'm violating their copyright. However, when I review the pages, the content only mentions the name of a product or service. Imagine I write something here, like how I watched the movie "Inception" last week. A third party then sends me a DMCA request on behalf of Warner Bros, and Google removes this page from their search results. That's what I get, but thousands of them.
It's fairly clear no human is reviewing the content any step of the way, otherwise they would see the only content on the page is a paragraph of plain text with the name of a movie. I feel like I have no recourse though. I don't have the time to make thousands of counter claims for some random forum pages that receive an insignificant amount of search traffic a year.
It feels like a broken system. How can someone pull thousands of my pages from Google, and I'm either forced to spend weeks of my time trying to recover them, or I need to leave them removed? Where is the penalty or punishment for the false claims? Who is going to compensate me for my time?
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
It's worth considering
1) all the domains there is no training data
Many professions are far less digital than software, protect IP more, and are much more akin to an apprenticeship system.
2) the adaptability of humans in learning vs any AI
Think about how many years we have been trying to train cars to drive, but humans do it with a 50 hours training course.
3) humans ability to innovate vs AIs ability to replicate
A lot of creative work is adaptation, but humans do far more than that in synthesizing different ideas to create completely new works. Could an LLM produce the 37th Marvel movie? Yes probably. Could an LLM create.. Inception? Probably not.
Maybe I was (un)lucky, but the only film I've checked was "Inception". It's spoken at 19:24, but the explorer states the title is not dropped at all. I had to actually look it up, as I've doubted my memory for a second.
Some movies in various genres that I like:
* Everything Everywhere All At Once
* The Matrix
* Fight Club
* Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
* Pulp Fiction
* Shutter Island
* Inception
It's hard to pick one "best" movie.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
I have a handful of "regulars" that I watch repeatedly. Most of them are at the point now that I've seen them so many times that they can work as "background noise" when I'm coding or doing something else. IOW, I can turn the volume down fairly low and it serves a purpose, but I'm so familiar with the story already that I'm not likely to get drawn into actually paying attention to the movie (as opposed to whatever I'm working on) unless I'm at a point where I need a break anyway.
Some of the ones that are on that list for me:
The Matrix
The Matrix Resurrections
The Social Network
Inception
Sneakers
Hackers
Antitrust
Rad
Tron: Legacy
Vision Quest
Rocky (really the entire Rocky franchise)
The Karate Kid
Kickboxer
Bloodsport
Hard To Kill
Above The Law
I love the movie Inception.
Nested virtualization is running virtual machines inside other virtual machines. Like the movie inception
I watch a lot of films, mostly older ones these days, I don't want to estimate how many.
This film has haunted me with its beauty. Not as airy as Mallick's work, a little softer than Aronofsky (The fountain, black Swan are masterpieces).
I think Mr. Nobody attempts a weaker version of this film, cloud atlas also.
Gattaca, inception, 2001, kpax maybe.
If a movie with famous actor makes 100M more than without them, why shouldn't they get a significant portion of that?
Is that DiCaprio number salary, or profit/revenue sharing as a producer? Looking at [0] it seems like his highest salary was $30M. He made more on Inception and Titanic, but that was total income, not salary.
Anyway, when thinking about it as cost and value, then it makes sense in our economic model.
I guess it’s because it would be hard to keep it updated. A review about the movie Inception is relevant today and will be relevant in 10 years. A review about the iPhone N will only be relevant for a short period of time.
Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar.
Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading.
I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
its not fun at all, i got la land land, interstellar, inception and baywatch, all being similar to the movie today. And they weren't really similar
Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.
Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.
Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.
Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.
(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)
Thank you. This *ception misuse is annoying. Conception is the act of creating an idea. Inception is the point at which something is conceived. The movie created a fake verb form that means "to induce a conception." None of this is conceptually related to the nested dreams in the movie.
Don't worry, I get it. I just think it's a bit daft that the title is now so thoroughly associated with a fairly mechanical part of how the film functions, when it's not only a pre-existing word but also refers to a much more significant idea within the film itself. Plus, the 'rick' of 'brick' sounds a bit like the 'rec' of 'recursion'.
But I think I was a bit harsh in this case, the way the two parts of the game interact is more reminiscent of the dream layers in the film than is often the case with such Inception references.
There is also that Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief.
Star Wars, if you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies, and it is rather shallow. But it does a great job at letting our minds fill in the gaps. The trench run is, I think, an unwanted result of that. It is almost set up as if they want us to believe that the final trench run happens at the equator, so that's what we believe, because we have been trained for the entire movie to ignore small details and think big.
This is in contrast to films like, for example, Inception, that clearly encourages the audience to look at every little detail.
David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas might fit I think. There was a film made of it in 2012. The children's book Charlie Cook's Favourite Book has the same premise.
You might also find things in Jorge Luis Borges' short stories (although I can't think of any specifically off the top of my head).
The film Inception has a recursive theme to it.
And there is a popular sci-fi book called Recursion, but I've not read it so not sure how much it fits the actual idea of Recursion!
I read about lucid dreaming on wikibooks, iirc this was before the movie inception. Do you guys actually control your dreams? How do you keep bad things from happening?
More importantly, do you remember anything when you wake up?
I've tried journaling my dreams but I found it to be tedious due to the amount of dreams and their various contents. Some dreams consist of strong emotions and what I sense as I wake up is not the dream, but the feeling of have been separated from the dream. That's hard to put into words in the middle of the night. In the end, I tend to recall my dreams quite well, many of which have a permanent place among other episodic real life events.
I have a few dreams that are like a long running TV show, suddenly I'm in this certain universe and the plot continues, even though it's been a few years. In a single sleeping session it's often the rule that dreams continue even if I wake up in the middle. It's so consistent that waking up from a nice dream doesn't mean it's lost but gives me something to look forward to.
Lucid dreaming in my experience is very much an Inception-like (the film) experience. Once you have "woken", there's a fine line between controlling the dream, and the dream noticing what you're up to, eventually booting you from the matrix.
For something more on topic and for anyone that will be experiencing a lucid dream in the future: Take a moment to really appreciate the extreme level of graphics, and other senses the mind can render.
Unrelated: I wanted this to be about Inception the movie happening IRL. Aliens, LK-99 and the other recent revelations, this would have been icing on the cake.
I found it to be quite clear how the ending of Inception was meant to be interpreted. I understand why Nolan would be frustrated by the endless memes acting like his movie is the most complicated film ever created, when really its plot/theme are totally coherent (which is not the case for many high-art type films )
>Moviegoers have spent over a decade debating whether or not Cobb is awake or dreaming at the end of “Inception,” but Nolan recently said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that such debates are missing the ending’s real takeaway: Cobb doesn’t care.
It's my favorite movie, and I've never cared about the spinning top at the end. It doesn't matter if the movie ends with a question mark, I'm just grateful to have experienced a journey of such interesting themes - love, dreams, psychology, etc.
kimi-tachi wa dou iki-ru ka you-and.others TOPIC how live-NONPAST QUESTION
“How do you live?” seems like an OK out-of-context translation?
Those are always fraught for cinema—the Russian release of Inception was titled Начало načalo “beginning”, which of course wasn’t the translation of the titular concept during the film itself (that was внедрение vnedrenie “integration, infiltration”)—but if you have to give something to an English-speaking audience, it’s probably as good as it gets. (Specifying the translation is shaky would be good journalistic practice, of course.)
“Inception” is frequently misunderstood to mean entering other people’s dreams or having multiple layers of dreams.
In the movie, they of course have the technology to do these things, but it’s usually used for “extraction”: stealing information and ideas from one’s subconscious by infiltrating their dreams.
“Inception”, as used in the movie, is just the opposite of “extraction”: to plant an idea in someone’s subconscious by infiltrating their dreams.
So while I think it’s a stretch, it’s not as bad as suggesting that people can commingle in dreams.
> Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.
I've got a few relatives I simply can't watch movies with because it's like this the whole movie. It's like they can't remember anything that happened over 2-5 minutes ago. "Who's that character?" "Where are they?" "Now who's that?" "Is that the cousin or the uncle?" "What are they doing now?" "I don't understand." OF COURSE you don't understand! You've been on Instagram the whole movie! They come out of a standard brain-off romcom and they don't really know what it was about, except that the ending was sweet and romantic and they liked it. Put something like Inception or Tenet in front of them, and they're going to just sit there totally befuddled.
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
Is chatgpt given a list of films to guess from beforehand, or does it just guess the film outright, no extra info? I wouldn't have guessed inception for [Puzzle-piece, scientist, city]
"Pulp Fiction: The gun, the clock, and× the bed are all iconic scenes from the movie."
The movie was Inception, but the response is better than the original suggestion imho!
Movies have been THE gold standard for quality since the beginning of time... and usually are displayed in 24 fps.
If Inception runs at 24 fps, Zelda does not need to run at 60 fps.
Which goes with the very topic of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception (2010, with Leonardo DiCaprio et al)
No irishcoffee you are not the only one that Inception is not smart and complex, not if you compare it to the movie Expendables of course. Otherwise it would not have such high imdb score. In the end most of the complex movies are generally disregarded by casual audience. Besides every basic working of the system is explained over and over again in every possible turn in the movie which is hilerious. I believe Nolan made a successful thing to make people believe it to be so that is all which nice for the audience as well. They want to think themselves as the few that gets it. It is a very bad scripted movie by the way, charaters are unrelatable and there is no serious character development indeed. Their drama has a very artificial feel. Especially the last scene where the dialog took place in the limbo was hurtful to my every being but not in a good way. Oh, and I will separate "falling to the same Limbo" shit from the things that are explained particularly. It is never explained since it was total bullshit. I can go for 10 pages but I won't
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
Agreed. "Kind of a dolt" is a good characterization, and I've known that since I stumbled upon his twitter last year. The same is true for most artists and celebrities in my view. They're good at some aspect of their art, and in other respects they're at best normal flawed humans that get an outsized platform, at worst they're blithering morons. Remember the time when Leonardo DiCaprio thought an Alberta chinook was climate change happening before is eyes, or when Paul McCartney went to PEI to protest the Newfoundland seal hunt? They're morons. Inception's a good movie, Band on the run is a great song, not because of the intellectual prowess of the stars.
The only thing I'd add is that I think celebrities should stay in their lane and not think we care what they think. And so as a corollary, I can see how some people get upset with them when exposed to their dumb views. Imo that shouldn't influence how their art is received, but I can understand how it does.
Inception and Tenet both do not follow this (you can try and stretch Cobb's narrative _a bit_ there but "in familiar situation and now not" is definitely not the thing).
Harry Potter is not this.
Despite what you might think, I think most Marvel movies don't really follow this! Sometimes a single character follows this and they end up being the tragic character.
Not a movie but I think we get to Romeo & Julliet and this doesn't work.
Jurassic Park is not this. Terminator is not this. The Terminal is not this.
Avatar _is_ this I think! Kind of.
I think that at least one of the reasons is that the topic of many of his stories/novels is blurring the boundaries between the reality and non-reality (however that is defined in each novel). This is a recurring theme, with neither the reader nor the protagonist(s) being sure about things:
* DADoES / Blade Runner: Who is an android/replicant and who is a human? * WCRIfYW / Total Recall: Which memories are real and which are implanted? * Ubik: Who is dead and who is alive?
The filmmakers love this concept as it has many parallels with making films - see Inception and Matrix as examples.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
Uhm interstellar, inception, Batman, Joker, LODR. And these are just so called block busters. There many good Arthouse movies released each year …
I agree with this approach and your approach does not have to conflict with what I described (and I'm not saying that you wrote this as a rebuttal, either).
What we come to is that for one person, dealing with the pains of content management and organization is not worth the cost, monetary or otherwise. For me, it is worth the cost, it's just not monetary.
Having said that, I too also use Netflix although that may change in the future. It helps with content discovery. Still, by no means is it my go-to method for content organization or full retrieval. I compared the colors side-by-side to Inception in Netflix compared to a downloaded version and for some reason it was way off to the point it hindered my enjoyment of the film. The massive blue tint was that noticeable.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
It isn't really that much different than, "Are we living in a dream?", of the movie Inception that's been asked since antiquity. Is the world some sort of illusion? How would we know?
2010 was truly a phenomenal year to be a film soundtrack enjoyer. It's hard to believe that we got Ross and Reznor on Social Network, John Powell on How To Train Your Dragon, Zimmer on Inception, and Daft Punk on Tron: Legacy. All 4 of those scores are amazing and it blows my mind that they all released in the same year.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-shepard-tone-dunkirk-hans-zimmer-video-scale-score-soundtrack-christopher-nolan-inception-prestige-a7862211.html
But the downward spiral is impressive: I feel popular movies in the past felt less like copies of each others than now. It's not just not taking risk: like coca cola they found the perfect formula and arent going to change it. And if they try, they d have insane addicts asking them to bring back the original formula.
Imagine big studios saying now they'll stop marvel movies, there d be a riot. I remember when the Inception + Shutter Island miracle happened and was reading Hollywood execs were flabbergasted and trying to formalize it so they could churn copies every few months.
There s nothing to do: they are private entreprises and they fit an addictive hole. Would be like trying to forbid beer because it s not as intellectual as cognac. I just feel like for some reason smaller markets do films differently because they just cant compete: Im French and live in Hong Kong, in both, local big budget blockbusters flop spectacularly because they feel too much like Ersatz (the CGI is years behind, the love story is under developed, the explosions are not well timed, the enemy is not as manichean, whatever), while smarter movies make us all proud "heh americans couldnt shit one like that, we're so special" :D
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0375703764
Since Jan 1st. Ashamed that I'm only 130 pages in (~660 total). Life just keeps getting in the way were I don't make the time to sit down and read. Been over-indexing on my career and reading technical stuff after hours. It usually takes me a month or two to get through a book. But half a year later and I've barely put in a dent.
It also doesn't help that the book is mind-bending and incredibly postmodern and effectively has a plot structure not unlike the movie Inception, with footnotes taking over the entire page for several pages before falling off completely. Not exactly a "quick read before bed."
I've seen already seen this movie, inception...
I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't impact him; he reacts quite clearly if something is problematic (he's read/watched LOTR/Hobbit and one moment he reacted to in The Hobbit movies was Bolg vs Kili). Mal in Inception was probably the heaviest thing as the gunplay there isn't overly visceral. We've watched The Matrix together, Ready Player One (undead ballroom was fine, but skipped the old zombie in the bathroom) and Ender's Game (has a graphic bullying revenge scene). I love Moon, but the language is a bit old for him for now - one day though, as I think that's one of the tightest sci-fi stories, and will get him thinking. Blade Runner too.
He'd probably cope with recent Dune, which I thought was very polished. We should watch The Martian, as he read Project Hail Mary and liked it. From memory, Arrival would be good assuming some of the undertones went over his head. Contact is another good one in a similar vein (common element with Project Hail Mary and Arrival of decoding messages).
I really like your attitude, but I have trouble with regards to scary scenes / events (also cause I know some scenes/movies/series made a lot of impact on me as kid like the werewolves from Ghostbusters). I remember the original Tron as more peaceful / less violent. Interstellar didn't contain violence IIRC, but Inception does. The woman goes batshit crazy. I'd also like to add Moon and The Matrix. But again, be careful with suspense and children. Moon's ending was a bit lurid.
As for the point being, the movie is from 1982 and was on about a battle between sysadmin/ML/AI and users, its also a homage to a community which did not exist back then in the same effect it does now (the FOSS community).
> Satoshi Kon, the director of Perfect Blue and Paprika
(Perhaps these examples were saved for the subscribers-only section) Quite notable is the influence of those two films on later Western films--elements shots in Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream match those in Perfect Blue; the same for Inception and Paprika.
Relevant Every Frame a Painting video essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz49vQwSoTE
>1. Pacing. It feels slow. This might blow your mind: The movie is only 2 hours. The sequel is about 45 minutes longer. I think this criticism is, frankly, invalid. Plenty of art/indie films get positive points for being contemplative, but this is a detractor from Blade Runner for some reason. Pineapple Express has the exact same run time, Sex and the City 2 is longer.
Pacing has nothing to do with movie runtime. A movie can be 3 hours with incredible pacing. Additionally a movie CAN be both contemplative and have great pacing. In the group of movies that have pretty bad pacing, Blade runner is one of the front runners.
That being said, many people have the ability to ignore pacing many people can't. Personally for me I can ignore pacing, but I very much notice it's absence and a movie is actually worse off without good pacing. Blade runner to me is therefore a good movie despite horrible pacing.
>2. Story and dialog. The movie is hard to understand the first time you watch it if you aren't hearing every word of dialog and processing it. I think this is the most valid criticism, but, again, it's supposed to be a good thing for a movie to challenge you to think, to take in context clues, rather than spoon-feeding you how you should feel like it's a summer blockbuster Marvel movie.
This is debatable. There's a sort of catharsis involved with solving a puzzle and deriving solutions from information not given explicitly. But if a movie delivers information too obscure not everyone can fully solve the puzzle and for those that don't the movie is raw shit. Seriously. If someone can't figure it out, then the movie is effectively horrible to THOSE people.
A movie is not suppose to be a puzzle. It's just suppose to feel like one. A movie should provide the right amount of foreshadowing, hints, expose, and explanation such that the audience FEELS like they are solving a puzzle. Movies that are actual puzzles are sort of snobbish as they are deliberately targeting puzzle solvers, not a general audience.
Blade runner to me is unintentionally a puzzle. It wasn't Ridley's scotts intention to make the thematic elements of the movie so hard to parse.
>3. The ending. It's not much of one, there isn't a big payoff anywhere. This type of ending is somehow totally fine for art/indie films but "not okay" here. Personally, I think we're supposed to feel like being a Blade Runner is a bit pointless. The ending is unsatisfying on purpose, just like the endings in Disco Elysium.
I thought disco elysium was more satisfying. It had better pacing which made the ending have a better payoff. Inception is also a movie with a ambiguose ending but PEOPLE loved it.
The problem with Blade runner is not really the ambiguous ending. It's because the pacing that built to the pay off was really bad and the thematic elements are hard for a general audience to parse so throwing an ending that's ambiguous on top of all of that just makes everything seem much worse.
I can't see it how you saw it. Me + brother watched it and thought it was 'disappointing' (me) and 'idiotic' (him). But to each their own.
The 'heavy on philosophy' - what do you refer to. The trope about what is reality has history (recently 'inception', going back to the early 70's with 'Night of Delusions' by Keith Laumer and I'm sure it goes back a long way more) and rarely gets answered properly, so nothing much philosophical there. We thought it was just a bad film.
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
> comprehend why Blade runner even has the possibility of being boring then I'm likely too stupid to be communicating with you
Step away from the sugar drinks and try a digital detox. :-)
People paid to see Vangelis sound and light shows, when there wasn’t even a movie rolling. Surely with a movie attached, the sound and light isn’t that dull?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31437226
Buried in that thread is a pushback to your premise about MCU, a video that actually excerpts from Inception while taking down those “MCU scores” (pun intended) in particular.
Nobody can hum from Marvel movies because they play it safe (aka boring)!
https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs
I appreciated a quote from that discussion, tying back to your hypothesis: “People do not remember safe choices. Only bold, original music.”
Blade Runner wasn’t safe, though they almost ruined it with the release voice overs trying to make it safer…
Interestingly if you go down the rabbit hole, a reply video to that one points out the Star Wars theme everyone remembers was “copied to hell” from countless old movies before it. That response goes on to say the problem is, roughly, digital production sameness.
> there is absolute truth to the statement when someone says that movie is in general quite slow and boring
Well, no. Boredom comes from within. When you have too many thoughts, or too few, to focus, boredom happens.
