1990 Silicon Dreams Games and Movie Reviews: Inception: The Matrix Several Years Later

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Inception: The Matrix Several Years Later

Share this post on reddit.

I've never been able to enjoy movies that are hyped up, as long as they are. Even though I like Leo DiCaprio as an actor in movies like Blood Diamond or The Aviator, I couldn't really like this one. I tried, believe me but I couldn't. It's a spectacle. Inception is like the Matrix, only if the Matrix was less about eastern philosophy and more about robots. It's like Neuromancer with too much time spent tripping around other people's bodies cross-gender or not. It's no fun, for me. So what's so wrong about Inception. 


I'm going to try to be short here, but mostly I didn't enjoy the acting one bit. Everyone in the movie seemed poorly motivated, with the character equivalent of a three minute back-story. Except for the main character, who's constantly overshadowing some dark issues that he's had in his past. People run around in other people's dreams, in their own dreams, it's the Matrix all over, only this time the platform is not a virtual environment created by super-intelligent robots, but the platform could be anybody's subconscious.

Think for a second, what a scary place that would be for most people. It makes it even harder to believe characters whose innermost dreams and hallucinations have nearly as much coherence as everyday life. Dreams are usually symbolic and convoluted sets of unrelated and completely irrational events and sensations and the suspension of disbelief is based on chemicals that stop us from critically assessing why are we seeing cars float in mid air, missing one tire and inside-out. It doesn't help that it's practically impossible for two people to experience the same hallucination. But enough on how Inception could or could not work in the real world.

Finally, the plot is as straightforward and unexciting as watching Memento the second time around, only you only need about half an hour to figure out that everything could and probably is a dream, and stop caring about weather or not it is. There was a slight interest for me, when it turned out that with every level of dream you go into (I'm not even going to talk about the 'levels' of dreams within dreams) you experience time faster, which means that compared to normal time you're getting more sensations per minute, which is Einstein's Special Relativity applied to the biochemistry of sleeping. At least if you forget for a second how absurd it would be to think that you could enjoy a lifetime spent within a dream (Vanilla Sky anyone?), you could probably imagine enjoying living for hundreds or thousands of years.

Later the plot turns into an action movie and much like in the Matrix, it's a bid for our characters to do some work in the dream world, before they're 'disconnected' or die of cerebral overheating, or something else. But it's not the Matrix and that's my whole issue with it. 

8 comments:

  1. I have never really been a fan of the matrix myself, but the computer game was awesome

    ReplyDelete
  2. While I do like the movie, I don't see the inception part of it as the actual movie. I think it's just really about Cobb getting free and the movie is just his way of doing it. I'm also pretty disappointed that they didn't take the dream part of it further, there could have been more spectacular scenes like the weightless fight scene but instead it just turned in to your regular action movie.

    ReplyDelete
  3. tobad! i really like it, maybe not super awsome but still worth watching!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Combine Inception and The Matrix (1, not 2 or 3, contrary to popular belief The Matrix never had any sequels), maybe throw in some Cube and you have the perfect film.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I enjoyed it, but I doubt I would have been as impressed with it if I hadn't seen it in Imax... that big screen and booming sound can make any movie epic.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I saw it a few times. I think it's pretty good.

    ReplyDelete

Recommended Post Slide Out For Blogger

Labels

Reviews Games Miscellaneous Movies Updates WoW Blizzard comics Mists of Pandaria beta Diablo 3 Minecraft Site News World of Warcraft Diablo TV Youtube Channel Drama Fallout Hack and Slash RPG Baldurs Gate Bethesda Diablo III Gaming annual pass beta codes 1999 Andrei Tarkovsky Arkady Strugatsky Art Battle Royale Diablo 3 Release Date Gametrailers Humble Bundle Lars Von Trier MoP mounts Mojang Music Pandaria Mounts Pandas S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Stalker 1979 Star Wars The Hunger Games battle.net chuck palahniuk fight club iPad racing 2011 4th edition Adam Adamowicz Ally McBeal Alterac Valley Announcement Apple Archer Armour Set Battleground Black Isle Blog Boris Strugatsky Breaking Dawn Charity Colin McRae Rally 2 Countdown Cruel Intentions Culture Daniel Craig Darren Aronofsky Dungeons and Dragons Enhanced Edition Expansion FOX FPS Faction Mounts First Impressions Gameplay Habbo How To Inception Infinity Engine Irvine Welsh Isle of Conquest Jim Carrey Lesson of the burning scroll Let's Play Literature Max Payne Melancholia Melancholia 2011 Minecraft 1.2 Mirror Mirror MoP Open Beta Weekend Overhaul Games PIPA Parody Protect IP Act Raise Dead Raymond Reddit Reddit This Reese Witherspoon Related Posts Roller Coaster Tycoon SOPA Sarah Michelle Gellar Sci-Fi Screenshots Severance: Blade of Darkness Shadowy Figure Skyrim Stalker Starting Quest Stop Online Piracy Act Sweden TPS The Devil Wears Prada The New Girl Training Bell Trainspotting Travel Twilight Tyrael's Charger Wandering Isles Weekend YogCast animated. series brad pitt david fincher edward norton features giveaway gog.com good old games helena bonham carter hunter thompson johny depp novel planescape torment priest PvP set rum diary terms and conditions the lesson of dry fur the matrix woody allen