Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: Inception (1 Viewer)

[Edwin-S]

What was so hard to follow on this film? To me, it didn't seem that hard to follow, but it sure did have a stupid ending. Nolan thought he was being clever by trying to create forced uncertainty. I lost a bit of respect for him because of that game playing. Otherwise, the rest of the film was pretty good, even though I did want to see Cobb and his crew get annihilated. Too bad that didn't happen.

 

[Brian Borst]

Originally Posted by Edwin-S

What was so hard to follow on this film? To me, it didn't seem that hard to follow, but it sure did have a stupid ending. Nolan thought he was being clever by trying to create forced uncertainty. I lost a bit of respect for him because of that game playing. Otherwise, the rest of the film was pretty good, even though I did want to see Cobb and his crew get annihilated. Too bad that didn't happen.

Well, I didn't think it was hard to follow, but there were many people who did. About the ending, it could go both ways, depending on what your view is. I don't see what's so bad about that.

 

[Edwin-S]

Originally Posted by Brian Borst

Originally Posted by Edwin-S
What was so hard to follow on this film? To me, it didn't seem that hard to follow, but it sure did have a stupid ending. Nolan thought he was being clever by trying to create forced uncertainty. I lost a bit of respect for him because of that game playing. Otherwise, the rest of the film was pretty good, even though I did want to see Cobb and his crew get annihilated. Too bad that didn't happen.

Well, I didn't think it was hard to follow, but there were many people who did. About the ending, it could go both ways, depending on what your view is. I don't see what's so bad about that.

With all that happened in the film, I just feel it was the type of film that required some sort of closure. Nolan's stunt at the end just felt like he was playing games with the audience.


The wobble at the end served no purpose from Cobb's vantage point because he never pays attention to the top after setting it to spinning. The wobble was stuck in there strictly to destroy any sense of closure that the audience was expecting. It was a cheap stunt. It was just the same as if the director turned around in his chair, looked out of the screen, winked at the audience and said, "is it real or is it memorex?" I found his "wink" annoying, especially after watching to what lengths the character was willling to go in order to get back to his real life with his children.

 

[Edwin-S]

Other than what I stated above, the film was better than average.I think it was better than "The Dark Knight". If I can find it for a good price, I'll probably pick it up. I tried editing this comment in to my original post, but I could not enter anything below the spoiler tag.

 

[Citizen87645]

I started receiving emails related to the Project Somnacin BD-Live feature, so I updated that part of the review.

 

[Brian Borst]

Originally Posted by Edwin-S

Originally Posted by Brian Borst


Originally Posted by Edwin-S

What was so hard to follow on this film? To me, it didn't seem that hard to follow, but it sure did have a stupid ending. Nolan thought he was being clever by trying to create forced uncertainty. I lost a bit of respect for him because of that game playing. Otherwise, the rest of the film was pretty good, even though I did want to see Cobb and his crew get annihilated. Too bad that didn't happen.

Well, I didn't think it was hard to follow, but there were many people who did. About the ending, it could go both ways, depending on what your view is. I don't see what's so bad about that.

With all that happened in the film, I just feel it was the type of film that required some sort of closure. Nolan's stunt at the end just felt like he was playing games with the audience.


The wobble at the end served no purpose from Cobb's vantage point because he never pays attention to the top after setting it to spinning. The wobble was stuck in there strictly to destroy any sense of closure that the audience was expecting. It was a cheap stunt. It was just the same as if the director turned around in his chair, looked out of the screen, winked at the audience and said, "is it real or is it memorex?" I found his "wink" annoying, especially after watching to what lengths the character was willling to go in order to get back to his real life with his children.




I still think you can look at it both ways. If you want the closure, then the wobble at the end is meaningless.

However, if you think that the ending that way seems a bit too perfect, then it can be explained as Cobb dealing with the fact that his wife killed herself, and that he can never see his children again. A sort of therapy for him. I think that's a whole new level altogether.

 

[John Skoda]

Originally Posted by Steve Tannehill
Looks like Best Buy has an $18.99 single-disc blu-ray that Amazon does not carry.

We'll see tomorrow, but I don't think there is a blu-ray only pack, just the combo. I don't like the combo packs. I guess they simplify things for the manufacturers, but it seems to me they lower sales. In my need to get rid of stuff I don't need, I just end up giving the non-blu disks away, creating fewer people who need to buy the movie.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

Best Buy's website is listing both the combo pack and a single-disc BD (with images of the packaging) for $17.99 each. (In the US, the package that includes the script is $30!)

 

[Mike Frezon]

Originally Posted by John Skoda

Originally Posted by Steve Tannehill
Looks like Best Buy has an $18.99 single-disc blu-ray that Amazon does not carry.

