ok, whatever dude. not even close. i'm tired of talking about nolan. we've been through this before. i have provided several links, however, that expand on exactly why inception is so poorly directed. now, you're free to disagree with any of the points raised, but you seem to simply be ignoring them.
either way, not a discussion worth having again.
To be fair, that one link was a super-obvious troll. The guy gives a list of movies that ostensibly deal "with memory or the unreal nature of reality", where he includes Charade and The Spanish Prisoner. Now I thoroughly enjoyed both those movies, but mind-fucks? They're just twisty thrillers, one in the breezy Hitchcock mode and one Mamet-style. If those count, then so do Maverick, Sleuth, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Wild Things (PROTIP: they don't).
Likewise the ostensibly superior heist flicks. Man, I love the Asphalt Jungle, but it's not a dedicated heist flick any more than Reservoir Dogs is about a bank robbery.
The problem with a lot of people's criticism of Inception (on-the-nose exposition, realistic dreamscapes, etc) is that they're based on preconceived notions of how a movie about dreams, or how all movies, should work. There's no consideration of how those fit with the rest of the film, or the demands of the genre.
That's why it's weird that you cited as your favorite scene:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
When Cillian Murphy opens the safe at the hospital and finds a picture of himself as a child with his father, a photo we were shown earlier in the movie.
and IIRC you linked to a critic arguing that this was better storytelling because it relied on a visual narrative rather than dialogue, and expressed genuine emotion from a character rather than a contrived, plot-driven motivation.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Which I think is NUTS. The scene can be read one of two ways:
1) It's sincere, in which case it's about as obvious and manipulative as your typical tearjerker or romantic comedy. From the first time you see Murphy's character look at the picture, it's an obvious Chekhov's Gun, only with filial yearning as bullets. I think everyone in the theater pretty much knew that was what he was going to find in the safe.
2) It's the moment when the heist is successful.
He was actively manipulated into imagining this to be true, according to a plan that was shared with the audience an hour ago. This isn't the scene in which father and son embrace, it's the one in which the bank manager finds that the vault has been emptied of cash.
To the degree that it shows anything character-wise, it shows his need for validation, and his willingness to deceive himself in order to get that validation. I think that makes for a more interesting character, but it also places the emotional impact of the revelation squarely behind the plot significance: they did it, and now they just need to get out.
Praising that particular scene on "show, don't tell" grounds just seems wrong. It's trying to evaluate something based only on the first lesson of Film 101, rather than taking any of the context into account. It's like trying to map the evolution of a species using only 2x2 Mendel squares.
