Friday, July 16, 2010

Inception

I knowingly make the following overstatement with the excuse that I just finished watching it: Inception just might be the perfect movie. It is certainly the only movie worth reviewing that I have seen since the last movie I reviewed almost exactly a year ago, and has almost as certainly earned instant placement on my Awesome list (at least 3 viewings are required for official recognition on that list, however).

What is so great about this movie:
  • The story is told with elegance, economy and utmost skill. I will not describe the story here. Don't try to read anything about it. I will give a couple examples that will not give anything away. First example: the natural and completely satisfying resolution of one of the core plots of the movie is nothing more than the expression on a character's face -- even a single word would have been too much. Second example: the scene with the top. Again, without a single word, the spinning of a top allows the audience to understand exactly what the top is for, but more impressively, what the top is for combines with what was learned in the scene before to illuminate just what fear the character has to contend with on a daily basis and the kind of life he leads, and does so more effectively than any on-screen conversation ever could.
  • It hits all the right notes. Literally. The music does a flawless job of maintaining the subtlety, urgency and unreality of the movie from beginning to end.
  • Everything in the hotel with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best executed and most imaginative action since The Bourne Ultimatum. My surprise at how believable Gordon-Levitt was was the only thing that took me out of the movie for even a few seconds.
This will be a movie I see more than twice. It should also be an Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay, Best Score, Best Visual Effects, and possibly Best Cinematography and several things in the various editing categories.

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