We'll see tomorrow, but I don't think there is a blu-ray only pack, just the combo. I don't like the combo packs. I guess they simplify things for the manufacturers, but it seems to me they lower sales. In my need to get rid of stuff I don't need, I just end up giving the non-blu disks away, creating fewer people who need to buy the movie.

Originally Posted by Aaron Silverman
Best Buy's website is listing both the combo pack and a single-disc BD (with images of the packaging) for $17.99 each. (In the US, the package that includes the script is $30!)

Like John, I am curious to see what BB has to offer tomorrow. That 1-disc Inception is prominently featured in their Sunday flyer...and, as Aaron, notes, it is also listed at bb.com. What surprises me is that NOWHERE do they take credit for having an exclusive on that title...which noone else seems to have.


It really seems like a moot point anyway...because why not just get the combo pack that all the big retailers are now is going to have for $17.99...

 

[Sam Posten]

Spoiler infographic:


https://calacanis.com/2010/07/27/inception-infographic/

 

[John Skoda]

Best Buy does have a blu-ray, non-combo pack in the stores. However, the combo pack contains a second blu-ray disc of extras which may not be included in the non-combo. Packaging doesn't indicate how many discs are in the non-combo, so I'm assuming there's just one disc in there. The list of extras on the back of the two packages is definitely a different list.

 

[Jason Adams]

*hint*'


You CAN price match the 3 disc Blu-ray set from 24.99 to 17.99 at Best Buy, as the 3 disc set on their website is 17.99.

 

[Dennis Maricic]

Getting my copy tomorrow. Ordered the special edition Briefcase from amazon UK.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0041O4SA4/ref=oss_product


Price was good, and 2 day ship via UPS was only 4 pounds.


Can't wait to watch this film again. Saw it in IMAX originally.


There were certain scenes that gave me goose bumps.

 

[music613]

I ordered mine (3-disc) from Amazon a month ago when it was $24.99 - it was delivered yesterday by UPS followed by an email from Amazon stating that the price had dropped to $17.99. One peculiarity, though: digital copy is by download, not from a digital copy disc as part of the set. Weird. But perhaps it's all a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, eh?


PS - Still no word about replacements for the defective disc(s) in Twilight Zone, Season 1. Boo!

 

[Southpaw]

Loved this movie when I saw it in a NYC theater over the summer and I love it even more now that I got to experience it in my own theater. The audio was so intense. Easily one of the best in my collection. Absolutely top shelf A/V quality.

Here's one question that I wondered upon second viewing....




Why didn't Fisher recognize Saito in his dream? Once Cobb told him it was a dream and he worked with him to get in the compound on the 3rd dream level, I wondered why he didn't recognize him. If he did, then Cobb's cover would have been blown. Saito is obviously a powerful wealthy businessman who was in a similar industry, which is why Saito hired Cobb to begin with. To destroy's Fisher's company.

Plot hole or some other explanation?

 

[AlexS2]

Originally Posted by Southpaw

Loved this movie when I saw it in a NYC theater over the summer and I love it even more now that I got to experience it in my own theater. The audio was so intense. Easily one of the best in my collection. Absolutely top shelf A/V quality.

Here's one question that I wondered upon second viewing....




Why didn't Fisher recognize Saito in his dream? Once Cobb told him it was a dream and he worked with him to get in the compound on the 3rd dream level, I wondered why he didn't recognize him. If he did, then Cobb's cover would have been blown. Saito is obviously a powerful wealthy businessman who was in a similar industry, which is why Saito hired Cobb to begin with. To destroy's Fisher's company.

Plot hole or some other explanation?

Do you remember the faces of people in your dreams?


I don't.


Just my two cents.

 

[Southpaw]

Originally Posted by AlexS2

Loved this movie when I saw it in a NYC theater over the summer and I love it even more now that I got to experience it in my own theater. The audio was so intense. Easily one of the best in my collection. Absolutely top shelf A/V quality.

Here's one question that I wondered upon second viewing....




Why didn't Fisher recognize Saito in his dream? Once Cobb told him it was a dream and he worked with him to get in the compound on the 3rd dream level, I wondered why he didn't recognize him. If he did, then Cobb's cover would have been blown. Saito is obviously a powerful wealthy businessman who was in a similar industry, which is why Saito hired Cobb to begin with. To destroy's Fisher's company.

Plot hole or some other explanation?

[/quote]
Do you remember the faces of people in your dreams?


I don't.


Just my two cents.





Sometimes, if I know the person that I'm dreaming about. Strangers I don't remember though. I would think that as business rivals, his face would be recognizable. Of course, if the ending scene on the plane when they land in LA is a dream, then it all doesn't matter.