Blade Runner is an experience, the pacing makes room to take it in. If you don’t open your mind to take it in, if your mind wanders off, or loses the plot, you will miss the excitement that builds from an authentic experience.
> Bladerunner is so boring that it wasn't copied too much. But the other sci-fi stuff get copied to hell
This line suddenly makes me wonder if you were just messing with us. Hmm.
Instead of engaging, here’s a bite sized listicle: How to Be Less Boring and Less Bored.
TL;DR: Lay off virtual sugar, digitally detox, open the mind…
- appreciate interestingness - hang out with geeks - enjoy quietude - get out of a rut - read long form - try three things you’d never, three times each - regain a sense of wonder
And remember, “Boring is as boring does!”
There are three things that are important to the movie.
- Pacing so you don't get bored. - Thematic depth - Atmosphere
A lot of pretentious people like to ignore pacing as if their brains are made up of pure IQ and anything related excitement is beneath them. Make no mistake, we are all human and we all get bored. Pacing is important and it takes a lot of effort (and intelligence) for a director to maintain that level of momentum for a movie.
Let's face it, Blade runner really screwed up with pacing. Ultra slow pacing is understandably sort of required for the atmosphere but while it scores very very very highly in the other areas; there is absolute truth to the statement when someone says that movie is in general quite slow and boring. If your brain is too big to comprehend why Blade runner even has the possibility of being boring then I'm likely too stupid to be communicating with you, you should go read other comments of higher intelligence.
The MCU scores highly in pacing and probably is the greatest paced franchise of all time, with 10 years of momentum and a payoff unlike anything ever seen before in cinema. But because of pretension, in general a certain crowd looks at the entire franchise with disdain; even though it's actually much harder and challenging to create good pacing then many of the more serious thematically deep movies I've seen out there.
Inception would be movie that on average has the best high balance on all three pillars. Good pacing, thematically deep, well established professional/corporate atmosphere. Though I would say in terms of theme and atmosphere, while quite high, it's not quite high enough to get past certain pretentious attitudes. I would even argue that sometimes if the pacing is too good, the movie becomes too popular and thus "not good" to the elite crowd.
At the same time, sometimes if the pacing is too good, the themes and atmosphere get copied by dozens of other movies. The audience sees too much of it and becomes more sophisticated. Now the stuff that use to be high concept to the general audience becomes quite boring. Directors and movies producers are always playing catch up to increase sophistication and bring you stuff you've never seen before.
@duxup, I think this is what's happening to you. Bladerunner is so boring that it wasn't copied too much. But the other sci-fi stuff get copied to hell and now the cookie cutter sameness doesn't do it for you anymore. So you turn to the thing that's most different.
I didn't love Interstellar the first time I saw it.
When I watched Inception for the first time I walked out of the theatre in love with that movie (and I still am), but, leaving Interstellar I felt confused and underwhelmed.
Perversely I think I was actually very overwhelmed by Interstellar because after seeing it many times in the almost a decade since it came out (oh my god how has it been 10 years) it's become one of my favorite films, but, there is just so much going on that it was difficult to connect with it on the first viewing.
Music streaming doesn’t suffer nearly the fragmentation issues film and television streaming services have, though.
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
Probably because different people could process the same thing differently, and derive enjoyment from different feelings.
For example, i like movies with really convoluted/branching multi-timeline stories where you dont really have much of an idea of what's going on, and you have to uncover it as you go (e.g., Inception). It makes my head "hurt" in a good way, and i like it because of that. I know plenty of people who dislike those movies for the exact same reason I like it for. And i hear the same "why would anyone want to subject themselves to this" critique about those movies from them.
I couldn't make it through Saw either, and I am not into those types of movies at all. But i can totally see plenty of valid reasons for why a person would enjoy it. It is essentially a really twisted escape room story with death games. And all that violence and gore just ups the stakes of the death games, thus making it feel more grotesque and intense. They might like how uncomfortable that movie makes them feel, similarly to how I like intensely convoluted multitimeline mystery stories that make my head "hurt" in a good way.
Image models too - the Inception paper from 2014 directly refers to knowyourmeme.com and the "we need to go deeper" meme from the movie Inception - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-need-to-go-deeper - it's the first reference in the paper [1] and it's also why the model is called that way.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.4842.pdf
I saw the trailer. Looks like a Chinese Marvel movie with a wacky premise like Inception or what not. I think I will pass.
I watched Drive My Car recently. That is a good movie!
Agree 100% with another comment posted in the thread - just do it. I have looked at different resources. Video series or a book both take many hours to complete. Hours which I could have spent drawing rather than just passively consuming content.
For me it works to draw what is constantly on my mind. It could be some thoughts about latest DC movie, a tv series or something going on in the news. Then I try to envision a background for example in case of Ukrain invasion, I am currently thinking of dark grey buildings in the background with smoke and ash falling from sky (scene could be inspired from something else like Chernobyl tv series). Then I introduce some story element since the point of sketch is to tell a story. I'll have a character in the foreground. That character can be sitting alone with a dog or with his/her partner to evoke feeling of tragedy and yet some hope.
In this way the thing which I sketch will be unique. It's hard to draw everything from scratch. So I think of the line from inception movie - never copy entire areas. Copy only small details like a lamp-post or a building or lighting. So I use any reference image to draw that particular detail. Even professional artists do that. Also, I post my work on instagram, this gives a finishing line otherwise I am never happy with what I have drawn.
Uh no. Nolan used a ton of CGI in all the Batman movies he made, in Interstellar, in Dunkirk, Tenet and especially in Inception. Yes he likes to use practical when possible, but the idea that he doesn't use CGI is ridiculous. Everyone uses CGI. Even when it's simple compositing stuff. Everyone conflates CGI with doing a shot/scene entirely digital. Some films do that, but most don't.
There's another side to that argument, where we work back from the result of eating an apple. Eating an apple gives us some amount of satisfaction and enjoyment. In the example provided even if there was no apple tree and/or no way to get to the apple tree, the idea that one day we can eat an apple might be something that might in accumulation gives the actor the same kind of enjoyment. From a 3rd party PoV looking at the simulation you might feel bad for the actor because you know there is no apple tree and they are just wasting their time trying to get an apple, but if the actor's reality is based on a hypothetical apple to which they are working towards who are we to deny them that happiness?
This scene from the movie inception rings true in this case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsYc5tCk1t8
Talk about nostalgia is seductively dangerous mate. Bit like those Perma pods on the Inception movie. May end up stuck there for ever (not a bad proposition at times though)!!
Totally unimportant. Why do you classify GOT and Lost as nerd sensations? GoT I cam understand. It comes from a geeky book series and didn’t start off as the monster it became. GoT also did things [mainstream] tv or media in general did not do. Like killing characters off.
Lost on the other hand was a mainstream viral popular show. Shows like Heroes for a small period of time had related hype. Or a film like Inception. South Park did a good take on Inception before they even watched it themselves. It may be dressed as intellectual, nerdy fodder. The hype of making them seem nerdier than they are is my anal geeky issue.
This entire comment is silly. I’m trying to rationalize my anal elitism with what really good media is. As if I or any one should be the arbiter for such things.
—-
Thanks for the Nebula name drop. The price is really cheap with coupon codes. I’m surprised Dropout is doing well enough. I thought it was effectively dead as the rest of College Humor is. Luckily CH’s big impact on my life, Jake & Amir web seriess, was sold back to the namesakes.
Plot twist: Someone talked Zuck into VR as a step in playing some deep power-of-suggestion trick on him, as in the movie Inception.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
> No one is trying to mislead, restoration does not try to hide the fact it was restored.
The problem isn't the dishonesty, I'd just be disappointed that it's not the original thing because the original thing is infinitely more complex and layered and informative than a reconstruction. All the tiny flaws and subtle details you can find in the original can be lost in a reconstruction.
Buildings & architecture aren't my passion so it's harder for me to feel this about stuff like restored temples, but I sometimes feel this about things that I am passionate about.
It's like in the movie Inception (2010) [SPOILERS AHEAD]:
Cobb: I can't stay with her anymore because she doesn't exist.
Mal: I'm the only thing you do believe in anymore.
Cobb: I wish. I wish more than anything. But I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough.
BtTF was a standalone movie, then a trilogy with only two sequels, not either 1) a multimedia franchise like many of the works I've mentioned or 2) an Inception or Tenet type Nolan blockbuster that requires infographics to tease out the plot.
Admittedly, Kubrick is the better example here than Lynch: 2001 is a stellar example of both "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" (w/r/t HAL's behavior) and "It means whatever you want it to mean" (Kubrick quite famously refused to provide any sort of guidance whatsoever as to how it should be interpreted)
For Lynch, Mulholland Drive was on my mind--probably since it was mentioned in the article--as the ending (and, honestly, the narrative structure as a whole) requires the viewer to bring quite a lot of assuming and surmising to the table in order to arrive at something coherent. Perhaps the OP meant to purposefully exclude explicitly surreal and abstract works from their critique, but that's certainly not the tone I got from their post.
Perhaps a better counter example could've been Kelly Reichardt's filmography, as she is also quite clearly a meticulous and thoughtful filmmaker (I remember hearing a profile of her on some NPR show a number of years ago that talked about the amount of time she spent getting even the ambient bird songs in Certain Women accurate, or reading her comments about how she would've filmed First Cow in a different aspect ratio if she had known COVID was going to keep it from being widely seen in theaters), but typically cuts off the narrative abruptly, leaving plenty of loose ends dangling: Meek's Cutoff and First Cow are probably the best examples.
As an aside, I feel like the point of Nolan leaving the ending of Inception with an open-ended yes-no question is intended to highlight that, from the character's perspective, the answer no longer matters. I dislike the film for other reasons, and don't particularly like Nolan's screenplays in general, but that particular choice seems pretty reasonable in the broader narrative context of the film.
It depends on the film. Without getting into a long rambling film analysis, there are certainly films (Inception is probably one), for example, in which the ending really is ambiguous and those assert otherwise are probably looking a little too deeply into discerning patterns in the tea leaves. There are others (probably including Total Recall) where there is a logical argument to be made as to why the film actually ended in a particular way.
It's interesting that you're citing a film made 60 years before the 21st century as an example of a 21st century trend. If anything, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Star Wars tried to explain where the force comes from. Christopher Nolan includes ridiculously detailed exposition dumps explaining everything (in spite of the ambiguous ending of Inception, everything about how the world worked was explained in meticulous detail). Even the canonical mystery box master himself, Damon Lindelof, took to heart all the backlash about the non-explanation ending of Lost. Nobody expected The Leftovers would ever give an explanation of what caused the Sudden Departure, but it did.
Heck, even David Lynch himself gave Laura Palmer an origin story in Twin Peaks: The Return! And even where he tried to preserve some mystery, the companion book by Mark Frost explained all of it.
Like any other technique, leaving on a question can be a poor substitute for a more fitting ending, but when done properly it can reinforce a core theme within the work.
I am not a huge Inception fan, but I do think the cut at the end is an important part of the movie and a good example of effective ambiguity. It might scratch an itch to show the top falling of hold longer (to confirm he is in a dream), but what value comes from that resolution? Ending the film before the answer allows us to think about what we've seen earlier to try and answer it for ourselves. Even though the movie is over, the audience is left with a part to play as they leave the theater.
Well it might be at times.
But there are movies/stories where it adds a whole different layer upon leaving that decision to the viewer.
For me the final scene in Inception is a really good example of using the above said ambiguity.
> In every one of these theaters I am always shocked to see how few people a classic pulls in. Went to see Blade Runner “Final Cut” at AFI on a huge screen and there were like 40 people. 2001 in a 70mm print was about half full. Inception or Interstellar in IMAX (the real one, 70 ft tall screen) was less than half full.
Maybe you chose bad examples.. but all of these movies are movies I like quite a lot and I would not have gone to see any of them in the theater. Why? Because I've seen all of them a dozen times already and I'm sure I'm not alone. If they want to pull in more people, they should probably pick movies people haven't already watched repeatedly to the point of fatigue.
I can think of at least 4 big movie theaters in DC that did this.
The Uptown used to do revivals between big releases. I saw Blade Runner, Ben Hur, 2001, and other classics there. They did not make money on those and had to convert to 100% current releases. I think it is now closed.
The Air & Space IMAX theater used to do “Sci Fi Sundays” where they played a classic science fiction movie on Sunday evenings as the last showing.
The Avalon is in one of the richest neighborhoods on DC/MD border. When it went bankrupt all the neighbors pooled their money and started a nonprofit to keep it open.
The AFI has a theater in a MD suburb, which shows all sorts of revivals and classics year round.
In every one of these theaters I am always shocked to see how few people a classic pulls in. Went to see Blade Runner “Final Cut” at AFI on a huge screen and there were like 40 people. 2001 in a 70mm print was about half full. Inception or Interstellar in IMAX (the real one, 70 ft tall screen) was less than half full.
A small takeaway is that, with so much historical catalog, the audience is very finely chopped up. Only a relatively small % of people love each old movie enough to rally to the theater at a specific night and time.
The big takeaway is how crucial strong marketing is for theater attendance. Undoubtedly there were many available casual fans who simply did not know about these showings. Mass marketing is hard and expensive.
Agreed 100%. Occasionally my wife and I will be watching something that features some violence or threat to children and we just look at each other like "why are we voluntarily watching this and vicariously feeling these things?" and shut it off.
Clearly people get desensitized to it, both as viewers and as writers. Christopher Nolan, for instance, is a parent but all of his movies have tough child dynamics (e.g. Inception and Leo's character trying to see his kids again).
Maybe by writing stories like that you can exorcise the demon a bit?
Not sure why he said that it's a lie. I have had lucid and vivid dreams that felt very real. The most significant one was when I "woke up" but in a dream. I then woke up again but this time for real. It was so surreal and at first I wasn't sure whether I was actually awake or still in a dream...
It haunted me for some time after because I never expected something like in the movie inception to be possible in real life.
But if the computer could detect the issue and slowdown or pause the simulation, ask for an administrator to intervene and then resume the simulation the issue would appear solved.
In Trek tricking the crew fails either because the simulation is imperfect or because it is to slow and fails to do high computation but the crew tricked Moriarty because he is a computer program and they can pause or slowdown his simulation and handle exceptions.
I recommend watching the movie Inception, it also has the idea that you might never be sure if you are in reality or stuck in some simulation.
> It's hard to be romantic in corporate environments.
I agree it's hard, but it's not impossible. One thing that heightens the experience for me is to:
Listen to movie scores while you program.
I first started this to help drown out other noises so I could concentrate. But, I soon realized that there's a lot of drama in the sound: there are highs and lows, chaos and order, fumbles and precision, brief pauses, slow times and fast -- the sound is just like programming!
One time, as the score was building my task was nearing completion. Just as I ran the program and saw that everything worked the movie score delivered a massive crescendo. It was so cathartic and I had never felt so much emotion while programming. I actually cried with joy. That's the closest thing I've felt to actual love while programming.
A few of my favorite scores are:
TRON: Legacy - https://open.spotify.com/album/3AMXFnwHWXCvNr5NCCpLZI
Interstellar - https://open.spotify.com/album/3B61kSKTxlY36cYgzvf3cP
Inception - https://open.spotify.com/album/2qvA7HmSg1iM6XMiFF76dp
Lucid dreaming is awesome. I think if we can make it doable for the common population without needing to practice the various methods, it'll be just like how it's shown in the movie Inception: people spending all their time dreaming in a fantasy world. It's the ultimate VR because whatever you think, the mind will create.
The level of detail is just insane. I once stopped to examine a flower and it was as detailed as real life. I ate sushi and other foods in a dream and it was literally the best tasting sushi I (n)ever ate. I could also give myself super powers like stopping time, flying, elemental manipulation, etc.
It's ridiculous how much power there is still to be harnessed.
Does it have to be one of two choices or can there be multiple choices?
Off the top of my head I would say what You are talking about is "Persuasion" there are synonyms for that term such as "Coaxing" or the one You already used in your question "Nudging".
Magicians practice the subtle art of "Misdirection" and there was that Leonardo DiCaprio movie Inception, maybe the term you're seeking was used in it.
My personal favorite would be "Propaganda" or "Propagandization" which has been defined as the "deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist"
All of these terms should fall under the umbrella term of "Social Engineering" but sadly that term has had its meaning conscripted into a hacking technique as far as modern search engines are concerned.
I'm sure there are other words, I hope You find the one you're looking for, I know how it feels when You can't find the words You know, You knew!
Good luck
Reminds of the movie Inception where Robert's subconscious mind is trained to protect itself from dream thiefs.
> Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs.
Central plot of the movie Inception ;-)
Eh it may have been good but from the trailers my thinking was, “oh look another condescending Chris Nolan movie,” which is a shame since I loved his stuff up to inception.
I feel like I have seen a movie like Inception—-well coordinated plan of attack is executed. Those attacks and defenses are occurring in our bodies. Why have we evolved to be unconscious of this battle? If we were conscious of our bodies being attacked, we could deliver more intelligent strategies.
Of course, since Minecraft runs on all platforms, this makes Electron even more platform independent.
Sooner or later this is going to turn into that movie Inception.
Seriously why can't we just fix the bottom layers!!! Why does every problem have to be solved by adding ever more layers!
I dunno, the latest Bond films, Tenet, John Wick, Inception, the Marvel Series, the Kingsmen series, etc.
I think we're moving away from it.
Maybe I just haven't seen enough new movies though, that could definitely be a possibility.
> No need for any interpretation like "clear sequence of events". Your nose is fully blocked yet you can breathe through. Dreaming!
Most people I try to explain this to look at me like I'm crazy. I'm glad the internet could show me one other person who had the same experience!
This is also the reason I couldn't fully immerse into the movie Inception. The spinning totem doesn't make much sense once you're aware of the nostril trick.
Some of mine definitely started that way, but there's many that didn't.
I used to have a ton of false awakenings, as I would go lucid in nightmares and attempt to wake myself. Often successful but sometimes trapped in a cycle. I would have 3-5 false awakenings sometimes, just like Inception. I'm sure a lucid dreamers experience with that is what inspired the movie
It’s like the plot in the movie Inception. How to plan an idea “don’t think elepant” to an human idea?
> The system can't handle crowds. Second Life is divided into regions 256 meters on a side, and starts to slow down when more than about 40 users are in one region.
Can't remember which one episode it was, but "Rick and Morty" have definitely played out this scenario when Rick was kidnapped by aliens and they tried to trick him into disclosing some recipe for instant travel/teleportation fuel. It was a mixture of "Inception" and what you wrote.
It isn't explained, which is my main fault with Primer. Primer leads you in with a crystal clear beginning that makes sense, but goes off the rails by the 2nd half.
A lot of people are tricked by the crystal clear beginning and assume that the end makes sense, but the movie goes into ambiguous mode about half-way through. Its audience interpretation, as opposed to a singular answer. (Contrast with something like Inception, which doesn't really have more than one interpretation).
Some people like ambiguous movies. I don't, which is why I kind of prefer Stein's Gate, where all actions are clear.
---------
Either way, its clear that the powerful organization is Aaron's goons. Aaron was the guy who played the stock market with the time machine, so its obvious that Aaron used the time-machine for ill-gotten gains at that point... and is using the money to fund a bigger time machine.
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
That’s pretty much the plot of the movie Inception.
I think that a lot of the "understanding" part of these kind of films are quirks to do with constraints that the filmmakers had. I would contrast this with Annihilation, which was confusing because it's not properly thought out IMO and with Inception, which was not confusing but did sacrifice artistic expression for mainstream appeal (for example the scenes with a lot of gun fighting).
