Every Movie Should Be An Inception

Posted by Lady Mel On Monday, August 23, 2010 2 comments

Over the course of this summer, I have seen these particular movies:


Sex and the City 2
Clash of the Titans
Kick-Ass
The A-Team
Dinner with Schmuck
Salt 
Iron Man 2
The Last Airblender
The Expendables
Get Him to the Greek

Some were rather funny, while others some were overrated. But nothing and I mean nothing could not compare to Christopher Nolan's masterpiece, Inception. I can go on for hours maybe days giving you reason after reason why I love Inception but it would be a waste of a good blog post and your time. So I truncated everything into two strong points: (Disclaimer: If you have not seen this movie, please read this review after you've seen the movie.) 

1. Inception is the anti-Avatar. Its been about eight months and I still have not watched Avatar. Why? Like I said. I want movies both amazing storytelling that makes you think. New York Magazine recently coined Inception as the anti-Avatar, and it is. You have a movie that is still discussed among the Twitter crowd as a trending topic. It has made over $250 million domestically, a modest profit compared to James Cameron's megablockbuster Avatar. It's a rare gem; its a movie that was able to pull in big bucks AND enabled you the moviegoer to think about your life, while being entertained by a stellar cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, and Ellen Page. I have not seen this type of avant garde film since the first Matrix film was introduced to the world in 1999. 

Avatar may have had the amazing CGI graphics, but everyone is used to the typical love story. Yes, Dicaprio's character is or was in love with his dead wife, but there is more to the story than that: Dreams, the inception of dreams in our heads, how dreams can transform people's lives, how dreams can imprison us from within the soul. A movie that digs deeps into our philosophical truths, while maintaining a certain humanity and whimsicality is golden to me. It took Christopher Nolan 10 years to complete this film and it all came down to a single idea, a dream. This is what a movie should be.
2. You are your own architect. One of the most surprising parts of the movie was the ending. All David Cobbs (Dicaprio) wanted after the death of his late wife was to be in the lives of his two small children. You think you are getting that typical fairytale ending when you see him with his father (Michael Caine) in the kitchen and the children's faces (finally!) in the backyard. Then you see the spining top on the table...
Now I have talked to a couple of people about this film since I first watched it. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and that is one of the many reasons why I love this movie because the ending is so open for interpretation. What I believe happened is that Dicaprio finally let go of this image or vision of his dead wife. Mal (Marion Cotillard) initially controlled his every movements, his ambitions. David's mind was so powerful that he intercepted his world into his minds of his fellow team members and fooled them into thinking they successfully persuaded Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to break his father's business empire. When he first asked Ariadne (Ellen Page) to act as his architect at the beginning of the film in order to get inside Fischer's mind, I automatically knew that the fear itself was consuming and deadly. Mal represented his inability to let go of his past and I think he finally let go of it at the end of the movie. 
What did I get out of this movie? Be the architect of your own life. You, the moviegoer, the blogger, should not let anyone, even the faint memory of a loved one ruin your chances of living a healthier life. I personally am fighting that good fight on my own. I won't get into the details, but I think the most important challenge of our lifetime is to live your own life by our own terms. Live life by the horns. That is the motto of my life at the moment and for a Hollywood film to project this message is extremely rare these days when you have movies like Twilight and The Other Guys. 
I remember one day after coming to work, waiting for the bus, weeks before I saw the movie, without any notion of the movie other than the trailer and I said something along the lines of this, "everyone is talking about this movie. I guess the moral of this story is that no matter how many dreams you have, as long as there are people that get into your way of achieving your dreams, you are pretty much defenseless until you fight back. That what makes the world go around. It is the survival of the fittest and that forces people to crush other people's dreams to reach to the top." I could not be any more right. Dreams are dreams unless you execute them.


What do you think of the movie? Have you seen it yet? If not, what are you waiting for?!

2 comments:

KIRSTY IRWIN said...

LOVED the movie!!!
Absolute gem

xx Black Adder Fashion
http://www.bloglovin.com/en/blog/1840556/black-adder-fashion

Lady Mel said...

@Kristy thanks! It was the best movie I seen in years. I had my eyes glued to the movie screen for hours and that's rare!