 

[music613]

Inception: On the egregious misuse of music in a motion picture


As a professional composer who has also had a lifelong interest in “movie music” (Bernard Herrmann was a correspondent and teacher), I often find myself assaulted by what I will call “The Curse of John Williams.” Williams is a very gifted composer, both of film music and of concert works as well, but the wall-to-wall music film-score aesthetic which he brought back into fashion beginning with Star Wars in 1977 has long since morphed into the standard method whereby film composers approach their tasks under the fashion that says, in effect, “people are stupid and need aural cues at every possible moment to tell them what to think and how to feel.” Thus, especially in the realm of fantasy and science-fiction, we have an endless stream of film scores whose opening title to end title continuity leave me utterly exhausted, aurally fatigued by the incessant blather of overcooked, hyperventilating accompaniments whose minimalist compositional techniques have all but destroyed the effect of music in film.


Bernard Herrmann’s operating principal was “less is more” – an attitude developed during his pre-Hollywood years as a composer of scores for radio dramas. When he made the transition to film, his overriding sense of economy and brevity made his contributions to the various films he scored all the more effective precisely because they were not constant – because they were present only when the dramaturgical flow of the film required the additional aural element to complete the visual. Herrmann was one of the very first minimalist composers, long before John Adams, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and all the other minimalists came on the scene, indeed before minimalism was a definable musical technique. As we know, minimalism became an end in and of itself, and not a means to an end. Our current crop of Hollywood composers have largely if not entirely, it seems to me, bought into the utter and total corruption of Herrmann’s “less is more” and have turned it into “more less is more.”


The most recent, and for my money, egregious example of this is Hans Zimmer’s score for the Christopher Nolan film “Inception.” When I saw the film in its “live” environment, that is, in the movie house, Zimmer’s score, never for a minute approaching anything even remotely subtle or understated, was intrusive in a way that seemed to have crossed over into new territories of aural overkill. When I acquired the recently released BluRay version of the film, and then watched it on my home theater system, both my wife and I were overwhelmed by the sheer chutzpah, the noise level, the unceasing repetition, over and over and over again, of the same musical figures absolutely without development, extension or variation. The phenomenal clarity of both the visual and audio elements drove home the point that this score, for all its synthesized and “live” musical elements, was totally inappropriate both in terms of conception and execution. It was often impossible for us to hear dialogue clearly, even though the bluray realization places most all of the dialogue clearly in the center front channels. I cannot fathom Nolan’s approval of this kind of overkill. But I am reminded of the story Herrmann told about his adventures with William Friedkin when Friedkin asked him to score The Exorcist. Herrmann was, if nothing else, perhaps the single most original and imaginative film composer – and when he told Friedkin that he would use many French Horns in the score, Friedkin told him that he didn’t want anything French in the music! Utter stupidity and ignorance there for a certainty. Zimmer’s patented overkill strikes me as director Nolan’s equivalent.


Now Zimmer is indeed a talented composer even as his scores have their characteristic bloated overstatement. But, with Inception, the score is so exaggerated and the presentation, especially in 7 channel bluray, so intrusive as to destroy what is otherwise a marvelously ingenious and engrossing film. I am not stupid. I don’t need the Wagnerian leit-motiv method pushed beyond the outer limits. I do not ever want music in a film to overwhelm absolutely every other element. And, I certainly don’t want to walk away from a film annoyed to the point of distraction by a score which shows not a whit of respect for the audience listening to it in the context for which it was composed.


I protest!

 

[robbbb1138]

I'm something of a score fanatic, but I've generally come to tune out most of Hans Zimmer's work when watching something he scored. He's the new Danny Elfman to me, overused and repetitive.

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

Avrohom, I enjoyed your post though I don't entirely agree with some of your conclusions. Although Nolan has traditionally been more interested in score as a soundscape, most particularly in his work with David Julyan, I have to believe that the music in the film is presented as desired by the director to express the elements of his film. Heavy-handed at times - certainly, but that's what you get with Zimmer - and I think he proudly embraces it. I wonder if Nolan, concerned about the complexity of his plot for larger audiences, requested the additional musical nudging. I enjoyed the hour I spend after the film explaining it to the people I watched it with, seeing their faces light with a few revelations that they appeared to miss. I love a film that can get people talking about it afterwards.


I enjoy listening to the score on the CD while I work and have yet to watch the film on my home theater, though I don't recall the music being distracting at the theater. The only score I can recall pulling me out of the viewing experience was Patrick Doyle's score for Frankenstein.

Originally Posted by music613

And, I certainly don’t want to walk away from a film annoyed to the point of distraction by a score which shows not a whit of respect for the audience listening to it in the context for which it was composed.


I protest!