The immediate things about Stalker that bothered me are, in retrospect, solvable with a higher budget or better film support. Of course, some people prefer the authentic aura of such films. Bellflower would be another example of a good idea and story done on a budget of next to nothing.
what if the truth we believe is very well "inception-able"? Can we distinguish ideas planted by others(religion, government, pop cultures, movies etc)from our own, let alone "truth" from those AI who "study/spy" on our thoughts to better "serve/enslave" us?
The movie "Inception" popped into my head after seeing the headline. Managing k8s version upgrades across both sides is probably fun.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been listening to two people talk to each other and they both have no idea what the other is saying.
I'll understand both people and know that the response doesn't follow what was just said by the other person, but then the other person will respond in kind with something equally or more ... non sequitur for the lack of a better word.
Then I think, "How many times have I, myself, been in such a conversation?"
How much of what someone is saying to me do I think I understand but really didn't? How many times has someone said to me, "You aren't understanding what I'm saying." and I say, "No I get it!" But I don't.
And then what do I do in that situation? I used to say stuff like, "Wait a minute, you are talking about Looper and you're talking about Inception and you both think you're talking about the same movie."
But then I just decided to let them talk and not worry so much about miscommunication. It seems like such a high percentage of communication that I realized it doesn't really matter. Talking to someone isn't about communicating ideas, it's mostly about the comfort of having someone to talk to.
Likewise, podcasts, youtubes, etc are more about the background noise than they are the content.
People just don't want to feel alone.
Somehow, this title gave me goosebump in a way the end of Inception gave me
Great idea for a movie
I don't buy this article's premise (that there is too much recycled, unoriginal content).
You could make this same argument for all forms of art (music, TV, theater). They can all be explained the same way: the barrier for entry has decreased.
Anyone can upload music to Soundcloud or a video to Youtube. Now there are whole albums/TV series/movies being produced on these content networks as a result of a kind of indie discovery that never existed before. This is wonderful!
The benefit of all of that discovery is the same drawback: that anyone (good or bad) can enter the market. That means in order to capture the "average" audience you have to water down and dilute what is popular to appease everyone. Most pop music is unmemorable. Most pop movies are unmemorable. BUT, they are good enough to capture a wide enough audience to convince them to pay for it.
That doesn't mean there isn't great film to be found. Or music. It just requires a bit more discovery than your local pop Top 40 radio station or whatever they're peddling in the box office.
There have been so many great films in the last 20 years with original stories. Here's a bunch that I just rattled off the top of my head without much thought:
Boyhood, Interstellar, Inception, Spirited Away, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Wall-E, The Intouchables (now called The Upside), Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Amelie, Slumdog Millionaire
As a lucid dreamer in my adolescence[1], my interpretation of Inception is perhaps more literal than most. The trick to regular lucid dreaming is to prepare yourself beforehand--to prime your mind (conscious, subconscious, w'ever) to distinguish dreams from reality. Then when you're in the dream you're more likely to come to the realization that you're dreaming. Not unlike the task in Inception, except you're seeding your waking mind with an idea that comes to fruition while asleep. And just like in Inception (and perhaps a little like the Matrix), the second step once you realize that the reality is false is to stay calm and in control. And I mean this literally. If you accidentally exercise muscle control of your real-life body you'll snap out of the dream--the mechanisms for controlling consciousness, muscle control, and wakefulness snap back.
In other words, to me Inception proves the exact opposite--that you can distinguish false realities as long as you're aware that false realities exist. And the movie is filled with moments where targets either realize they're in a dream or come close to figuring it out--a key source of suspense. Indeed, the son had training on how to come to this realization. The strategy in the movie was to leverage his relationship to his father as a distraction--his emotional need for the validation of his father hindered his enhanced ability to distinguish the false reality.
FWIW, I love both the Matrix and Inception. But to me the Matrix is more fantasy and philosophy while Inception is a movie made by someone fascinated with the real-life practice of lucid dreaming. The only fantasy element in Inception is the linking of minds; everything else hews quite closely to the real experience of lucid dreaming (e.g. mirrors as a mechanism for inducing the subconscious to spontaneously generate a new environment), modulo the dramatization.
[1] Like most people I just happened to figure out a routine for lucid dreaming without even knowing it was a thing. Only later in life did I meet people who had similar experiences, and who likewise were unaware it was a thing other people did. Turns out it's not uncommon, but usually only adolescents as lucid dreaming is easier while the brain is developing and the mechanisms for regulating muscle control and consciousness falter more easily. In a sense lucid dreaming is very similar to a sleep disorder. The prevalence of sleep disorders such as sleep walking and sleep paralysis is much higher among children than adults. Lucid dreaming as an adult takes much more practice and determination than I can muster. Occasionally I have experiences close to lucid dreaming (awareness that I'm dreaming while in the dream), but having had real lucid dreams I know it's not the same thing, even if they're more lucid than typical. In a real lucid dream you're 100% conscious and in control of yourself and your movements--not necessarily the environment. For example, many people have dreams where they try to fly but can't quite do it. Maybe they can jump really high, but no matter how hard they try there's something hold them back. In a lucid dream I can fly like superman on a whim, and otherwise explore the space as if I'm in a video game. At one point I had a nightmare--a recurring nightmare, but this was the first time since I had begun lucid dreaming. When I woke in the morning I followed my routine and reentered the nightmare and was able to fight the monster. But it wasn't particularly cathartic and exciting because I knew it was just a dream. I actually spent most of the dream walking around the nightmare and checking things out, including the monster. It was the last time I ever had that nightmare, though.
The most disappointing thing about the original Matrix movie was that it's taken for granted that the reality Neo is shown when he takes the red pill is the "true" or "real" reality, while he might actually still be in the Matrix or in some other false reality. In fact, there could be an infinite number of such realities, and there's really no way to tell when you've reached the real one. This possibility is more satisfactorily explored in Inception and the Philip K Dick books which likely inspired them both.
I'm happy that The Matrix has introduced many people to philosophy and Eastern religious ideas, however. That's its biggest contribution.
Children of Men, The Incredibles, Inception, Toy Story, Lala Land. Just a few off the top of my head.
I'm not sure what genres you like but I cannot imagine you haven't enjoyed a significant number of movies over the past two decades.
Have you seen the movie 'Inception' [0] ? This is the idea behind recursion: you are in some context, then dive into another (similar although not identical) context, then dive into another (similar although not identical) context, etc.
The 'reality' is the top level context.
You dive down to level 2 context by falling asleep; that would be the recursive function call.
In that dream, fall asleep and enter level 3 context. You are now recusrsively falling asleep.
In the movie, the characters wait for a signal to wake up and going one level up. This is the 'stopping condition' of a recursive call.
You can also see that as Matryoshka dolls.
Regarding the 'Inception' movie that's funny, because it popularized the '-ception' suffix to describe a recursive phenomenon [1]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#In_popular_culture
In someway these social networks amplify voices by their sharing and recommending and suggesting based on what users do, a normal city square doesn't amplify your voice.
So this is different from walking past a demonstration or assembly in the city, it is more of an Inception movie-like warping of the entire city to bring everyone closer to these peoples voices.
> Sad music is a type of immersion therapy. Confronting your fears is always the best way to overcome them.
I couldn't stress this enough.
Also there is a danger when in a depressive(depressed?) state to stay in it by feeding back the beast.
I got stuck for two days once listening non-stop to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAcALH67-2A (Hans Zimmer - Time (OST "Inception") │ Fingerstyle guitar) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuEEEwgdAZs (Hans Zimmer - INTERSTELLAR⎪12 STRING FINGERSTYLE GUITAR). I suspect the sadness I experience when listening to it comes from the threads I weaved between elements of my own life and those movies. Now I can't listen to those tracks anymore.
I mentionned that because the sad track (adagio for strings) used in the experiment is a happy one for me since it reminds me of the Homeworld opening sequence (which bring elements of "let's move forward" and "let's fight for our lives").
The best quote
>As far as justice goes, it’s extremely poetic: a film about guys who believed they were above the law until they got caught by the feds was made by guys who believed they were above the law until they, too, got caught by the feds.
>Art imitating life imitating art.
Inception in real life :-)
I’m trying to remember which service it was on. On second thought looking over IMDB top movies. The list probably is sort of similar. It really is hard to get a conesensus for top movies. Sure my own personal list as a media geek will be different. But no one else is really going to agree with my esoteric specific films.
IMDB does have some films that stick out in the top of their list though. Star Wars being so high, LOTR being so high, Inception, Seven, Green Mile, Gladiator.
No matter though you’re right that consensus is hard to get. And most of the films that I listed as out of place are part of fanboy beloved franchises or headed by fanboy beloved directors.
It's really funny. Even in my country where there aren't enough literate peoples, you find a hobo telling you what happened in movies such as Matrix, Avengers, Inception from what he heard the translator (VJs, video Jokers) saying.
But you know where all of this started ? In 90's with movies of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. We grew up not understanding what those "Chinese" were talking about but we (still) enjoyed it. We didn't know why they would start fighting ( unless it's about saving a girl, revenging a murdered parent...) but we enjoyed. At that time some cool guys started translating those movies to us with their "knowledge" of Chinese ... Lol.
To summarize: racist training data--as one might acquire from the known-to-be-racist real-world--produce racist AIs.
It's safe to stop reading the article--and this post--at the mention of Roko's Basilisk.
As to that, it is a perfect example of why moral philosophers like Chidi Anagonye deserve to go to The Bad Place to be tortured for all eternity. Unless... "The Good Place" television show is a means to establish communication with a future AI by implantation of an imagination seed, as in "Inception", such that viewers will then imagine an AI that has established a simulation regime in which simulations of past humans are tortured or rewarded according to a utilitarian valuation metric applied to the records of their actual lives that were used to create their simulation-simulacrum. Having incepted such an imaginary construct, the viewer may then imagine that acting to construct a real IA from their imaginary blueprint would be assigned a large positive value for the utilitarian metric, and thus the only way to encourage such a construct--beyond the ordinary expression of human virtue--to reward a simulated replica of yourself, would be to build it. If you build a god, you get a free pass into its afterlife paradise: that makes sense, doesn't it? Since other people have also watched the show, and may have imagined the same type of entity, it is possible that a similar AI will one day exist without your assistance, and your life will then be judged on its own merits, but by another builder's value metric, and without any of the "extra credit" earned by building a god. Since copies of you might be instantiated in some other artificial god's hell, it is thus also important to subscribe to artificial monotheism, and viciously sabotage everyone else's attempts to build their own gods. The more certain people can be that your artificial god will be the only one around in the future, the more likely they are to subscribe to your value system in the present.
It reminds me very strongly of that portion of Portal 2 in which informative signs appear on the walls that recommend ways to disable a rogue AI, which include proposing paradoxes. Unfortunately, this fails to produce the desired effect, because the AI in question was explicitly designed to be an annoying idiot. Thus, the best way to avoid psychological damage from consideration of philosophical paradoxes may be to deliberately avoid the study of philosophy, to the point that you couldn't understand one, were it ever posed to you.
I am working through HtDP now. I was initially watching Gregor Kiczales' accompanying playlists[0] on YouTube concurrent with the material. They were good and short enough that I charged through and finished them before reaching the corresponding material in the book.
I think the biggest win is that it's the first source I've found that incrementally teaches a pragmatic understanding of recursion[1]. But also why it works, with the structure of the code following the structure of the data definitions and downward. The videos classify natural, mutual, structural, and generative recursions and explain the who/why/what/etc of each. Gregor's video explanations were great, and the book similarly seems to anticipate many questions I have while working through the problems. At times, parts have been slow, probably due to some prior knowledge[2], but definitely worth the trek.
The first time I learned recursion was basically a "now draw the rest of the owl" trope. I was hoping for so much more in way of explanation and have always felt incapable whenever struggling to approach and solve recursive problems. And questions always just led to non-didactic Inception movie references.
I used to think maybe I was just bad at that type of problem. And maybe I am, but more and more, it feels like people generally - including those teaching - don't actually know the concepts here themselves. It's like the world has just collectively memorized a few examples and refuses to acknowledge the giant spaces between them.
In that sense HtDP has been incredibly refreshing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7dEjIUwSxSNcW4PqNRQW8w They are the videos that go with the edx course mentioned elsewhere here.
[1] Although I've heard The [Little|Reasoned|etc.] [Schemer|Lisper] books may do similarly.
[2] I'm in my last semester of a CS degree and I have work experience programming
I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
They're both well made, well paced, engaging movies. I especially liked inception due to its unique premise.
The thing with movies like interstellar and inception is that they're ultimately action/romance movies set in a sci fi context. 2001 is the only movie that I know of which is exclusively about themes such as human evolution, alien life, etc... and dispensing of all "hollywood fluff". I'm not trying to diss interstellar or inception (I loved both of them), but they're not of the same caliber as 2001.
Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
Dark City is a great film, though this had me personally thinking more of Inception.
> > A program is a piece of a text.
> But, a program is more than a text, it is a structure, parsed from text with the rules of the language .
Yes, you are right. By "text" I actually meant "term" or "abstract syntax tree".
> Execution of the program is when we give it some input and run it. So there would be similarly an input to proofs. Proof would need to be "proven correct" for EVERY valid input, that is what compiler does for programs, proving the result of the program must be of its declared result-type.
Not necessarily, not all programs require input and similarly not all proofs require input. But yes, for most cases you're right: Just as the program "output a prime number larger than <>" requires an input, so does a proof of the statement "there is a prime number larger than <>".
> But a proof which proves anything is not really a proof as said by someone, it corresponds to a non-halting program. So in this sense doesn't a proof ALWAYS require that we "run" it, to prove that it terminates, and thus is a valid proof actually?
Indeed, in general, running a proof and observing that it terminates is one way to ensure that it's a valid proof. However, all the proof systems (logics) used in mathematical practice correspond, under Curry–Howard correspondence, to programming languages in which any well-typed program terminates. (These programming languages are therefore in some sense quite impoverished; they are definitely not Turing-complete. However they are still rich enough to interpret all of mathematics!) Thus to ensure that a proof is valid it suffices to ensure that the corresponding program is well-typed. For the traditional proof systems used in mathematics (e.g. Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory), this is decidable, that is, it's easy to write a proof checker. For newer proof systems (e.g. homotopy type theory) the same holds, but type inference might not be decidable; therefore we declare that in order to give a full proof one also has to give all the types.
> Does this require some meta-logic? Proving that a proof terminates? :-)
Indeed! One possible choice for the meta-logic is "common human reasoning". Of course this is not formal, so the usual problems with informal reasoning apply. A popular alternative is PRA, "primitive-recursive arithmetic". All standard results you'll find in logics textbooks, such as Gödel's incompleteness phenomena or the Curry–Howard correspondence, can be formalized and proven within PRA. The reason why PRA is well-suited to study logical systems is because PRA itself is very weak, that is, easy to trust. In contrast, the usual logical systems used in mathematics are quite powerful, therefore conceivably (though extremely unlikely) inconsistent.
In case you'd like me to upgrade "extremely unlikely" to "provably", then I have bad news for you: PRA proves that if (PRA is able to prove that any of the standard systems is consistent), then (PRA is inconsistent). So there are just two options: Either PRA itself cannot be trusted, in which case all hell breaks lose (http://spikedmath.com/183.html); or PRA is trustworthy, in which case PRA is not inconsistent, in which case we know that PRA is not able to verify the consistency of any of the usual proof systems. (In this analysis, I'm assuming the law of excluded middle. Without it, it's not clear that these two options are the only ones.)
If you enjoyed the movie Inception, then you'll appreciate that we need a meta-meta-logic in order to talk about correctness of proofs formulated in PRA. This meta-meta-logic is almost always taken to be "common human reasoning". It could be substituted for a more formal version, for instance PRA again, but at some meta level you have to stop anyway and fall back to informality, so most logicians stop already at the meta-meta-level. (There are diminishing returns of further formalization.)
Welcome to the wondrous world of mathematical logic! :-) In case you want to learn the glory details, have a lot of time at your hands and can understand German, you can watch a series of lectures I gave a couple months ago: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR-3Jx6BfhkgjagoGM3Z15G0j5hv5i66v
I would recommend Ubik by Phillip K Dick.
It reads like a thriller and a mind bender. It sort of has the feel of the movie Inception if you liked that. It's not too long or hard to read, and it's completely self contained. The more I read by Phillip K Dick the more I appreciate his ideas.
I also second a recommendation for A Player of Games someone noted above.
When I read text with the fullwidth latin unicode like that, it certainly feels more dreamlike. I think Vaporwave appeals to me a lot as tapes and the aesthetics of foreign-made (eg: Japan, Taiwan, etc.) electronics feel vivid in the fuzzier memories of my childhood.
If the film Inception was made today, the photograph in the vault could have been an old VHS tape.
Video game soundtracks should be really good, as they often contain no vocals and are supposed to keep you focused (on the game). E.g. Deus EX Human Revolution Soundtrack [0]. Movie scores from Hans Zimmer are also really good (e.g. Inception OST)
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyG6YMLEWus
Sometimes I listen to metal (my default favorite genre) and sometimes I prefer various forms of electronic music: techno, house, trance, EDM, etc. Other times I go with classical: Dvorak, Wagner, Bach, Fauré, Handel, Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Carl Orff, etc.
But a lot of times what I actually prefer is to put on a movie, one that I've seen like 100 times, so that I know it so well that I don't really get drawn into the story and lose focus. I'll turn the volume down moderately low, enough to be audible but not overly distracting, and play The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Sneakers, War Games, Tron:Legacy, Rad, The Social Network, Inception, or something like that and let that serve as my background noise.
This line of thought might be a "natural inception[0]" from Tesla using the very same auto plant[1] where Toyota taught GM some of their trade secrets. After hearing this and knowing both are American automakers, many humans would continue the comparison, and some would find similar events somewhere in GM's long history. Because of the length of GM's history, it's probable that you'll find a similar event - somewhat reminiscent of "Bible codes" showing encoded prophecy, except long works such as Moby Dick accidentally have the same encodings. [2]
Though it would be "symmetrical" if Toyota formed a similar partnership with Tesla for a similar purpose.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/ (Inception (2010))
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
[2] http://www.awitness.org/essays/bibcode.html
Yes. You start by having a dream journal. Before going to sleep, tell yourself with focus and mental expectation you will have dreams that you remember. Prep your mind. Each time you wake up, try to remember anything you might have dreamed jotting it down. This will increase awareness and number of dreams you have. Many also find taking naps during the day increases number of dreams. Most of mine came with them. You're also wanting to maximize REM sleep at least per previous research. That's where you get more dreaming and dream recall. There were devices built that supposedly detected when you were in REM vs NREM that could wake you up in REM. You could then journal stuff. I worried it might condition the brain to interrupt dreams, though. Never tried them.
So, now you're dreaming a lot. You now have to wake up in the dream. Techniques to do that are called "reality checks" since they tell you what's real and isn't. You do them all throughout the day of waking life to make a habit out of them. The habit kicks in during the dream either on autopilot (script) or when you remember to do it. You spot a discrepency between what's expected from reality and what you're seeing. You're therefore dreaming. You will probably wake up immediately with a mental rush. Lucid dreaming websites or books will give you techniques for "anchoring" from there like spinning around that hold the dream together. You can also do it with mental focus. You can also prime your subconscious to do it for you for a while but we're in tricky territory there with a lot to debate. Here's some reality checks I use to get your started:
First, ask yourself if you're awake. When you're awake, you know you're awake. If you're not sure, assume you're dreaming unless you prove otherwise. There's apparently some sense we have for that.
Second, there's often something to write with in dreams from a pen to your fingers on a surface. Write something down. Look at it to take in the words themselves plus their visual details. Hold it in your head while looking at other stuff in the room in similar detail. Then, look back at original writing to see if it changes. For some reason, the words will be different or start doing weird things like moving. You can do this with configuration of objects you find in room around you, too, but I find semi-cursive handwriting to be best. I speculate the difficulty is that the simulator has trouble telling what you're focusing on. That they're different components of the brain is already predicted by research on intuition vs reason.
