I just saw Inception, which made me about the last person in the U.S. to do so. (But on the off chance that you have managed to miss it as well, be warned that this post is loaded with spoilers.)
Inception is a pretty cool movie, in a lot of ways. The effects are great, the performances are good, and there are not enough movies these days naming their characters Ariadne. Also, the central idea is very compelling, even if it didn’t feel particularly revolutionary.
So I wanted to like it. But, by around the time Ken Watanbe explained his Macguffin-esque “goal” to Leo, I sort of gave up and sat back to watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt be funny and Ellen Page’s hair fly around prettily.
It made me think, a little bit, of that awesome video review of The Phantom Menace, in which the reviewer pointed out, among other things, that the movie’s central flaw was its absence of a protagonist. Inception, in contrast, has a protagonist. We know he’s the protagonist because he’s the most famous actor in the movie. And the protagonist of Inception has a character arc. And if I saw the movie two or three more times I could probably articulate that character arc pretty well, but based on my one viewing all I can tell you is that he sometimes got confused about which was the real world and which was the dream world.[1]
So, it’s not a wholly character-driven story. That’s okay. Inception opens with a big, cool action sequence, and that’s great. I like me some big, cool opening action sequences. I like watching people try to fight in zero-gravity too. And I liked the suit Ellen Page wore in the generic-high-end-hotel layer of the dream. All that stuff can be awesome.
But there needs to be a story thread to tie it all in together. And Inception’s story thread was revealed too slowly and wasn’t compelling enough even when it was all there. The story of the movie is, presumably, the real nature of the relationship between Leo and Marion, but that isn’t made clear until about 2/3 the way into the movie, and there are still revelations happening in the last possible moments, but by then I had given up on developing any sort of connection with either of them, because all they had done for the whole movie was look meaningfully at each other and talk about stuff I didn’t understand.
Not to mention that, as Marion finally pointed out, the “real world” the characters inhabited didn’t feel particularly real. I kept waiting for a big reveal at the end that the whole thing was just another dream layer, and that Marion’s interpretation of what “reality” was had been right all along. In the non-dream-world, Leo kept flitting from country to country, being chased by generically-named corporations, engaging in mad dashes through crowded places that entailed elbowing innocent bystanders in the face and squeezing through random narrow corridors, having way-too-cute phone calls with his too-perfect children who never aged, and getting told how amazing he was by everyone who’d ever known him, including his randomly British father and randomly French, occasionally dead, wife.
Even the effects, which normally would have drawn me in on their own, felt pointless here because they weren’t real. I love effects sequences in otherwise bad movies like 2012, because they’re premised on the idea that, for example, California really is falling into the ocean right now, and that’s a scary scary idea because I know there are fictional people down there who are going to have to swim to Vegas and they aren’t all going to make it, and gosh I sure hope John Cusack’s plane doesn’t run out of gas before they get to China! Etc. Sure, Inception changed its own rules halfway through and announced that getting killed in the dream world, which was previously a good thing, was suddenly bad. Okay, fine. But am I really supposed to have an opinion about buildings crumbling into the sea or the Champs-Élysées folding in on itself in the dream world when I know for a fact that there are no buildings and there is no Champs-Élysées? It felt like I was just supposed to be sitting there, not caring what actually happened, but simply being impressed by all the fancy things movie computers can do. But I already know what movie computers can do, because I saw The Lord of the Rings. But in Inception it wouldn’t have mattered if Legolas climbed an oliphaunt, because the oliphaunt would have existed entirely in Legolas’s head. (Or Cillian Murphy’s, I guess. By the way, how awesome would it have been if Cillian Murphy’s dreams has been about Legolas and oliphaunts, instead of getting kidnapped and chatting up bottle-blonde sex workers? Maybe then I really would’ve seen the movie a second time.)
Even Avatar, which was far more effects-driven than Inception, had a compelling story. It wasn’t earth-shattering ― it was the same story used in Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas and a hundred other stories about the complications of colonialism. It was there, mostly, to prop up the scenes of aliens running around in funny outfits and kissing with their ponytails. But that’s fine, because it was still a strong story, and because we’d been introduced to a protagonist whose central problem was introduced early on and clearly, and because we got to meet the other important characters through the protagonist’s point of view, which made us start to care about them the same way the protagonist did.
To bring this back to publishing, and YA in particular, for me, this gets to the whole “high-concept” idea that’s always getting thrown around. Inception would certainly qualify as high-concept. But there’s a reason that the most successful high-concept series in recent YA memory, Hunger Games, had people going to war on message boards over how its love triangle subplot would be revealed, instead of gushing about its insights on reality TV and desensitization in modern society. (I mean, not that people didn’t talk about that, but as far as I could tell they pondered that for a second or two, and then they went back to looking at fanart of Peeta.) But did anyone really care whether Leo and Marion somehow found a way to be together by the end of Inception?[2]
Story concept alone doesn’t do it for me. Not without strong characters and a strong story that’s about those characters. I’m surprised that formula ever works for anyone. But Inception was a big hit and got good reviews.
So maybe I was just having an off day. Any Inception fans want to weigh in? I’m worried that I just missed something really obvious.
[1] There was a lot that I missed in my single viewing, by the way, because the plot points got thrown out so fast and offhandedly in between the long, long sequences in which buildings crumbled and Ellen Page moved mirrors around. Did we ever find out what Marion Cotillard’s big secret that she locked in the safe was, by the way? Did I miss that too?
[2] And hey, if you did, more power to you; it’s entirely possible that it just flew over my head, the way the plight of all the poor kids in Rent did when I saw that movie. (I just kept trying to puzzle out how Mark and Roger hadn’t already starved to death, what with the lack of any apparent interest in getting jobs. I walked out of that movie feeling older than I had ever felt in my life. And I was 8 years younger than most of the principle cast.)
