Story Lover

This movie is insane. G and I sat there until the credits were completed and the lights came on. The last movie I saw like that was Momento. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since Christopher Nolan wrote and directed both. He also did The Prestige as well, which was amazing. Nolan’s ability to draw a punch at the end just blows me away.

So, was everything we saw a dream? Was he unable to distinguish from reality and dreams? Was his wife even really dead? Can you ever convince yourself of something, without traces of it lingering behind, nagging at you? Can you even create an inception in someone, unless they were willing to believe it? Fisher wanted his father to love him, so he created a story, a dream, in order to convince himself. Maybe Mal wanted to die and so was able to hold onto that idea.

And I thought that the attention to detail was pretty mind blowing. Each layer of a dream had its own style, character and environment. The most obvious was the clothing and fashion. Eames, Arthur and Ariadne were the most conspicuous (except in the snow dream). I wonder if the score changed with each dream (Hans Zimmer, great stuff).

Even though there were quite a few “wait a second” moments, I thought all the concepts were really intriguing. Like, you had to die in the lower dream in order to wake up in the upper dream. And that five minutes in reality is like an hour in a dream. And one person could control the dream and make it a reflection of their subconscious. What an imagination.

I love the title, it’s an inception, not a deception or even a conception.

Streamed tears almost the whole way through. I would love to leave this world with the dignity that Daigo touched people with.

Maybe it is fate that brings us back to ourselves and to the unanswered questions of our past. The beauty of controlled stories. But I liked how Diago ended up coming to peace with his father’s abandonment before he himself became a father. I think it was learning that his father’s life wasn’t blissful, that his final thoughts were on his son, helped him forgive.

It’s tragic to think that there are things that we regret, pain we have inflicted, that freezes us in our tracks. And our regret, shame and guilt makes it impossible to even try to redeem yourselves. So we don’t even try.