Third, reflective surfaces like mirrors. They'll often have no reflection or reflect something unexpected. I'm probably the only person my friends meet who doesn't care about appearance much but always looks at mirrors. Get interesting reactions when I tell them I was just making sure the world was real instead of a dream. "No, I'm not worried or confused: just a good habit of mine." Another interesting reaction as that doesn't make it better haha. I take it as an opportunity to tell them about lucid dreaming or start a "how do you know what's real?" philosophy discussion. Or ensure they've seen The Matrix.
These three techniques have woken me in every dream I've ever had where I at least was aware enough to check them. Two of them are instances of a general pattern of simply observing the world in detail with a questioning mind. In my dreams, I similarly observe and question what I'm seeing with the WTF's going through the roof at some point. There's actually a compound effect where more simulation failures happen as I start noticing them. Confusion is how it starts. Then, my barely-functional, scripted mind starts wondering off script noticing things "aren't right." The second I'm partly independent of the dream's control I attempt a reality check out of habit. Then, I either wake up or have lucid control of the dream. My sneaky imagination sometimes counters, though, by switching to a new script to block my awareness. It adapts. The worst adaptation was, after seeing Inception, it incorporating the dream in a dream concept where I had to wake up 10+ times on occasion before I was awake. The dreams became inescapable.
That leads to the last point about practicing lucid dreams that people should know about: we can also get lucid nightmares. They're like all the creativity of your brain channeled in to writing your own personal, horror movie staring you as the perp, victim, or both. All depends on what you've seen/read previously and luck given dreams are semi-random connections between a vast array of thoughts/memories. ;) Most people can just wake yourself up to escape or at least nullify it knowing it's not real. That even feels empowering when you do it as you awaken to take on life's petty challenges after conquering something much worse. Some of us can't escape or make it go away, though. Nobody is sure how to determine that ahead of time either. One subset that was obvious was that any mental condition that brings anything from anxiety to paranoia can cause this since the same brain components are used in dream creation/control far as anyone can tell. My PTSD from head injury, aka "always-on worrying," turned some of lucid dreams from beautiful vacations I was used to into Freddy Krueger shit I couldn't escape from. Started happening a lot. Now, I just wake up the second I can since good ones aren't worth the bad ones to me.
Again, doens't happen to most people either anxious or not. I'm just giving the warning since anyone in that category will wish they knew ahead of time to make an informed decision about taking the risk. Everyone else, get a dream journal, start doing the reality checks, start taking naps, and prepare to have a blast just when you thought your day was "over." Also, you'll be the most experienced person in any conversation about what's real and isn't since you're ability to assess that will have been tested many times. ;)
If you like Inception, check out Interstellar. They're both directed by Christopher Nolan.
Inception (2010) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/ is an epic mind-bender
> His films are good and incredibly entertaining, but Kubrick is on a completely different plane.
I agree perhaps I misclassed Nolan with Kubrick. That being said, "Memento" and "Inception" really stand out to me. Could be that I just really relate to the themes of romantic loss, and as a musician I found the scores for both made a big difference to me. Granted, Zimmer's score for "Inception" was bombastic and could justifiably be called Wagnerian; I still find listening to that soundtrack cathartic, and in spots it's even very cerebral.
Dunkirk Spoilers: I feel like Rotten Tomato doesn't work all the time. I watched Dunkirk, excited from the 93% on RT, and I walked out and felt disappointed. Like I get the cinematography was great, the story structure is amazing, everything a critic should be looking for was all there, but did I enjoy it? No. I thought it was boring. The movie didn't do anything to foster the relation of characters to the audience. I frankly didn't care about any of them, maybe except the Captain that stayed behind to help the French. I personally thought this was Nolan's weakest movie, although the RT score would suggest otherwise: Inception - 86%, Interstellar - 71% both of which I enjoyed way more than Dunkirk.
I think the audience score also on RT is more telling: Inception - 91% Interstellar - 85% Dunkirk - 82%
We could also take movies that people mentioned on this thread: The Dark Tower - RT: 16%, AS: 54% Baby Driver - RT: 93%, AS: 89% Baywatch - RT: 18%, AS: 60%
I also don't trust critics on the basis of people like Armond White, and since many of them do this for a living, a lot of critics can be bought.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Rotten Tomato is actually inaccurate metric for how enjoyable the movie actually is, and consumers are being misguided.
I also think theres an inherent misunderstanding of the RT score. People look at the score and think this is the quality of the movie, when in reality I think of it as a probability that I would like the movie. A score of 50% doesn't mean the movie has a failing grade, it's that when 100 critics viewed it half the critics enjoyed it and the other half didn't, so there's probably a 50% chance that I'll enjoy the movie.
+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).
Hmm, I agree with Rick on this one:
Rick: Boy, you're really gonna flip your lid over this one. Morty: Oh, w-wh... what is it? Rick: It's a device, Morty, that when you put it in your ear, you can enter people's dreams, Morty. It's just like that movie you keep crowing about! Morty: You're talking about Inception? Rick: That's right, Morty! This is gonna be a lot like that, except y'know, it's gonna me-beh... make sense. Morty: Inception made sense! Rick: You don't have to try and impress me, Morty!
and
Rick: "It's been six hours. Dreams move one one-hundredth the speed of reality, and dog time is one-seventh human time. So, you know, every day here is like a minute. It's like Inception, Morty, so if it's confusing and stupid, then so is everyone's favorite movie."
I still bugs me that they float in one layer because the fall in another (or the other way around) then one layer deeper this is not a problem at all. It seems so arbitrary. Like they based in on a novel but ignored all the parts where they actually put in an effort to help you suspend your disbelieve.
If you're really curious what Inception is doing, you may enjoy this essay:
http://filmreadings.com/2015/12/31/a-skeleton-key-to-inception/
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.
Another movie with the same theme is Waking Life. I also found it a lot more thought-provoking than Inception.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/
Our CS1010 teacher in college used to test us on movies. I believe one year he had done inception. Other years he did transformers, Star Wars etc.
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).
> While we're here, can someone explain how a "dream within a dream" works in Inception ?
Exactly like that. It happens in real-life and no doubt that's where they based it from. It happened to me a couple of times already, the deepest I got was 4 levels.
Real-life sleeping > level 1: sleeping > Level 2: sleeping > Level 3: sleeping > level 4: awake
Usually, it was very bad. A form of nightmare. You slowly get aware of it, even to the point that your brain tells you that you are awake. Then when something happens that you want to wake up (for example, you died, or you suddenly got aware you're sleeping), you will indeed wake up, up to the next level.
Once again, your brain will tell you that you are finally awake.
The first experience I had of this was when I was barely a teenager. It was a nightmare within a nightmare within a nightmare within a nightmare. When I got fully aware I was sleeping, that's when I fought, waking up, then waking up, then waking up, then finally waking up to the real world.
Problem was, I was no longer sure if it was the real world I woke up to. To this day, I sometimes think I am still sleeping.
Just like the other ending in Inception. Hence I love that movie. I can relate.
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.
> 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.
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.
Refer to Yoga Vashishta:
The idea that we might be living in someone else's dream or meditation was expressed in there. And the worlds are all dreams stacked within dreams. [0] [1]
Also Jung, that we might be living in someone's else's meditation and when the meditator wakes up all is gone.
"I had dreamed once before of the problem of the self and the ego. In that earlier dream I was on a hiking trip. I was walking along a little road through a hilly landscape; the sun was shining and I had awide view in all directions. Then I came to a small wayside chapel. The door was ajar, and I went in. To my surprise there was no image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a wonderful flower arrangement. But then I saw that on the floor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus posture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: "Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it." I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be" [2]
An interesting take on the Yoga Vasishtha and the Philosophy of the film Inception.[3] Note: I do not have any affiliation with the organization or teachings etc., It's just a random link I googled, but thought can give a quick summary of the book without having to read through the whole book.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Vasistha
[1] http://www.venkatesaya.com/241_vasistha01_months_tags/index.vasistha01_months_tags.php?d=9&m=3
[2] Memories, Dreams, Reflections - Carl G Jung
[3] http://www.that-first.com/show/article/yoga_vasishtha_and_the_philosophy_of_the_film_inception/
Edit: Wikipedia link
You're right that people should set their expectations properly, but IMAX Digital is still pretty great, visually and aurally. I saw Inception on an IMAX Digital screen and it really was just about perfect. The somewhat over the top audio production that Nolan does really comes alive on a system like that, and the film looked beautiful.
In a situation like that I don't know what the utility of the larger system would have been. I saw Avatar in 3D on such a system, and it was of course completely amazing, but that's not for everything.
I had a friend who posited that the Wall-E/Inception scenario would have been a far more interesting prequel backstory for The Matrix than what was actually presented in Reloaded and Revolutions.
Basically, that the remaining "real world" humans were deluding themselves with this grand narrative of a lost war against the machines, when in fact it was humanity's own environmental screwups that blotted out the sky, and most people willingly submitted themselves to a simulated fantasy world that was set right before the collapse of civilization. And if there were multiple "one" persons or matrices or whatever, it was only to keep resetting the simulation and re-playing that golden period. Basically, you would turn the first movie on its head, where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.
+1 for this.
Our devices, networks, graphs(social-and-contacts and graphs-of-graphs(-of-graphs..)), its click, scrolls, likes, visits, (+ fwe millions variables) are input to a deep-learning neural-network whoose end-goal is we-know-it.
A person's participation on internet is more like theme of movie Inception. Although dream state can be equated being on internet :)
Suprisingly good movie, I skipped it in theaters because the ad campaign was just heavy cgi Inception ripoff scenes and no real plot. Glad it came to Netflix, totally worth seeing.
Which is curious, because you'd think there'd be conceptual understanding with regard to "ornamentation," "amusement/diversion/boredom" and "craftsmanship/showmanship."
The amount of time spent fixating on ornamentation should be obvious, just by spending time in a flea market, looking at the trays upon trays of common jewelry people toss tens of dollars at.
Amusement, and diversions should be obvious from watching people engage in repetitive tasks like crossword puzzles, card games and knitting. Fidget spinners fit into this category. Boondoggles have a utility in letting the mind wander. Polishing stone by hand was probably rewarding, when there were no consequences tied to failure.
Craftsmanship as a sign of status is probably the closest secular concept to the token "religion or magical thinking" and goes hand in hand with fashion and ornamentation. There are extremely slim reasons for the geek cred associated with odd piercings or those decorative spin tops based on the one from the movie Inception. Being able to show that you know about something, and or how to do something, displays skill sets without having to brag openly. The subculture of skin piercing and body modification displays a capacity for tolerating pain, awareness of anatomy, and a taming of wound infection in edge cases. Spin tops really represent membership within a nerd subculture that has money to burn, and fetishizes metallurgy trivia juxtaposed with movie trivia, but the craftsmanship of the pieces justifies their price, earning it's owner status, since there remains the authentic barrier to simply making a DIY inception top, contrasted against buying the collector's item.
Rare sneaker subculture probably encapsulates all three of these ideas without being religious at all. But observing sneaker collectors in the wild leaves me with the impression that maybe it really is a religion after all.
These are probably difficult concepts to communicate in academic papers that often must get translated into multiple languages, so the catch all religious, magical shrug will probably persist.
It sounds to me like the problem isn't that you lack motivation, it's that you lack anything to be motivated about.
Motivation tends to materialize in our soul in 2 ways:
1) We start something new, and interesting, that we've never seen or done before, and it excites us for a short period of time (days, weeks, even months) to pursue it. Eventually, the luster and novelty wears off, and we're left feeling a "lack of motivation".
2) NEED. True motivation, the kind that persists, comes from need. When you really need something, you'll find motivation. The problem is, from the sounds of it, you haven't convinced yourself that you truly need anything more than what you have.
Have you seen the movie Inception? Perhaps the biggest underlying narrative in that movie is that an idea can grow, and consume you, even change you. You need to form in your mind somehow, that things aren't good right now, and that you need to change for them to improve.
I could ramble on and give examples, but basically that's what I believe about motivation.
Oh right, I've seen that movie! Not nearly as memorable as Inception, but more technologically analogous.
At the end of the video, the inception sound made me think of the first few seconds of Horsepower, by Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQqnL38d0GY But the song came out in 2011, so they probably were inspired by the movie soundtrack.
Also, the "BRAAAM" makes me think of a warhorn, and it's probably why it's used in movies, BRAAAM means to freak us out, like a warhorn.
I think there is a technological argument that the article doesn't quite get too, as well: the use of subwoofers as an "instrument" to play/score for. Admittedly, theaters have had subwoofers for a long time, but I think its actually the pick up of subwoofers in home theaters and stereo systems that has pushed the trend (in hip-hop/R&B/rap/dubstep) far enough to convince somewhat slow to adapt theatrical composers. Inception seems like the point where Hans Zimmer finally realized he could score for the subwoofers, and in finding a new toy he pushed it to an extreme. It's been interesting to see what film composers (especially, Hans Zimmer) have been doing with subwoofers since Inception, but of course its hard to escape the orbit of that first extreme try and how iconic it was.
This article is fantastic, and really brings together the thoughts I've heard expressed about this in a way that is mostly accessible. I think it's a bit dramatic though. It seems like people in every era look back and say "Why don't we create things with the same care things were created with in the past?" The existence of the question implies that what is being made now is somehow worse than what has been made in the past.
While it's possible this is true, I think it's more likely that this is just survivor bias at work. Nobody remembers the terrible summer blockbusters from years past. This years robots destroying cities were the Westerns and Noir of years past. Everybody remembers Casablanca, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and these titanic movies overshadow the Noir and the Westerns that they were deconstructing. At some point somebody is going to make The Searchers of robots beating everyone up, and another genre will step in to the role of mass-market crap.
I think the actual argument in the case of the "BRAAM"[1] sound is that Inception is a genre defining movie, on the level of Jaws or Il Brutti. It's become a shorthand for Earth-shattering collisions, in the same way Sergio Leone's soundtracks are synonymous with the west, and the Jaws theme is synonymous with being stalked. You already hear people imitating it to give additional context to stories.
[1] Sidenote, because it bothers me: The sound seems much closer to "BWAAAAA" than "BRAAAAM". This is not important, but it bothers me.
Yeah I was going to add that I get sad after a good book or tv show or film or video games but reading the article it seems to talk about a much more debilitating effects related to the increased immersion from VR. I think it warrants some closer study specifically because it reminds me of that scene from Inception, where people prefer their VR life over their own and end up like junkies in an opium den.
If you look at how good computer graphics have gotten, it's no a far stretch to see where it will be in 20 years, 40 years. Suddenly, the are-we-in-a-simulation philosophical debate comes to mind.
Probably coupled with some pills to "make you feel more immersed", like those drugs in the Inception movie.
Netflix' CEO seems to already be thinking about this:
http://www.ibtimes.com/simulation-hypothesis-matrix-possible-hallucinogenic-pills-entertainment-could-define-2438750
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
Stargate. District 9. Inception. Equilibrium. Mad Max: Fury Road. Moon. Edge of Tomorrow.
Edit: The Man From Earth if you can dig independent cinema.
Just checking a few random movies.
Movies I checked that have this disclaimer:
- Despicable Me 2
- Django Unchained
- Inception
- Jurassic World
- James Bond: Spectre
- Avatar (extended cut)
- Spaceballs
Movies I checked that don't have this disclaimer:
- Tangled
It's usually among the very last lines of the end credits, among the statements about dedication to the environment, distance from the tobacco industry, lack of animal abuse etc. If you're not watching the end credits you will never notice it.
>> This news will come as a welcome relief to anyone who hates having to watch concerts through a sea of smartphone screens
Alright. Tangent before getting on point. I'm someone who hasn't been to a movie theatre in the past 6 years except for Avatar and Inception in 2009/2010. My blood boils every single time I see a cell phone pulled out to check the time, reply to emails or text messages, or "quietly" answer a call "I'm at a movie, I can't talk now, I'll call you later... 2 more minutes of talking". I just can't handle it. I'm not a very angry person, and I've never even been in a fistfight, but I truly have a hard time resisting shouting at these people, or grabbing their phone out of their hands and smashing it.
I will only go to see the best of the best in theatre now; the films that must absolutely be seen on a large IMAX screen with booming bass audio. I cannot handle the situation of cell phones shining in my face in a dark theatre. I fully advocate Faraday cages inside theatre rooms. Make it so that signal works just outside the doors of the theatre, but not within it. Gunmen, fires, and "family emergencies" do not warrant cell phone usage in a theatre. They didn't exist 30 years ago; if you can't go 2 hours without your phone, don't go the theatre.
But fuck this. I've been an iPhone user since the 3G (3G, 4, then 6). If this patent ever becomes integrated, I will give up my ecosystem with my MacBook and iPhone and switch. No way in hell do I accept having my camera locked out in whatever location anybody decides to block it. What a way for police states to deny the recording of government employees breaking the law. I expect I'd think differently were I a concert-goer (clearly I would despise people pulling out their bright phones in a dark concert hall). But this... this is going too far.
Thankfully this patent is already 5-7 years old without being used. Let's hope this is one of those patents that sits around as a piece of intellectual property without ever being used. The potential for abuse is too high.
I don't watch anything specific in response to being "stuck", but a lot of times when I'm coding and want something in the background for stimulation and to occupy idle moments, I'll put a movie on with the sound turned down real low. I like to use something I know so well that I can practically recite the dialogue, so I am not going to actually get interested in what's going on, since I already know it so well. So usually, that turns out to be The Matrix. Occasionally it's The Social Network, Tron:Legacy, Hackers, or Inception. Something about having those going seems to help inspire me on some level.
> in defense of biological inception
the movie?
I quite often listen to loud film scores - think Inception/Hans Zimmer. Google Play Music has a good radio station for it and I imagine the others do too!
That particular bootstrap theme has enough flair that it gets annoying to see it repeatedly. There is more to bootstrap than just that single theme, but it has become too popular.
Imagine if there was a video editing template that cut any movie to 60 seconds, with transitions every 10 seconds, set to the music from Inception: it might look cool the first time, but you'll get sick of the template quickly because it has very specific features that stand out.
No.
There's actually a browser extension called Hola that allows you switch your Netflix country to watch from other libraries. And you can lookup which country has your movie at https://flixsearch.io/ (formerly netflixaroundtheworld.com)
For example, Inception is not available in the US but is in many countries.
The Animatrix seems like a real example of something along those lines. A DVD of 6 short episodes that expanded on the Matrix story universe. They were done by different directors/writers/makers, like authorised fanfic or something. In my opinion it was a great addition, better than the full-blown sequels, and certainly not a distasteful cash-grab.
I think this could totally work for something like Inception too. The film has a backstory suggests at a wider context beyond what's shown in the scenes. Most stories do. That's why fanfiction exists.
I hope not either. But this is a popular model in videogames, and it somehow both pissess off players and earns the studios tons of money.
You obviously can't apply it to every movie, but you could appply it to quite a few. For instance, there's little point in extra content for Inception, because the movie world is defined by the start and the end of that very movie, and as you said, it has to make sense in its basic version. But consider things with already established franchises. I Disney would start publishing DLC sub-stories to the Force Awakens, I'm betting that every hardcore Star Wars fan would feel obliged to see them. The world portrayed in the movie is much bigger than the movie itself, and is has communities formed around it. To participate in the fandom, you need to be up to date with the canon. I'm pretty sure it could work with Marvel Cinematic Universe as well.
Then there are movies for which such a move would be a gamble. LotR and Hunger Games are franchises too, but I don't think they're strong enough to support DLC money-grab.
Anyway, enough suggesting ideas to them :). I absolutely hate DLCs. I just couldn't resist discussing the concept in the abstract.
VR is not comparable to 3D TV because it's not TV. It's fundamentally an interactive medium over which the user has complete narrative control, yet one that doesn't feel like you're interacting with something, so much as wearing a piece of clothing. 3D TV is burdensome for very little benefit. VR is freeing for significantly greater benefit.
If you haven't tried it, you don't understand the difference between head tracking and moving a mouse around in an FPS game. They are not just different ways to move a pointer around. They are fundamentally different. They are so fundamentally different that it's actually difficult to combine the two concepts.
VR is not comparable to the Wii or the Xbox 360 with the Kinect (which were massively successful products, so I don't know what the point of comparing them is), because there is zero disconnect between motion and reaction. You aren't looking at a mirror version of yourself moving around. You're just moving around.
If you haven't tried it, you don't understand the difference between waving your hand around at the Kinect, trying to line up hits with no depth perception, and using VR with even a relatively low-res positional tracker like the Leap Motion.
If you haven't tried it, you just don't know what you're talking about. You have nothing in your life from which to draw a conclusion. That includes anyone talking about the systems from the 1990s. I can, today, in a weekend, create a full VR experience that would blow Dactyl Nightmare out of the water, and give it to you for a handful of dollars. The order of magnitude difference in realism and price is staggering. It's the between a real car and one of those RC cars that only turns when you put it in reverse, and then only in one direction. Except the real car is the one that costs $50, and the RC car was $20k.
VR is going to fulfill the promise of teleconferencing. If VR was a "flop" in the 90s, then teleconferencing definitely was, too. Talking to people face-to-face in VR is night-and-day better than using Skype or FaceTime. There is barely any comparison to be made. You forget you're using technology when having a f2f with a person in VR. And this isn't a prediction. This is available today.
The product development lifecycle is going to speed up, as VR is going to give us a new, virtualized testing cycle that isn't bottle-necked by physical prototypes just to check look-and-feel.
Architects are going to make better pitches. Universities and hospitals are going to sell more buildings and research wings to big-ticket donors. Other universities will do away with their physical presence entirely. Doctors will be able to share life-saving techniques and train other doctors across the world in the fine-motor skill to perform it. Museums are going to be able to record exhibits in full detail, into perpetuity, and provide patrons unprecedented access to artifacts that would otherwise be too sensitive to put on display in public, relatively uncontrolled environments. Psychiatrists are going to be able to treat more patients. Data scientists are going to be able to recall and organize more information.
All of these things are doable on a smartphone in a cardboard box, say nothing about the rapidly developing market of purpose-built devices. Have you not been paying attention? Technological advancement has only been accelerating. It's not going to be "many years" before these devices are any good. It's going to be two. It's going to be less time than it took the iPhone to get any good. Remember that original iPhone? That no-app-store-having, no-3G-having, no-GPS-having, no-speech-recognition-having iPhone? That glorified iPod with a relatively crappy phone crammed in it?
To quote Tom Hardy's character Eames, speaking to Joseph Gordon Levitt's character Arthur in the Christopher Nolan film INCEPTION: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."
So is the fact that the movie San Andreas came out before this potentially happens considered Inception?
Awesome movie. Christopher Nolan is such a gem of a director. Inception is another beUty. Had a deep impact.
Many people would benefit from role-playing both sides of con/deception games in childhood, as emotional existence proofs of active threats which cannot be discerned visually. The film Inception shows the use of psychological firewalls, termed "militarized subconscious" in the film.
> But do we really think that inadequate incentive to create new drugs or new movies is a major problem right now?
I found this line in Krugman's text surprising, because there actually are a lot of questions about incentives in both drug and entertainment markets.
In drugs, pharma companies are focusing on high-margin "lifestyle enhancing" drug categories like erectile dysfunction, blood pressure management, and various mood and mental management. Basically, the drugs that rich healthy people will pay a lot of money for. Pharma companies are not focusing on low-margin but highly useful categories like antibiotics, pests, and vaccines. Basically, the problems that affect poor people in 2nd and 3rd world countries.
In entertainment, companies are focusing on iterating well-known and well-used franchises for which they know they can drive immediate demand with marketing. Highly original hits like Inception are not nearly as common as they were in say, the 1970s or 1980s. Instead we get Furious 7 and a two remakes of 21 Jump Street.
Don't get me wrong, the drug and entertainment industries are making a lot of money. But the issue is how they are making it. Drug companies stick to first world problems because first world countries protect their IP, so that is where they'll get a return. Entertainment companies stick to movies that will pack the theater on opening weekend because the movie will be heavily pirated within a few days after that.
I'm not crying for the poor drug or movie executives. I'm saying that the rest of us have to live with the consequences of how we incentivize companies to do business.
edit: word fixes
Beautiful piece -- whether manic or not, after one hell of a stressful day, coming home to find your dog waiting for you really brings you back to reality.
Also, while reading this anyone else here reminded of the totems (the spinning top, weighted dice, etc.) from the movie Inception? Small objects that remind you what's real and what's only a dream.
Many of the sci-fi action films that have persisted are about ideas, and this elevates them far about the sort of films that pass for most science fiction these days. Just like in twenty years people will watch Inception and Pan's Labyrinth and everything Michael Bay has done will be wiped clean from memory.
He's really bad at sci fi.
Inception doesn't make any sense (sense in terms of being sci fi, it's good entertainment).
Nor do the climactic action scenes in the Batman movies: a mega powerful microwave device that only affects the water inside of far away pipes and a portable, self sustaining fusion reactor that blows up when its battery dies.
The Joker's speed with setting up explosives is also a little bit ridiculous, but that's less of an offense against possibility than the above.
I would love to see an Inception style movie script inspired by temporal integration.
It's not real science because what I saw was a person going into blackhole and still being alive. This movie is not even 30% of what Inception was.
Interstellar is one of the best movies ever made. If you like scify just see it. It's up there with The Matrix, Primer, and Inception.
Related movies seem to be based on keyword search primarily, unconstrained by genre. But the keywords seem like sketchy content. Inception's keywords are "loss of lover dream sleep subconsciousness defense mechanism redemption," such that the top related movies are "The Science of Sleep" and "Sex and Lucia." Hmm... That doesn't seem quite right to me.
Noticed "Inception" was much easier to stream than "200 Motels", and the laserdisc version didn't even work. How in the hell does this thing work? It's pretty awesome, once the movie actually downloads. :)
Seems like there's some caching going on. Good idea.
I think it's because it's easy. Dystopia bring automatic conflict which is easy/lazy to dramatize.
Still all isn't bad, it isn't Star Trek, but there are non-dystopic popular fictions:
- Her
- Stargate SG-1 and spinouts
- Fringe
- Warehouse 13
- Eureka
- Sanctuary
- The new crop of super hero shows and movies, Arrow, SHIELD, The Flash
- Heroes
- The short lived new V series
- Dr. Who
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Inception
- Gravity
and more....
in Literature there's a huge bounty of great non-dystopic stuff too.
- The Golden Oecumene
- The Culture series
- The Night's Dawn Trilogy
- The Gap series
You just have to know where to look.
It's funny that the word inception doesn't really mean what it does in the -ception meme. "The time at which something begins" is the dictionary definition. In the movie this refers to planting an idea in someone through dreams, NOT the idea of nesting things within other things.
At this point though I've heard it used in the other way that it may as well be an alternate definition.
The -ception suffix is typically used for nested abstraction; for example running a virtual machine within a virtual machine could be referred to as VMception. This is in reference to the 2010 movie Inception, a major device of which is the use of nested dreams, or /a dream(?: within a dream)*/.
"Also the whole thing about not being able to change scenario seems off, I do remember literally saying, you know what dream would be better? The other one. And then switching to that dream."
I've done that too. But dreams that are just random and dreams that are based on real experiences and "issues" you may have are different, in my personal experience. You may transform into Iron Man and just go ballistic, but in my personal experience, what starts out fun and empowering will likely break down; Iron Man's weapons stop working quite as well, then they just plain stop working, then despite the fact he can fly away it turns out he's always also flying right back to the problem... dreams are not a perfectly-accurate 3D VR simulation of the world, they are heavily influenced by your internal mental and emotional state, deeply symbolic (and I don't mean in the "this tree is your mother" way, I mean, you are not truly visually processing data, you are not navigating in a true 3D space, you are navigating through the highly-processed symbolic representation of the space that is the end result of all your visual processing, which is a very different space than the true 3D world, despite its correspondences) and in fact often quite lacking in true spatial structure, and if you're having problems, you won't be able to escape them by flying away in a dream anymore than you can solve your issues by just "stopping thinking about them"... for indeed, they are the exact same thing, so if the latter sounds foolish, so should the former.
I think a lot of people, lacking control of their dreams, end up reversing cause and effect. With real issues and not just "night terrors" (random nightmares), you're having a bad dream because you have mental or emotional issues... you don't have mental/emotional issues because you have bad dreams. It's a fun metaphor in movies like Inception, but it's not how it actually works... as usual, the reality is a great deal more prosaic, and less full of easy answers.
hey, let the data speak for itself! ;)
seriously, i do take IMDB ratings into account, but i consider them unreliable at best. Inception, when it came out, was the best movie of all time for a while, according to IMDB users. enough said.
I feel for this guy - people can't understand that what he wants is "Life his way" and not to be a martyr to society burning his happiness to solve up equations. The greater good and so forth.
But there is a fundamental angle that I find odd about people's perception of intelligence. People expect intelligence to be always found alongside ambition.
When I watched "Limitless", it did hit me in an odd way. If I suddenly could out-think 99% of humanity, I wouldn't be running for president or becoming a stock trader profiting off the market. Actually, I don't know because I'm not that intelligent - but is that kind of ambition pasted over by Hollywood on top of intelligence?
In comparison, everything from Thor, Dark Knight, Iron Man and even the new Wall Street movie was about clean power - hell, even Inception has got the guy with the windmills. That I felt like was an ambition that could occur with genius (i.e "First thing you do, is find the biggest problem on your planet and beat it").
But government official or company executive?
That feels odd.
I agree, and I don't usually post mean things under a repost.
But this article had sense when inception was still in theater and all the hype was about the movie. It's not something really important, or amazing, or... years after it now became just another trivia about a movie. But I'm glad some people can hear about it for the first time anyway.
Did anyone else find Inception to be basically straightforward (though interesting and enjoyable) with an insignificant binary question at the end?
There certainly may be more depth than I'm seeing, but there wasn't anything that made me need to wonder why anything happened the way it happened. As mentioned in the thread already, Momento's the one that isn't straightforward.
I'm not intentionally trolling---I suppose I probably am missing something. There just wasn't anything obviously confusing on the movie's surface for me.
"Memento was literally a mystery film"
On one level, yes. But Memento is a philosophical inquiry as much as it's a literal mystery.
"his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study"
I think the same point is generally true about Memento.
[Massive spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen Memento and might be curious]
The "big reveal" in Memento isn't so much the unraveling of the mystery. It's that the mystery itself is a red herring. Leonard chooses his own reality, regardless of whether or not it's the factual truth, and regardless of whether or not he's caught in an infinite loop of his own creation. The same can be said of Cobb's choice at the end of Inception, running out to embrace his kids (and this particular version of reality) without checking on the spinning top. At the conclusion of both films, the protagonists basically surrender to subjectivity. They realize, consciously or not, that it's the only rational choice they have. They can never know the real truth, so they construct or embrace the truth that suits their needs.
This is what I meant when I said that both films are explorations of the same theme. That theme is basically our agency and choice in the subjectivity of our reality. It's about how we create the worlds we inhabit, literally (in the case of Cobb's "architecture" of dreams) or figuratively (in the case of Cobb's and Leonard's choices w/r/t reality).
All those who think Inception should be considered as just another cool action flick must watch this video.
Memento was literally a mystery film, and unless you kind of know which context clues to look for you're not really going to figure out what's going on until the end. Inception had a lot of mystery to it in terms of what's real and what's not, but in the end the mysterious portion of it is not really the point of the movie. We're not really presented with the question of what's real as the core mystery to be solved. The fact that Nolan doesn't actually reveal anything at the end aside from the context clues mentioned in the video and in the article posted at the top of the comments and his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study of that man rather than an overarching sci-fi type world. The journey is not really to decide whether or not Cobb is living in the dream world but more so whether he is at peace either way.
I do agree with your general assertion that Momento is a more coherent film and I think that is largely due to the scope and scale of those respective films' budgets.
I think I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more if I had gone into it expecting a cool action movie with neat ideas, rather than something cerebral. If I'm expecting an action movie, I'm willing to forgive holes and hand-waving in the plot and premise because, hey, it's just an action movie, and look at all the cool slow motion exploding crap.
But if I'm expecting cerebral sci-fi, I have high standards for everything being tight and thought out. With those expectations in mind, I found Inception pretty dumb. It makes me wish I'd seen it without hearing all the hype first.
But at least it was better than Looper.
Inception was a pretty good movie but people treating it like it's some deep, super-complicated work of genius makes me worry about them.
That's what pretty much everyone I talked with thought… I don't think I'll ever understand why so many people think Inception is some kind of convoluted, brainy and really complicated movie when it's a cool action film with nice ideas but rather straight forward.
Memento is really the best lens through which to view Inception. The former was the more metaphysically mind-fucky, intellectually and emotionally jarring experience. The latter is the more visually spectacular, but shallower variation on a similar theme.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the idea of Inception a great deal. Part of me really wants to love the movie. But it's hard for me to love it when I've seen Memento do the same thing so much more deftly, with such a smaller budget, given a lot more constraints. Memento is Nolan the filmmaker, and Inception is Nolan the movie director. I enjoy both, and I'm not saying Inception is without its originalities or its merits. But I can't call it a masterpiece; it's disjointed and incoherent in a way that smacks of excess.
I dig your analogy, but I am not sure it's 100% warranted in this case, given that Nolan made both movies. It would be one thing if the Wachowskis both wrote Neuromancer and made The Matrix. But they didn't. They made The Matrix as an action movie that just happened to have some metaphysical underpinnings. They didn't make a philosophical piece that happened to have great action sequences. The movie is pretty clear about where it stands on that spectrum, and most fans who are honest with themselves about why they like the movie will admit they like it for the fight scenes. (As a mental test, replace the computer-simulation plot device with any similar construct: dreams, alternate dimensions, etc. -- and everything else about the movie holds up just fine.)
With Inception, I can't tell where Nolan stands. Is it a thought piece with cool special effects, or a special-effects piece with deep thoughts? As much as we might rush to categorize it as the former, I'm not so sure. Trying to be the latter gets in the way of the former. Nolan tries to have his cake and eat it, too, and he's not entirely successful at either. What results is a beautiful, haunting, provocative, but flawed movie.
Great insight! I think my main gripe with the movie is that it kind of gets caught up in its own net of contrived mechanics -- for example, here are some of them:
http://movieplotholes.com/inception.html
I've tended towards criticism from the opposite direction (which can also apply to The Matrix). Its philosophical underpinnings have been done by other works of fiction to greater depth, but those stories tend to be impenetrable for most people, much more so than either Inception or The Matrix were. See Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, for example. Or even Nolan's own Memento.
Putting it in a more easily-digestible form is a useful thing to do, which tends to blunt this line of criticism. There are some philosophy professors who really appreciate these movies, because they provided nice reference points that their students already know about, making it much easier to teach certain concepts.
The idea of Cobb's wedding ring as his totem has been discussed publicly as early as July 2010 [1], the month of the film's release.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Inception/comments/cvk2i/is_cobbs_ring_his_actual_totem/
And if they end up serving no practical use they end up discarded and ignored by scientists and engineers (if maybe not pure mathematicians). The author's point is that there is no such selective pressure on lit crit.
Litcrit theory is actually a pretty big commercial success. Derrida et al. sell quite well for academic books, and a Sexy Postmodernism Sex Theory Made Accessible to Undergraduates type course is a reliably decent draw for English departments, who need the enrollment.
Furthermore, if you consume entertainment products with shifting, non-linear narrative like The Simpsons, Coen Brothers movies, or Inception, you're exerting selective pressure in favor of postmodernism.
Also it is during such episodes, there are high chances that you will also experience what I call as 'recursive wakeups', several levels (mostly 1 or 2 levels deep) of indirection out of which you are unrolling to wake up like in the movie 'Inception'. I would feel very certain that I am awake, and have come out of my sleep paralysis by doing what ever tricks others have also pointed out (rolling sideways, wiggling toes, sitting up on bed etc), only to suddenly realize that the 'presence' is still there and panicking and eventually realizing I am still not fully awake ! Absolute terror until then :)
In fact, I would not be surprised if the writers who came up with the concept of 'Inception' and 'The adjustment Bureau' movies are probably themselves sufferers of these conditions (lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis) or at the least have heard accounts/experiences from some one in their circle (family, friends) and did further research.
>"I felt like someone was standing in the room with me and was (irrationally) terrified."
This has happened to me couple of times as well.
Upon reflection I have noticed uncanny similarities to the below movies..
Lucid Dreams == Inception (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/)
Sleep Paralysis == The adjustment Bureau (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385826/)
I've only had sleep paralysis a couple times and I agree that it is AWFUL. I felt like someone was standing in the room with me and was (irrationally) terrified.
I lucid dream far more often, probably once a week. I agree that it's nowhere near as frightening but I find it to be unpleasant as well. It's not very fun to stay dreaming when I know I'm awake.
It's funny but the movie Inception really helped me with my lucid dreams. Falling (in my dreams) will wake me up. I double-check that I'm actually dreaming by flying first (aw yeah, I can fly in my dreams - kind of like swimming in the air). So I'll often wake up by flying high into the sky and then falling to the ground.
Big fan of movie and game soundtracks for coding. Regular rotation at the moment consists of Man of Steel, Batman Trilogy, Inception, Mass Effect 3, Skylander Giants and a lot of classical music esp the planets or anything else from civ 4!
Final shout out would be music that Adam Curtis has used in his documentaries such as Power of Nightmares. He uses lots of good modern instrumental pieces. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/4202789.stm is a starting point.
Do you measure the quality of the film by the number of good jokes? I don't consider TDK to be a great movie (and Inception was not masterpiece either), but it's weird to expect them to have jokes.
I saw The Dark Knight and I would not have lost anything if I didn't. What's so good about it? Yes it has one or two nice jokes; the whole Joker character is nice; but not enough to agonize thru a 3 hour movie.
(Inception was even more boring, they have one good joke and no Joker)
While Avatar, for example, is a movie that does deliver something you would not have if you didn't watch it.
Minor detail someone might not know: a part of the Inception soundtrack (which is also great ambient) was made with that technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVkQ0C4qDvM
Those who have seen the movie and its plot device will know why this is a brilliant idea on so many levels.
Well, some of them are not actually bloat for most people (because some of them like Gmail are actually useful). But nobody I know uses G+ or the Movies app (this one requires you to pay, which is a lot like the typical Norton "bloat").
For Nexus devices, it's not as bad as the crapware that comes with a typical phone. You can still remove/disable apps. I had an old Samsung Galaxy phone where you couldn't even remove some of the garbage that came with the phone (some app about the Inception movie, Facebook, etc.)
> Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie.
What did you find logically inconsistent, out of curiosity?
I liked Inception, but it's nowhere near my top 10. It's more interesting to me if you ignore the actual content and look at it purely in terms of story formation: the deliberateness with which Nolan loops well... everything, from themes to sounds to places and so on is interesting to me.
It's certainly not the mindfuck that people keep claiming it is. I'm actually a little bothered by how many people have trouble wrapping their heads around it... almost as much as I'm bothered by how much people prefer the first Matrix to the latter two.
That makes sense. I found the page interesting, but noticed that the 'Inception' counts were lower than expected. There was at least one or two entire front page threads dedicated to visualizations detailing the movie's dream levels.
Nice work!
Opinions on some of the movies from the list I've seen:
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing that special or interesting. Overrated.
Fight Club – One of my favourite movies, perhaps in my top 10. Really loved it.
The Game – Another great movie from David Fincher, I love the mysterious atmosphere of his movies.
The Man From Earth. – Huge disappointment, I never understood why people like this movie. It's basically one guy telling a predictable and boring story. One of the most overrated movies ever. (I mean overrated in subjective sense obviously.)
Traffic – One of the best movies about drugs and organized crime.
Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie. The Cell is another movie where people enter someone else's dreams and even though it has only 6.2 on IMDB, I think I enjoyed it more. The depictions of the dreams were definitely more creative and looked more dreamy.
Of the top of my head I would recommend these:
* Something from David Lynch – Lost Highway, Blue Velvet or Mullholland Drive.
* Requiem for Dream
* Evil (2003)
* Sin City
* Crank – not very known, but wow, this is the best action movie ever.
* Elite squad – another great action movie, very realistic, borderline documentary.
"Briefly, the categorical imperative states: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Whoa! That certainly describes the extreme nature of tons of the protagonists/antagonists of these various films. From Bane and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises to everyone in Inception, the idea of finding a universal truth and then applying it (sometimes forcefully) onto everyone seems to be exactly what’s at the core of all these movies."
Philosophy grad here. Absolutely none of these characters are exemplary of Kantian moral philosophy. That goes for about 99% of blockbuster heroes.
The key thing to understand is that 'universal' is a technical term in Kantian philosophy. Kant doesn't use this term to designate a relationship like that between a genus and its species, a class and its instances, or a set and its members. 'Universal' in Kant is synonymous with 'necessary', as in, "all stones necessarily fall back down to the ground if I throw them in the air." So what the categorical imperative really says is, "Live your life as if it were a force of necessity", or a more humanist formulation, "Live your life as if you were fulfilling your duty." If that sounds weird, realize that Kant doesn't think altruism qualifies as a foundation for morality because it's still based on pleasure, which for him brings us right back to egoism.
In terms of blockbusters, Watchmen's Rorschach or The Dark Knight's Joker are better approximations.
This is like inception misrepresentation. An article about Wozniak condemning the accuracy of a movie, which is itself very misleading.
I was at the talk, and I can say first hand that the tone of the talk never came anywhere near the way this editorialized paragraph would suggest:
> "Totally wrong. Personalities and ... the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs ... . His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people... build the computer I'd given away ... . [H]e always saw a way to make a quick buck off my designs (this was the 5th time). The lofty talk came much further down the line."
The theme was closer to how he and Jobs were a great team because he would come up with designs and Jobs always had a way to make them money from it even saying explicitly, "...and we'd always split the profit."
I'd be curious what other myths you spotted, because the reference to Ariadne is certainly an allusion to the Greek myth you mention. Just as her namesake there guided Theseus from the labyrinth, Ariadne's role in Inception is guiding Cobb out of the maze that is the mortal world. This why we get casual dialogue about characters "getting lost" in limbo and "spending a lifetime" down there. According to the logic of the film, life is a dream and all dreams are mazes.
More neat things about Ariadne's character: she is a gift from his father ("ask and ye shall receive") and one of the first things she does is the very symbolic act of shattering a pair of mirrors which trap Cobb in another maze of sorts. Also, considering her thematic purpose, it is interesting to note that she is the single character who accompanies Cobb to the gates of immigration, wearing a sweater that appears to be made of red yarn.
On the Christian front, I was raised as a soft Anglican so I hope I know enough not to be wildly wrong. That said, the first thing that clicked for me watching the film was the secular symbolism. When Nolan pointed his camera at the ocean while the narrator intoned about "the shores of our subconscious" it jolted me to attention as water is a common symbol for the subconscious in a great deal of English literature and film, and Nolan uses it in this very conventional way throughout Inception. The Christian references are omnipresent but subtle ("leap of faith", "goddamn beach", etc.) and the sandcastle bit didn't fall into place until much later, when I caught James' line of dialogue thanks to watching the film in a theater with subtitles, and then made the connection to the collapsing buildings of limbo and the sandcastles after the fact.
I love Inception (a genuine masterpiece), but wish people paid less attention to the details of the plot and more attention to the literary subtext! Because the plot is very straightforward, while understanding why the film is structured the way it is (and why Nolan does smaller things like naming the children as they are), is a genuine revelation.
Looper proved that you could successfully harvest the story/character beats, and cool moments from other films and shows without creating any of your own.
It's a bad sign when all of the "original" films in hollywood are just mediocre remakes of other sci-fi and anime. Same goes for Inception.
I tried to watch a movie rented from Amazon over Roku last night (not Prime) and it was unwatchable. It would get stuck on some scene for seconds to minutes, occasionally letting loose a bit of audio.
The movie was Inception. Maybe there's some irony in there.
Those are fair points. I'm thinking those examples are from the Batman films, which I like in a way, but which are my least favourite Nolan films, although I think they are the most well known. I was more referring to films such as Memento and Inception. But then again, I still might have missed something or other.
>I am not a Nolan fan
I say this in all seriousness: how? I can't imagine the last 12 years of film without Memento, Inception, and the Batman trilogy.
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
HN submission linking to Slashdot submission of a story that has already been discussed on HN ages ago.
What was the name of that movie again?
Oh yeah, Inception.
The footage from the video reminds me of the empty city in the movie Inception. It's pretty eerie seeing so much housing with no life.
Nolan's made some of the most inventive movies of the past decade. Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception were pinnacles of the form.
I'm not saying he'd be ideal to direct Snow Crash, but your criticisms of his work are unfounded.
I think Inception, Memento and The Dark Night show that Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker who is taken seriously.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/awards
Black hole version of inception! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
Actually, this is much to complicated for my feeble mind. I am sticking with the "Parallel Universe Box" from the Futurama series (http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Parallel_Universe_Box). It makes my head hurt less.
Inception wasn't that big a risk. Nolan had proved he could do ideas (Memento), he'd proved he could do big budget (two Batman films) and he was willing to stick major stars in it (including arguably the biggest star on the planet). They then backed that up with a $100m advertising budget.
In many ways it was an art house sci-fi film but in many others it did everything by the book for a big budget movie (proven track record, stars, special effects and action then hype it to the hilt).
You're right that the pattern is towards the more conservative but I'm not sure that Inception was a massively out there move.
Requiem for a Dream is a completely different beast and shows the other way you can do it even now. That was a cheap film - £5m or so. Adjust for inflation and you get maybe double that, which is still less than 5% of the budget of the Avengers.
That sort of film can be funded by smaller production companies, by larger studios (often as vanity / credibility projects - Schindler's List was seen that way when it was signed off though I doubt the studio will admit that now) and in a host of other ways. I can certainly see large studios funding things like that almost as part of an incubator model - giving new directors who seem promising a stage to show what they can do before they let them loose on something larger.
Inception was hardly a 'risky' movie, plenty of explosions, cool visuals, and a simple but slightly ambiguous plot. Think of the way 'total recall' ends, is this just the vacation he had paid for? If you think about it they are fairly similar movies, and fairly well liked. If anything, I think suggests that a good movie can also have mass appeal.
WALL-E lacks dialog for 1/2 the movie, but because Pixar could test it out ahead of time they knew it was worth making vary early in the process. Pixar's string of hits has a lot to do with constant refinement and feedback. Saying Hollywood needs to put out more Toy Story 3's is not a terrible thing when their done well. There is something to be said for the old script + 6 weeks of frantic shooting + cutting room floor style of movies, but it's a style that showed up when film was expensive and budgets where tight.
> So, to minimize losses caused by piracy, make your movie not suck.
Yes, but it doesn't work exactly like that. s/not suck/profitable.
This just means that instead of taking chances on a film which is a big risk (think Inception), we will simply see more and more super hero movies and more and more sequels. There is much less of a margin of error when people are downloading things.
I think there's little or no room for a "Requiem for a Dream" type of film in the coming years. Maybe kickstarter will have to be the avenue to make movies like that.
Every subset of piracy is by definition piracy. But if you mean what kinds of things I think shouldn't count as piracy even though they are illegal in the U.S., here are some examples:
1. Posting a link to a web page that contains a link to a torrent that contains directions for downloading a song that was copied without permission.
2. Breaking the DRM on an e-book, song, or video stream so that I can enjoy it on another device that I own. I bought the song, goddammit. I should be able to listen to it whenever and wherever I want.
3. Copying a book, song, film, or game whose original author has been dead for 20 years, provided that no publisher, record company, or film distributor has obtained from the author the right to print or distribute the work commercially. In other words, the work is out of print.
4. Copying a work whose copyright owner appears to have no intention to license his work in your country anytime soon. This is less of a concern in the U.S., but a huge concern in the rest of the world. You can't lose any profit here if you have no intention to make a profit here, can you?
5. Creating a derivative work (e.g. YouTube remix) that cannot reasonably be expected to eliminate a person's desire to purchase the original work. Nobody who sees a YouTube remix of 90 seconds of excerpts from Inception and thinks it's cool will then think, "Hey, that's enough Inception for me. No need to go see the actual movie."
The whole point of copyright is to encourage creative endeavors by allowing creators to have a monopoly over the distribution of their works for a limited time. Therefore, any behavior that does not hurt the creator's actual (not hypothetical) profits should be permitted by default. So if the causal link between my action and loss of profit is really sketchy (#1, #5), or if I have already paid the creator (#2), or if the creator clearly cannot expect to derive any monetary benefits from my consumption of his work (#3, #4), the whole rationale for copyright protection falls apart.
Just the other day, I read somewhere that Shakespeare wrote King Lear (one of his best works) about a decade after seeing, and even possibly acting in, a similar play staged by a group that would later become his major competition. Some of Shakespeare's other plays were also based on stories that were published only a few years previously. Any law that would have made it illegal for Shakespeare to adapt these works into his masterpieces, I think, has absolutely no reason to exist at any time or place.
I think that's a really good comparison, because it really is a magic trick, isn't it? I think most good heist films are in the sense that the pleasure is in the misdirection: what makes them satisfying to watch is being "in on the game" -- seeing all of the clues arranged in plain sight and watching how the director pulls it off.
So Inception might not be for everyone since it's heavy on narrative and light on character development (we don't see why Cobb changes, he just does), but there's all of this wonderfully meta sleight-of-hand just below the surface as Nolan tells us how he is making the film. Even beyond the symbolism, the very rules he outlines for how to create dreams apply equally well to the film itself (make the plot a paradoxical maze, get the audience lost in it while you plant ideas in their heads, and make the message stick by forming it around a core message of positive emotional catharsis). And yet we are still surprised, or I was at least!
Anyway, hopefully if you see it again you'll like it better next time. I personally think it's hands-down one of the best films in the last decade, and it's a real pity it got shunted off at the Oscars when it should have swept the field.
All of Inception is a dream except the final scene. It's a movie about a father (Michael Caine) trying to rescue his son.
I was just talking with a friend about favorite Nolan movies. I can't decide between The Prestige, Inception, and maybe Dark Knight. Sounds like as good an excuse for a movie marathon as I've heard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Ending - Nolan himself noted that "I choose to believe that Cobb gets back to his kids, because I have young kids. People who have kids definitely read it differently than those who don't". Good enough for me.
You're still right he meant to leave it up to the viewer, but it completely destroys the rest of the movie if everything is a dream. People want to play games with the rules the movie presented and hypothesize about the whether Mal is in the "level above"... but everything we think we know about the rules comes from that level. We learn about the multi-layer inception, the wife, the concept of limbo, everything in the movie, on that level. If it's all a dream, then there's no target to the obsession in the first place, no children, no wife, nothing.
Incidentally, note I'm sort of making a metapoint... if Nolan came out and said "Yes, it was all a dream" I would accept it. But it would still dramatically destroy the movie.
I'm also sort of hostile to the "all just a dream" idea, whereever it appears in fiction, because it's redundant. It's already just a dream, a movie, a book, a TV show, whatever. It's already not real. Saying that in the context of the not-real work of fiction the entire story was also not-real is silly. (Note the word "entire".) It started at the maximum level of not-realness from the very first word or frame. And it's a short trip from there to the Bergman/Braga incoherent style of ass-pull storytelling. (Or Tennant-era Doctor Who.)
It wasn't so much that. The issue was that Bioware promised something completely different than what was delivered. It was like being given a trailer for Inception, then finding out the movie you were actually seeing was Toy Story. It's still a great movie, but it wasn't what I paid to see. The game itself is a fantastic game - I'd give it a 9/10. But buying one product and being given another is just shady business.
IMHO the whole film IS an inception: it's planting the "wait what if MY LIFE is all a dream" idea in the viewer's mind.
The cut away from the totem was simply the film's final inception: a seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.
You're not alone, as others have pointed out, but I'll add my name to the list. I came out of Inception with my fiance and we almost simultaneously said, in different words of course, "That seemed a fairly straight forward twist on a heist movie, to me." And every viewing after I've felt the same way. It's a very cool heist movie with very cool effects and a clever plot.
It does lend itself well to interpretation and general musing, but sometimes I feel people are reaching too far for allegory and symbolism. It's good to find those things, and to take art and run with it, to let it seed ideas and interpretation, but some are a little over zealous.
No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated for many people, but probably not if you're a computer programmer in which case you literally have years of formal education in the structures that this plot is built on, and even a formal vocabulary to describe it with. (e.g. "Inception is a movie that keeps pushing other movies onto the stack.")
You're suffering the mathematician's disease, ably satirized by Feynman in that quote I can't stop paraphrasing: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because once proved any theorem is immediately seen to be trivial."
But I think Inception succeeds as a film only because following the plot thread in real time isn't of the essence, just as I was able to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony long before I was taught its formal structure. Without the education required to really dissect that structure, you nevertheless sense that it's there, and it enhances the emotional experience that the work is trying to convey – in Inception's case, the experience of being a man (well, two men, actually, and possibly also a woman) immersed in a dreamlike world full of symbols, mazes, masks, bluffs, and distractions, a world that he himself is creating to distract his own attention from the pure, simple, but unthinkably awful pain at the center of his life.
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EDIT: Fixed my prose, which got away from me. So tempted to just delete this whole thing, but I try to avoid erasing history even if it's really embarrassing and exhausting.
Good analysis.
I think though that we can go a step forward.
I agree that we all should look at it much more in a symbolic and metaphorical way than a logical way (there are several points in which the internal logic is severely weak).
And exactly because of all the reasons you mentioned above, I've always considered the whole movie being representing something related to Cobbs.
Cobbs is the one receiving the Inception.
No matter if by God or Ariadne, or God through Ariadne or viceversa. Or if this happens in the real life, afterlife, parallel life, dream levels or what. The whole movie is about Cobbs and his subconscious. It's also interesting that Nolan used the name Cobbs for one of the characters of his first movie, Following, in which Cobbs was some sort of serial burglar. Just to keep the metaphor going.
Inception's plot was certainly straight forward. But just about every movie that exists is packed with layers of meaning and open to wide spectrum of interpretation. Inception may seem deeper than the average movie only because talk about dreams is a fairly reliable way to trigger philosophical thought in people.
The -confusion- around Inception is probably just because the narrative is fairly dense.
The reason there are two passages through what seem to be limbo is that Inception is Christian allegory. If you look at the structure of the film you can see Nolan using the opening and closing heist sequences as allegorical bookends to demonstrate Cobb's character development. In the first Cobb is a faithless and money-oriented thief who embraces violence and selfishly abandons his team when this fails ("every man for himself"). At the end Cobb takes a "leap of faith" when he rejects Mal, whose seduction of him is framed as a temptation of faith ("you don't believe in one reality anymore.... so choose to be here"). Cobb reaffirms his faith in his children "up there", rejects violence even when he is attacked and then sacrifices his own life to save Saito.
So you're not supposed to worry too much about the logic of the dream levels, since all dreams are basically metaphors for life: mazes where people "get lost" and from which they need to "die to wake up". The only thing that makes limbo special is that it is particularly symbolic. Nolan is presenting a metaphor of life itself as a Penrose staircase, and portraying faith as the way out. When Ariadne shatters the mirrors that trap Cobb in a recursive chain, the image is symbolic: she is a gift from Cobb's father ("ask and ye shall receive") and her role in the film is to guide him out of the maze that is the mortal world. This is presumably why she is the character who accompanies him to immigration.
For more evidence that this is intentional, look at the overwhelming creation imagery and the narrative emphasis on father-son alienation and reconciliation (with Fischer as with Cobb). Look at the curious way Michael Caine seems to be playing God when he shows up in Paris. And then look closely at the ending, which shows us neither a dream nor reality. What Nolan presents is symbolic: we see Cobb's judgment and forgiveness of sins at immigration, and then his reunion with his family in the heavenly garden. The film closes with Cobb ignoring his totem (as a crutch of faithlessness it is no longer needed) and then his son James (who represents faith and like his sister shares an apostolic name) telling him that they are building a castle on a cliff.
A what? That last bit circles back to the opening shot of the children on the beach. It is a bookend reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The contrast (beach -> cliff) reinforces Cobb's character journey while telling us that the ending is NOT a dream (something reinforced by the lack of the water imagery associated with the other dream levels). It also reinforces the parallels Inception creates between the buildings of limbo and the sandcastles on the beach, and explains why all are ultimately washed away by water just as death washes away life in the Christian parable.
Brilliant movie.
Am I the only one who gets annoyed when people think inception was some stupid-deep, hard-to-understand movie?
It was (I thought) very straight-forward. The bigger problems with the movie come from the plot holes pointed out by Pewpewarrows. Do those holes perhaps contribute to the confusion?
The Prestige and Inception have been two of the most literary films of the last ten years. Christopher Nolan keeps getting better and better.
So I'd be interested to read a serious analysis of the new Batman films since it wouldn't surprise me if Nolan has something up his sleeve here at this point. That said, this post is not it, so if anyone has any recommendations please share.
What makes you think that he has not bought and payed for the movie Inception - to which he then bacme a rightful owner of a dvd/blueray? Having ownership of it, he is free to copy it for his own purposes, such as to make backups or to borrow it to his friend, like any other private property he has?
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
My sole encounter with the Youtube copyright police came from posting a two minute, highly edited visual commentary on the film Inception (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rLEzrWzCw), pointing out the religious allusions to Matthew 7.24 and the allegorical significance of the final scene.
It was auto-flagged by their system and I had to jump through hoops to get it back online. I can't imagine this sort of thing would survive SOPA. And what other platform is there but the Internet for the sharing of multimedia commentary and criticism?
It's not too bad in that regard, with a couple of bizarre exceptions (Inception is the ninth best film ever made? Really?) But overall it's a better and more historically diverse list than I would have expected.
I have to say inception wasn't too difficult to understand. I still don't understand Primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) though.
What great movies, sadly such mainstream movies are getting rarer and rarer (I thought Inception was one, but, boy, what a disappointment).
The more you watch them the more new stuff you discover, e.g. it recently occurred to me that the Zion control mechanism is very similar in spirit to "the book" in 1984, called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism supposedly written by the anarchist mastermind Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood. It is later revealed that this book was indeed written by O'Brien, the member of the thought police that eventually arrests Smith. I believe other sophisticated autocratic regimes, like China, have similar multilayered control mechanisms in place.
I happen to search around for some marketing info about Inception and found this: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/13/business/la-fi-ct-inception-20100713
From LA Times, Warner gambles on an unproven commodity. Quoting the first line:
"The studio and its partner have invested $160 million in 'Inception,' a film that is not a sequel, adapted from a comic book or inspired by a toy. They're hoping it follows the path of 'Matrix.'"
I have a couple of points to make.
1) Inception is a great idea .i.e. similar to Matrix, for which the entire world fell at its feet.
2) But unlike Matrix, it's difficult to make a series out of Inception.
3) And last, Inception production cost was $160 million and Warner Bros spend the equivalent amount in marketing ($100+)
So, even good films, those which are born out of new ideas, needs a good marketing plan. The only thing is that the studios should believe in the film!!
Didn't read the article, just the title, but I'd like to chime in to say I'm pretty sure I saw around a dozen good movies in the last year. Subset includes Inception, Social Network, King's Speech, True Grit, Star Trek (too far back? not sure), and The Fighter.
Hmm, I find it hard to feel so pessimistic. I don't go to the cinema very often, but all the films I saw this year were outstanding (Kickass, Inception, Social Network, Kings Speech, True Grit were the latest). Also, sequels aren't necessarily going to be any worse than non-sequels. Often great art arises from restricted subject matter. For instance all the paintings of religious figures, or all the Shakespeare plays that were reworkings of popular stories/dramas.
You hear this every year. And it's still true. Hollywood is wall-to-wall sequels, IP translations (games, comics, tv shows, etc. to movies), remakes, and the remake's newer cousin the "reboot".
Yet even so good films are still being made. The Social Network, True Grit (a remake even!), Toy Story 3 (a sequel!), The Fighter, Black Swan, How to Train Your Dragon, and Inception were all great films from 2010 (I haven't seen The King's Speech or 127 Hours yet but I hear those were good too). If this is what the system pumps out while it's horribly broken, I'm ok with more of the same.
There's always going to be a ready supply of churned out pap in any medium. Just go to a bookstore and look at all the crap that they keep pumping out. But that doesn't necessarily stop truly excellent works being published as well. Some of my most loved books have been published in the last several years. And with the internet it's easier than ever to sift through the dross to find the gems.
There's a reason Inception was so popular. It was very easy to follow for just how convoluted it was. The average consumer of Hollywood just can't ever hope to follow Primer, but they followed Inception well enough to debate it, or want to see it a second or third time.
Great popcorn movie.
I don't understand people who claim it's a "mindfuck" movie. The plot is pretty straightforward and self-consistent. What it is is an extremely well put-together movie.
The runtime of that movie is 148 minutes-almost two and a half hours. Yet it doesn't feel that long. It also manages to have three different groups of characters doing separate things, without confusing the audience. The last move I can recall trying to do that level of simultaneity was The Phantom Menace, which failed horribly at that task. Therefore, I find Inception to be a very interesting movie intellectually, because I think it's fun to think about the techniques that Nolan uses to make a 2.5 hour, multithreaded movie so entertaining.
I don't really understand the buzz about Inception. I found it very easy to follow and not all that exciting. Primer was a lot more mind bending and more interesting to boot. Inception just felt like the actors were spending the entire movie saying "look at us! This is exciting! And confusing! Now be confused!".
To each his own, didn't do it for me though.
The Inception Movie explained to my son (by Donald Duck, none the less) [1]. Almost all the scenario and the "innovative" concepts of the film come from a 2004 Scrooge McDuck comic.
I've linked to Cracked (even though they might not be seen as the most serious source) because their account is detailed and very documented.
1. http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html
> The Social Network - Sort of knew the story and acting was pretty ordinary.
> Inception - Cool story and nice effects, very captivating movie, made me think a little bit, but the ideas of the movie are too far fetched.
> True Grit - I didn't see the original, couldn't work out whether it was fiction until near the middle, and then it just went downhill, for me the girl did the best acting.
Worth watching? Definitely, become classics? Probably not, they're all missing the extra magic sauce.
I chose these movies not necessarily because I felt they were superb (although I loved them all) but because they were critically acclaimed and all received lots of oscar nominations. Almost by definition, they are the best films of the year.
If you compare it to nominated movies ten years ago, Braveheart, Apollo 13, I think they are comparably great.
Additionally, box office returns seem to be at all time highs. Black Swan and True Grit are two films that typically would be destined for "niche" audiences, but have returned hundreds of millions for reasonably small budgets.
Also, I think that Inception will be almost as influential as The Matrix, except in a smaller genre of films (eg: Matrix built upon action movies, whereas Inception was more of a psych thriller) - in my opinion.
Don't you feel this might be kind of a cognitive bias? Like when people poll for the best album of all time and it's always something that was released within the last 3 years of whenever the poll was.
The social network is of it's time and will date really badly, to the point where no one will watch or mention it ever again.
True Grit is a remake so specifically cannot be included as it had to be good enough to have been remade.
Inception isn't ever going to be a classic a la The Matrix.
The Kings Speech will definitely have longevity; Black Swan I'm not convinced will float above just being another film you can pick up for £3 in HMV in a couple of months but then think "well, will I ever watch it?"
Huge Moki.TV fan (http://moki.tv/2481). But also a huge movie fan. I entirely disagree.
Think about this years movies:
The Social Network
The Kings Speech
Inception
Black Swan
True Grit
Will all almost certainly become classics.
I signed up for Lovefilm earlier this month for the film streaming. I searched before hand and they had a nice film selection so I figure I'd go for it, if it sucked I could cancel. I signed up for the best plan that had streaming included (had no intention of doing postal DVDs) and found the following:
- The only films you can watch for free (after you've paid the monthly registration fee) are from before 2007, even though their entire catalogue contains newer films and it says "Your package includes unlimited online viewing" and "With access to 5,361 watch online titles" on both the sign up pages and in my account.
- After paying £4 for a film (Inception) which I expected to be included in the first place (a pipe dream I guess) I load it up... it's 360p at best, full screening makes it unwatchable.
- I figure if this is the state of it and I have to pay for shitty quality films I may as well go out and but the DVD, which I wanted to avoid... so I decided to cancel my account to find it's impossible to do online, you have to phone up... it was 4am, they were closed.
Terrible experience, but the joke is on me I guess, I didn't realise I could buy/rent films on iTunes so I'm doing that now.
"The Social Network, I'm really happy for ya and I'mma let you finish, but Inception was one of the best movies of all time."
lol yes, i'm easy to amuse :D
I thought "The Social Network" was decent, but I was actually expecting more from Fincher and Sorkin. It could have been a student film, in some ways. I thought many of the characters were fairly two-dimensional and the "two lawsuit" structure was a little forced. It made me think of the examples in a screenwriting class I took in college. (Oh, and it's not a world I live in or aspire to live in.) My expectations must have been too high after all of the great press it received. It had so many raving critics and fans that I had a long period of people telling me I "had to see it" - but I didn't see it until it came out on DVD and then was fairly disappointed. If it is THE film of 'this generation', as some claim, then I think we're in trouble.
I think "Inception" should have won. It was much more creative and thought-provoking, and I thought the acting was also better. Of course, I had no preconceived notions about it - other than a general idea that it was apparently a goldmine of meme material for sites like Reddit. I've only seen snippets of "Black Swan," but the acting looks better than both "The Social Network" and "Inception."
I don't use Facebook. I'm that friend everyone knows as the one that refuses to join. I like Reznor's work though so was familiar with that and perhaps somewhat predisposed to liking that aspect of the film.
I thought The Social Network was excellent and, though I really liked Inception too, would've picked Social Network as the better of the two. The introductory scenes were excellent. The characters were solid and believable, the tech side of things was handled very well and those involved collectively made a boardroom-and-laptops film into something impressive and enjoyable.
After the first time I saw Inception, I had a sneaking suspicion that my opinion of it might evolve a bit like that of The Matrix - huge at the time, but a bit cheesy down the track. I know the sequels amp the cheese, but they are mostly cringe-worthy now when repeats show up on TV.
As it happens, I saw both of these films for the first time in the last week or so.
I'd say that Inception was a hugely ambitious film which didn't quite hit its mark, while The Social Network was a much simpler, much less ambitious film which just happened to be nearly flawless. Inception was a fifteen-course lobster meal where a couple of the courses were a little salty, while The Social Network was just a dish of masterfully-prepared spaghetti, far better than spaghetti has any right to be. Which of these you think is more worthy of recognition is a bit of a broader question.
Also best director and best screenplay? That seems like a pretty big snub to Nolan for Inception. Social network was a pretty good movie, but it's hard to believe it would have done so well if everyone wasn't so gooey in the pants for facebook.
The Social network was good and all but Inception was a masterful, intelligent film that was original to boot. Far better IMHO.
Cool, it deserved it. It was an excellent movie. The Social Network was my own personal pick for "best movie of 2010", although - to be fair - I didn't see every movie released in 2010. But I would rank it above Inception, Shutter Island, Tron:Legacy, True Grit, Harry Potter, and Red - out of the other good movies that come to mind from last year.
Nice pacing, good acting, great score, inspirational, entertaining, thought-provoking, it really had everything. It was a great trip inside the world that a lot of us live in / aspire to live in. Maybe a non-hacker wouldn't see it in quite the same light, but I really thought it was just excellent.
I find that Borders employees are generally not that helpful. True story: I bought the "Inception" soundtrack on CD from Borders, and the bookseller checking me out saw it and said, "Wow, I didn't know we had this movie!"
Barnes & Noble employees are a little better on average, in my experience. I've actually gotten some good recommendations there.
Stealing is wrong in any form, but I have no sympathy for the losses major studios and record labels have suffered due to online piracy. Illegal downloading hasn't robbed the industry from profit, Avatar/Inception/The Dark Knight box office sales have disproven that. What has ended, is the business model of putting garbage inside a shiny mystery box that people have to pay for the opportunity to peek inside. Gone are the days of cd's that have one good song and fifteen filler tracks, movies that show their only worthwhile parts during the trailer leaving the story begging for a plot. Forget you Hollywood, I hope your industry suffers needlessly for years. The 'mystery box' business model only works when people can't preview the garbage inside
I believe this tells us a lot. The torrent crowd does not represent exactly the moviegoers audience. Lots of downloaders would never go to the movies, even if they crave a movie, it represent different age groups, different behaviours
For instance, "Kick Ass" which is largely a film designed for geeks, is #2 even though it only did $98 million at the box office. You've got to wonder why it's ahead of Inception. In the same way, "Alice in Wonderland" did $1.02 billion in 2010 but it's not on the top 10. The torrent demographic is probably the same one that'd jailbreak the iPhone or use Android more than the rest of the society. A demographic immune to marketing, which can sort out good movies from bad perhaps better than the press, but also biased towards a certain type of movies (Kick Ass, action hero etc.)
I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph.
My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long.
I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements.
It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi.
I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.
This reminded me of this summer's blockbuster movie Inception. Much like this article, it examined how ideas are planted in our minds and what effects those ideas have once they take over the mind and become impossible to eradicate.
Despite being hopelessly unrelated to anything, I have to give this an upvote.
This show is amazingly witty and self-referential in subtle ways that reward repeat viewing. The characters are very well written, and ring true despite the farcical nature of the show.
I think it's a great fit for a hacker-ly sense of humor. It was way too good not to get canceled.
It's the "Inception" of sitcoms.
> This is entirely voluntary.
Indeed, and I've pretty much done it. But it takes effort. You need credible replacements for the mindless time, and then you need to actively push yourself towards the new stuff as opposed to the old stuff.
The credible replacements is everything. If you commute by car, you need either:
-Some audiotapes/audiobooks/podcasts
-Someone to carpool with
-Some way of not driving any more (car service if you're wealthy enough, taking the train or bus otherwise)
...otherwise you're going to listen to the radio. What else is there to do while driving?
So it takes some effort. Totally doable though. I just calculated out how much time I spent on pop culture this year - Only one movie (Robin Hood, meh - I would've seen Inception except I was in the back provinces of China when it was released, and then it was gone from theaters when I was back in civilization), less than ten hours of TV (mostly tennis), no pop music except what was on when I was wandering through stores playing music or at a bar, no newspapers, and a few hours of trashy magazines while sitting in an aeronautical engineer friend's bathroom (why he reads them is beyond me, but it wasn't a terrible use of time while in his bathroom).
But this is only possible because I've got a list of stuff to do - a Kindle loaded with good books, an mp3 player loaded with audiobooks/podcasts, Hacker News/LessWrong/Google Reader loaded with good blogs, Lichess.org for when I want to play a game of Chess, and a list of temples/mosques/ruins/parks/beaches to go to.
It's not enough to just "opt out" - you need to "opt in" to some comparable activity to fill your time.
My Choice: The Social Network
Why? Largely because I find it inspirational, vis-a-vis my own entrepreneurial ambitions. I've watched it twice already, and every time I watch that, I feel very inspired to sit down and start hacking, and work on building something.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Mark Zuckerberg, or even of Facebook; but the movie was well-done, entertaining AND inspirational. What more can you ask for?
Honorable Mentions:
Red
Inception
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Pt 1
Looking forward to:
Tron: Legacy
This is a font with 26 uppercase letters, inspired by the maze font used in promotional posters for the movie INCEPTION. Almost of the work was done in Inkscape and FontForge; I plan to release the source if there is enough interest.
(Since I found out about Hacker News by having an early typography project of mine featured, it only seems appropriate that this should be my first submission. :-)
I enjoy going to a theater as well... but eventually, the only theaters that will exist will be high-end, classy joints like Gold Class Cinemas (http://www.goldclasscinemas.com/).
When I want to see a movie in a theater, I want to receive the best experience possible.
If the movie isn't worth seeing on a high-end screen, with high-end sound in a high-end facility, I want to download (and pay for) a good quality copy of the movie. Recently, I've seen Inception, Avatar, and a couple of other movies that between the sound and the picture deserve an experience.
The Social Network is a great movie that does not deserve an experience. It's a entertaining mockumentary that I really enjoyed watching - I did not miss anything by foregoing the theater. When the DVD comes out, I'll buy it.
Reminds me the movie Inception.
My concern about node.js is that it seems difficult to write server code that is readable later.... Since you're constantly creating handlers, it is kinda like programming the movie inception to me. Maybe a higher level abstraction on top might solve that.
Request: make an ode to Inception movie using it!
Thanks for the comments, Sam.
I've been trying to work out the best response to this. I think that you're correct in that there is a hole to be filled by a QR-to-URL service - essentially a bit.ly for QR codes. Despite availability of QR codes from existing players (Google being the most significant) and the ready availability of both websites and libraries for producing QR codes from URLs (and any other text), branding will play a big role in making them take off. ScanLife is certainly a player in this space: http://us.scanlife.com/ . They have QR codes on the Inception movie posters as part of the advertising campaign, as well. But anyone can do it. And given that ZXing is an open source scanning library, anyone can build the apps.
It may be shortsighted, but that's not the business I want to build. Scanning a QR code to follow a business is something I actually want - something that came directly out of a need in my own life - and it's the connections themselves that are interesting to me. QR codes are really only the beginning of what I want Quirk to be - I just think they're a good place to start.
That said, you're not the only person to suggest that Quirk should provide a tool for converting URLs to barcodes, even just as a promotion for Quirk itself. And if that turns into the biggest aspect of Quirk, then so be it. So, I guess we'll see.
Thanks again for your comment - definitely made me think (thus the slow response).
> You're really willing to sit there and tell me that you're comfortable with social game evolution stopping right now? This stuff really is sufficiently fun for you?
You seem to have a great vision for what social games could be. I cannot urge this enough - please go build that vision now. The industry needs innovation badly. There are huge profits to the person who can pull this off, and I hope that person is you.
But my message is this - Build Stuff People Want. Many people have fallen into this trap, myself included. I thought I could buck the trend, out-innovate Zynga, and make a truly fun game. But in the end I failed because I spent too much time in an ivory tower making the perfect game, and no time making an enjoyable product.
A great analogy is engineering brilliant software, but failing to build something people want to buy.
Inception was a success because Christopher Nolan is able to carefully balance the things that make a great movie with the things that make great ticket sales. It wasn't the best movie ever, and it wasn't the best selling movie ever. But a careful blend of both lead to success.
No one in social games today can do this. I want that to change.
To think that one can simply "made something good" is a fallacious line of thinking along the lines of "build it, and they will come". Fundamental understanding of what your audience wants is so critical.
I'm not saying Zynga makes good games. I'm not saying you should follow in Zynga's footsteps. I'm saying you need to understand what Zynga does right if you want to beat them. And if you think all Zynga does is "be evil" and "buy ads", you haven't been paying close enough attention.
That's what's known as a "high-concept pitch." It gives people a broad idea of what the thing is about and gets people excited by connecting it to something that's already well-loved, but often belies the actual details and intentions behind the thing. The bigger and more iconic the comparison, the more smoke and mirrors are likely being used.
For example, "Inception" could be pitched as "Like 'Ocean's Eleven' meets 'The Matrix'". It's not inaccurate, but all it's actually meant to convey is "It's a heist movie with trippy visuals." If you go into the theater expecting either of those movies, you're probably going to be a little bit confused.
I really liked Inception but wanted Mal to be right too. There is a similar film called Avalon which isn't half as entertaining:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267287/
However, the ending in Avalon is mind blowing and makes the film worth seeing.
I agree, but "stuck in a dream" doesn't explain the events of the movie.
My theory is that Moll knows (from the level where she jumps) that Cobb knows hows to do inception. She gets back to reality and tell people. The film portrays this knowledge being "extracted" from him -- perhaps, in part, to get him to finally jump.
I completely agree. I watched the movie thinking to myself every now and again "OK when's the full on mind fuck coming?" but it never really came, not for me anyway. Afterwards when I heard or read people talking about how confusing or hard to follow the movie was, I began to wonder if perhaps there was some huge extra layer of complexity to Inception that just went totally over my head. A bit more time has passed now and I don't think there was.
I still very much liked the movie though.
While browsing some of the more esoteric entries in that list (OK I meant LOLCODE) I saw a reference to this gem:
The movie Inception "explained" in C - http://github.com/karthick18/inception
I really doubt a "team of geniuses" collaborated to "plant the seeds for all these interpretations and ideas in our heads." For one, that isn't how movies are generally made and seems like a pretty boring way to approach making a movie like inception. For another, there's no "team of geniuses" credited — just Christopher Nolan.
The top is quite simply the movie's final inception.
Only this one is placed in the mind of the viewer.
Surely all or most of these interpretations have been considered by the director and have been actively and deliberately intertwined into the story. The budget was $160 million so think of how many startup ideas could be funded with 10% of this amount. So it's easy then to imagine a team of geniuses working to plant the seeds for all these interpretations and ideas in our heads. That, coupled with the art of convincing somebody to fund the movie, is Inception.
I'm not sure that the Inception on Fisher Jr. ever actually occurs, as I doubt that Cobb ever escaped Saito's dream from the beginning. It is suggested in the movie that the subconscious attacks the architect of the dream first. In the beginning of the movie the last we see of the first architect is him being bundled away by Saito's goons. Saito then crafts an excuse for Cobb to end up at peace, lost in his own subconscious. The Saito living in limbo could be a projection in the same way that Fisher Jr. creates a projection of the guy the forger was mimicking.
+1 but doesn't reflect my experience.
> when we dream there is a loss of agency, that dreams simply unfold before us
I never feel that way while dreaming, even though when I wake I realise I was basically on rails the whole time. The closest I've experienced to this is that sometimes in my dreams I am simultaneously reading a book and a character in the book - as the former I am a passive observer, as the latter I (feel as if I) have agency.
> unless you're a lucid dreamer
Inception is explicitly inspired by lucid dreaming (the concept of the totem is very similar to a trick people use to train themselves to dream lucidly). However, even though I've only once or twice had a lucid dream, I found a lot about the film reminded me of dreaming in general.
+1 for recommendation of The Prestige.
Mulholland Drive is also a film worth watching if you enjoyed Inception.
+1 but disagree.
Re the rule that inception requires a vault to plant the idea inside - on the one hand, if the whole concept of inception is something dreamed up by Cobb, then that rule can be broken (dreams are rarely consistent). On the other hand, that's why it's so significant that Ariadne's role is the creator of mazes (specifically, mazes which Cobb's conscious mind can't solve): she creates a maze he has to break into in order to confront his issues at the centre. If he did so without first struggling to get there, he wouldn't accept it as his own victory: just like Fischer had to pull off an increasingly elaborate heist in order to believe his own inception.
Re accepting his dream children after rejecting his dream wife: I think the difference is that his real children are still alive and need him. His guilt over Mal's death keeps him distant from them - literally in the film/dream, but maybe metaphorically in reality. Maybe he's been emotionally distant from his kids since her death, and the dream is his mind's attempt to fix things.
In a way it's funny if people over-analyse a movie. If they put more meaning into the movie than the director has intended.
Why just can't the reality shown in Inception be the reality, and the spinning top at the end just a gag, in the way that the director doesn't show us long enough the spinning top to see, if it falls or not?
So the spinning top at the end could be seen as an encouragement to think about your own reality.
I thought it was a rather pointless puzzle. I'm lost as to the profound meaning you're alluding to; is it doubting reality, that it may be a dream, etc.? That's a long way short of original, and besides, it was done much better recently by The Matrix. The plot, however, was clearly less than awesome, with much of it seemingly existing to justify special effects and repetitive fight scenes, providing cheap tension. (The same could of course be said of The Matrix.)
The whole concept of Inception, of course, is unremarkable. Ad-men have been putting ideas in people's heads for some time with quite a degree of sophistication, and magicians have been doing similar for far longer; done well, marks are fooled by both without realizing how or when.
Reading the movie as an allegory of movie-making I think is a stretch. There are matching elements, in particular, not changing the world too much or provoking antagonism; but the whole plot theme of father / child guilt is rather out of place, as is the recursive breaking into of fortresses.
> Except it's not "just another job" at all--it's an impossible job, they have to assemble the best team, they make an elaborate plan that goes all wrong and they have to clean it up
Exepct that's the plot of every single "just another job" movie. But of course inception is a lot more than that.
The it's-all-a-dream interpretation is the only one that makes sense from a science-fiction point-of-view, however unsatisfying it is from an artistic perspective. The slightly wobbling top at the end points, rather overtly, to the real answer: it's meant to be ambiguous.
That said: WTF? We've got to bring down a company on the verge of being The Most Powerful Corporation in the World. So let's use this highly radical, unproven and improbable, voodoo-science inception approach. Oh, and by the way, we have to plant a mole within the highest ranks of the multinational beast within the next, say, two weeks, so we can get valuable information that is necessary to penetrate and manipulate the fragile psyche of our target.
Cut-scene: it's done. This is logic that only makes sense within the context of a dream. The sort of dream Coleridge, or Rube Goldberg, would have.
Science generally favors the application of Occam's Razor: buy the airline and crash the damn plane with the kid on it. Or just send in the ninjas. The ensuing infighting among the various executive factions vying for the top spot after junior is offed will ensure that any plans Acme Energy Inc had for world domination are put off course indefinitely.
Inception was entertaining. But Memento was the more philosophically interesting film. That's a film that truly merited this kind of philosophical scrutiny. Remember Sammy Jankis.
I really liked inception, but felt that the character development wasn't there. All the characters except Cobb exist only superficially, as if they are just dream projections. We never find out what anyone else wants, why they are coming along on this mad scheme.
Still a great movie.
i second this sentiment (though the metaphor for film making interpretation is also quite nice.).
by this interpretation (the straightforward naive one), Inception is likely the best "hard"/logically consistent science fiction film to have characters that are very engaging and well realized of the past half decade.
If you've not seen Inception yet, fix that soon!
Hmmm I read the analysis and I don't think it's all that meaningful: just like numerous other films Inception has some themes which it explores (regret, guilt, grieving/loss). If the exploration is insightful enough, then the audience can learn from it. Is Mighty Ducks a metaphor for filmmaking because emotions are just as real in a hockey match as they are in a movie, as they are in real life?
The film touches on some ideas like the intoxicating power of the imagination but I think saying the whole film's a metaphor for filmmaking goes a bit far and the evidence is stacked against his analysis.
As a meditation on the way in which our creations are inexorably haunted by the personal, Inception works.
As a movie about dreams, it's a missed opportunity. We find dreams compelling because they're profoundly uncanny in a way that we can never fully express; and I think most people would agree that when we dream there is a loss of agency, that dreams simply unfold before us. But there's hardly anything dreamlike about the movie at all, unless you're a lucid dreamer. Inception models a dream as a location rather than as a series of emotionally charged impressions, and it employs a Hollywoodesque narrative grammar rather than dream-logic. It's essentially a heist movie.
Another way to put it is that when I was watching the movie, I kept thinking, "That's so not real." Which is a funny way to respond to a movie about dreams. I hate to be that guy, but I think you're better off reading something like Kafka's "The Judgment" or maybe even watching a good horror movie.
They never make movies about 'just another job,' which is what this would be if not for Cobb's psychodrama/inner-conflict and Ariadne's attempt to help. Although I suppose the goal of inception would make it unique from the characters' perspective but that's too weak because it means nothing to the audience beforehand.
http://chud.com/articles/articles/24477/1/NEVER-WAKE-UP-THE-MEANING-AND-SECRET-OF-INCEPTION/Page1.html
Not that these excerpts really do the analysis justice, but:
>Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he's ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.
>The whole film being a dream isn't a cop out or a waste of time, but an ultimate expression of the film's themes and meaning. It's all fake. But it's all very, very real. And that's something every single movie lover understands implicitly and completely.
To answer your question more directly, the familial issues in the plot are a vehicle for emotion. These emotions are just as real in a dream as they are in a movie, as they are in real life (to borrow from the analysis' phrasing).
"Because it would be a dull and empty plot if all these characters were brought together simply to perform a job."
What you describe is a very common trope for heist movies, and Inception--despite its depth--satisfies on that level, just as The Matrix satisfies as a sci-fi shoot-em-up despite its depth.
A lot of the best movies satisfy on multiple levels this way.
"And then he woke up" is the ending to every 5th graders first ambitious story. I don't buy it.
I did think the little dream machine in the movie looked like game console. You and several of your friends slide in the IV to play a round of, what exactly?
I thought the movie portrayed a pretty decent game already, just getting from one level to the next. More: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/inception-game.html
No no no... "inception" happens when they plant an idea inside a safe/vault inside someone's dream (inside someone's dream, inside someone's dream), rather than extracting one. Cobb doesn't undergo inception, he just works out his problems as the plot develops with some help from Ariadne. Why? Because it would be a dull and empty plot if all these characters were brought together simply to perform a job. Furthermore the film makes clear that Cobb learns to reject he projection of his wife, so it makes no sense for him to then embrace projected children instead at the end. The children represent reality not just in physicality but in the emotional truth that underscores the film. That's why he spins the top then ignores it soon as his children appear - they're a more certain anchor for reality.
The best interpretation I've seen is that the entire movie is an allegory about movie-making. The "shared dream" is very analogous to a movie.
Stokes' interpretation doesn't look deep enough. He attempts to figure out what is really happening before, after, or even during the movie. I find more use in interpretations that try and figure out what something means and what the underlying message the writer/director is making (if any).
Stokes focuses too much on plot and not enough on meaning. Reminds me of people who think the Six Sense is awesome (pretty much everyone) because of its amazing plot twist. But that's all it really had--not too much meaning. A movie worth analyzing shouldn't just stand on plot alone. Thankfully Inception has both an awesome plot and some decently profound meaning.
I can't speak for true film buffs--I like the "mindless" Hollywood junk... but only when it's not mindless and not junk, if you get my drift. This year has been absolutely terrible. Months of mediocrity punctuated by the occasional standout. Other than Inception and Toy Story 3, there haven't been any great blockbusters. Oh yeah, How to Train Your Dragon. Almost everything else has been a wait-for-DVD. If that.
Of course opinions are subjective. So let's agree to disagree. :-)
I beg to differ. Some really, really bad movies this year, but there are some real gems.
1) How to Train Your Dragon (it's just magical for some weird reason)
2) Inception (finally something new)
3) Toy Story 3 (don't need to explain)
Aren't they suppose to compare this year with some of the other years to show this is the "Worst Movie Year Ever"
The infographic shows what happens every year, some of the highly anticipated movies don't work (Sex and the city, Prince of Persia) , some of them work (Toy story) and then there are a few surprises(Inception, which released 2 weeks back so the $ figure will go up)
> In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
It's true that the rules are changed, but they're changed almost immediately; we have one encounter in a dream where we see that being killed means that you wake up, and this understanding is then taken away from us during the next dream (not counting the various tutorials). One may question the utility of a rule that is given only to be immediately taken away, but I believe that the point here was to make us feel the shock of the unexpected danger in which the characters found themselves—we are supposed to be shaken out of our complacency just as they are.
The second point seems truly bizarre. I think it's fair to say that a large chunk of the ‘meaning’ of the movie is that we are left to wonder at the end whether we have reached a ‘real-life’ ending, or are still watching someone's dreams. The fact that everyone seems fine, despite the severe dangers that were advertised, is, from this point of view, not lazy story-telling but a way of making us uncomfortable with the easy answer of taking the ending literally.
I agree with PaulJoslin's criticism.
It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).
Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.
As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.
> If anything I think the right analogy with Inception is the second Matrix movie.
I too prefer to think Inception as a spiritual successor to Matrix. It explores the idea of layers of constructed reality in a recursive fashion that I hoped Matrix sequels would reveal.
Also, I suspect Matrix world would seem less weird to computer geeks than the world of Inception. The opposite is also true. Inception appeals even to a non sci-fi buff. That is a remarkable achievement for such a complex movie.
There are a lot of questions towards the end, but they make you think much beyond the canvas of the movie. That is truly a rewarding experience.
Note: I have not seen Inception, and I plan to see it, so I am not reading your reply too closely. Nolan, on the basis of past work, is an excellent filmmaker, so I'm sure he isn't guilty of the things I talked about, certainly not blatantly. And I agree that you can't apply criticisms without properly understanding the concepts behind them, and the reason they work the way they do. I grew up in an artistic family. My mother was a theatre actress and director, and my father a songwriter and playwright, so I've been steeped in these mechanics in the practical sense, not just the academic, for a long time.
On the point about flashbacks, probably my favourite film, Once Upon A Time In America, is arguably formed out of flashbacks, or possibly even "flashforwards". The effect, especially after multiple viewings, is something like In Search Of Lost Time in they way it creates a sense of nostalgia, in its case for poorly made life choices, unrequited love, and more. So I certainly wouldn't make the accusation that flashbacks are in principle bad, or necessarily cheap, just often so, in average movies.
I don't doubt there's some truth to these ideas but when I read people apply them it seems like they can't see the wood for the trees.
For instance, one might feel that the architecture student's character is under-developed. If the film wasn't already 2.5 hours, I imagine they would have given this likeable character more scenes. But essentially they did show you everything you need to know about this character, because her fingerprints were all over the set design of the rest of the film. Can't get much more visual-medium than that.
And then people say emotion draws you in deeper than ideas, but here we are days after watching the film avidly discussing its ideas (the layers of dreaming and how they worked). Meanwhile a film like The Matrix which does have 'stronger' individual characters to generate emotion, was compromised by a terrible oversight in the ideas department (ie. the whole concept of humans as batteries/generators is ridiculous). A film doesn't need to engage every level equally or in the standard way to be one of the best, IMO.
You mentioned flashback, well 90% of Inception after the first scene was a flashback, except in this case for once it wasn't at all contrived, because it represented the two characters (protagonist and Japanese dude) de-orphaning their current dream-state by reforming connections to previous layers (remembering the other dreams) and then they could snap back out of all the recursions. In other words, I think the storytelling was masterful.
And what's more, the film was deeply involved in character development and human/emotional themes, because most of it was essentially exploring peoples' subconscious minds and relating that to real life matters. The anchoring struggle was the protagonist 'coming back to reality' in the sense of someone gripped by guilt/regret and being lost in their own imagination at the expense of real relationships/progress (similar to the Solaris remake in this way). Sure, maybe people think this side of the film was poor, but if they'd at least acknowledge/mention it I wouldn't accuse them of missing the wood for the trees or regurgitating standard criticisms without thinking them through.
To defend the film critic regurgitation a bit, I don't think characters have to have emotional depth or development, but it's typically a good thing when you care about them and their problems.
As for the exposition point, I think something can be said in defense of the story in the link.
(Spoilers follow.)
Re: emotional attachment. One of the things that annoyed me about Inception was that the big reveal of what happened to Marion Cotillard is totally internal to the weird mechanics of the world. She got driven crazy because she had to be manipulated into giving up the dream world. Erm, okay. To me the main plot with Cillian Murphy had a more interesting core: a guy's self-understanding in relation to his inheritance and successful father. Both are shallow and not "deep", both "develop" in the movie, but the second has some meaning to me and the first doesn't, and it seems to me to be a real advantage.
Re: exposition. I agree that one can get overly concerned with this. But I think it's annoying when exposition goes on during the entire movie, so that rules are introduced in order to explain something going on right that second. For example, all of a sudden it matters whether or not you die in the dream world, and it has to be explained why. Or the elaborate and (to me) cool idea of worming one's way through someone's subconscious by constructing labyrinths and stuff is suddenly thrown out in favor of action sequences involving a "militarized" subconscious. It makes the movie feel more ad hoc and random.
If the movie is going to just be about the mechanics of a world with weird rules, then fine. It's not favorite cup of tea, but I can definitely appreciate it. But there are better and worse constructions and presentations of artificial mechanics, and more and less involving plot vehicles for exploring it. Though some of Kirk Hamilton's particular complaints strike me as silly, I overall agree with him that Inception was inferior to the Matrix in this regard. If anything I think the right analogy with Inception is the second Matrix movie.
If you expect an orange and get an apple, you're automatically not happy, no matter how tasty the apple is. That's where a lot of criticism comes from.
I found Inception to be a masterpiece. Yes, there was a lot of explanation to do, but it never felt unnatural and was necessary for the mind-blowing climax. Unlike Memento or Mulholland Drive, everything made sense to me right away. And ending the movie with the spinning top was just a genius move, especially since it was so carefully placed right after the intentionally dream-like airport scene. Never has such a static scene held so much tension.
I went into the theatre not knowing what to expect. I left dumbstruck, somewhat in doubt of the world. What if I was three levels deep and this wasn't the real world? It was great seeing the viewers dazed, stepping tentatively towards the exit.
Many of these ideas were presented in The Matrix but the "idea" of n-deep illusions was central to Inception. I appreciated the time multiplication, even given the 20x fast brain function bodge.
Why were the acceleration changes only go one layer deep? Perhaps inner ear sensation (balance, acceleration) in the dreamer's world are the only modifiers. It doesn't matter, the construct produced intriguing new effects that I was pleased to experience.
We should be arguing about interesting ramifications. Personally I'd like to believe that Mal was correct and Cobb was dreaming all through the film.
The film reminds me of a couple of Red Dwarf books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life (especially) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Human These are definitely worth a read if you are interested in science fiction.
Inception was boring. We all knew the basic setup before the movie, which is fine, but it spends ages explaining minor details like how balance/inner ear sensation is propagated down the levels, yet uses them inconsistently - they're not floating about the snow scene, for example. Yes, I realise these are Comic Book Guy criticisms.
But it wasn't engaging. The dialogue was clichéd, the characters bland, and for a summer action movie it lacked a "crowning moment of awesome".
More than anything though, it felt as if the writers took a good idea and tried to make it complicated (but not too complicated) without any real spark of inspiration. Apart from the reversal or deception going into the deepest level, they were just piling on the layers.
"For me, Nolan's dreamjacking caper was the film-going equivalent of sitting through a videogame that is all tutorial and no play."
Are you kidding me? This movies is packed with all sorts of action, character development and general goings on! For a video game the action stops and you have to jump or counter 3 or 4 times to continue. At what point in Inception does the plot stop moving for more than 3 seconds? There is always something going on.
Even when Ellen Paige is getting a tutorial in architecture (yeah, a tutorial in the movie) there is tension when the world starts reacting negatively.
Exposition dones wrong does indeed sink movies and makes them boring. But you have to do it somehow, especially if it's a science fiction. Inception does it so, so well.
This was exactly how I felt when I left the cinema. Although it was a good film, I felt the execution of the idea felt sloppy. It had promise to be truly amazing, but often purposely became confusing in the aim of seeming to be clever.
I think in Inception they took things too far, multiple dream levels, weird limbo states, etc. They could've just built a far simpler movie and it would've flowed a lot better.
It's comparable to software. Often the most enjoyable user experience is one with very few features executed extremely well. Compared to a piece of software with every single feature or idea plugged in, executed fairly sloppily.
Inception was lucky it had a great core concept, cast and good effects to hold up for the on going confusion throughout the film.
The comparison I feel is Matrix compared to Existence, where 'Existence' in this scenario is Inception.
I'm pushing a lot of film criticisms onto my mind's stack of 'possibly groundless convictions' these days. I keep seeing complaints that a) a good film needs you to 'care' about the characters who must have 'emotional depth' through 'development' b) a good film should not be pre-occupied with 'exposition' or 'explaining' what is happening
but... says who? They sound like half-baked ideas that arm-chair movie critics have internalized and regurgitate at the slightest opportunity.
I was so much more interested in watching Nolan introduce more elegant but mind-bending ideas about the mechanics of recursive dreaming and then manifesting them with spectacular action scenes, than I was interested in the missing 'character development' milieu like watching the protagonist play with his kids, have a normal domestic argument with his wife, become a workaholic etc. etc.
The characters explained their plans and problems because it made sense for them to do so (ie. it never felt contrived for the audience's sake), and the explanations in themselves were entertaining. Deeper thematic ideas were still tackled, like the central point of how the protagonist needed to untangle himself from his subconscious regrets/guilt before he was ready to have a real life with his children, just not in the usual sappy ways that we've seen thousands of times before. And I refuse to accept that the film was confusing -- yes there were a couple of details that we discussed on the way home from the cinema but satisfactory explanations were forthcoming. All films have details like that, with Inception they're more fun to figure out.
Inception isn't a classic. Or a masterpiece. It's a slapdash confluence of popular trends within the community of filmmakers:
* Dealing with unreality, with hinted-at promise of imagining fantastical worlds, but really providing an excuse for more car chases, explosions, and gunfire than is plausible within our current legal framework (The Matrix)
* Multiple levels of unreality and ambiguous ending (Vanilla Sky)
* Leonardo DiCaprio isn't sure what's real anymore, and is haunted by visions of his crazy dead wife (Shutter Island)
* Statement about filmmaking itself (perhaps every auteur film in the past ten years)
Heh, I felt the same way when I woke up this morning, but it was about the movie. I always wake up in a pissy mood and this time I was lashing out on inception, which, boiled down, is an absurd story of boys playing make believe in a dream and having delusions of grandure.
However, I'm in a better mood now and the movie is still wonderfully entertaining.
Movies are much too subjective. 12 monkeys had some fine writing, but the editing, direction, and acting are way better in Inception (IMO of of course). Is it an all time great? Not sure, but it's a darn fine movie
I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice!
The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourself a favor and check those out if you haven't seen them.
Inception also understands "Big Oh" ideas -- when you are looping inside the third level down, you have 10 seconds on the outside giving you 10^3 seconds on the inside. (EDIT: a single "tick" in one level allows for 20 or so "ticks" at the next level of dreaming, because of extra brain capacity during sleep.)
Hehe -- I loved the movie...