was inception really hard too understand?

[SpaceBat]

Ohh... if you are into interpretations you will LOVE Un Chien Andalou, and if you are seriously into films you will need to see it at some point anyway, its one of the all time classics art films.

I like stories dense in new concepts and ideas even if they are clear as day like Blade Runner, The Fight Club, Ghost in the Shell or Reservoir Dogs, or amazing character construction like City Lights, Wall-e, the Godfather.

Don't care about that interpretations stuff so Lynch or stuff like Zhang Yang's doesnt touch me deeply.

I absolutely love watching movies and have already seen quite a few. Strange that I've never heard of it before, though. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll probably look into it sooner or later. I've seen all of the movies you mention in the latter part of your post and agree with you.

And yeah, Lynch movies aren't necessarily enjoyable for everyone. Do try and avoid most Lynch fans, though. A lot of these people believe that if you didn't enjoy his movies, you just don't understand it because you're stupid.

 

[KeyMaster45]

so the movie is actually a pretty straight forward film, but hollywood thought it would be to diffulcult? shows how much hollywood knows.

Actually what it shows is that Hollywood knows how to market a high concept film; Oceans 11 but in dreams. That's literally the gist of it and had they marketed it based on that it probably wouldn't have gotten as much attention. If you however issue a challenge to the public by say making the claim that they probably won't understand it then you're going to get viewers who go to watch it just to prove you wrong. They basically marketed the movie by telling the public they were too stupid to understand it and movie critics helped them along by reinforcing that.

There are of course those who probably won't understand it and further solidify the claim made by the marketing team by shouting to the world as an angry minority that the movie sucks because it's too hard to understand. Thus making the issued challenge of "we dare you to understand our movie" given by a minimum of three sources.

It's a brilliant marketing strategy and as we can see it worked like a charm to get people into the theaters and now facilitates the sale of DVD's to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

 

[nothingspringstomind]

Inception is easy to understand, Memento takes two watches to get, but Primer takes a degree course to follow.

Ninja'd

I was going to talk about Primer as anyone who says they understood that first time through is either lying or a savant.

OT; Inception was an excellent movie that really tickled me intellectually but was nowhere near as confusing to me as people said it would be.

Then again, i have been spending the last two years reading some of the heaviest science fiction i can get my grubby little hands on so most sci fi seems "dumbed down" to me now.

It's not, i've just got my headspace somewhere where i expect detailed theoretical physics lectures halfway through a plot. (Steven Baxter, i'm looking at you. Yeah, you! And that Arthur C. Clarke bloke!)

 

[somethingprofound]

And here I was thinking he never escaped the dream him and his wife were in...

and Le Chien Andalou... eugh eyes and The Matrix stole something eh?

 

[Amphoteric]

The only thing I didn't understand about the film is how a Japanese Businessman can get murder charges dropped by the US in a single phonecall.

 

[frizzlebyte]

I made the mistake of listening to the hype so when I actually saw it I was expecting a whole lot more and inevitably ended on "that is it? come on now..."

It's a cool movie tho, I wish there were more like this but deeper.

I had a little bit of that thought myself. I loved the movie, but it was not exactly as great as the hype would have suggested it might be. I think I was expecting something more akin to the Matrix. While there were brushes of philosophy painted in the movie, it didn't go as deeply as i would have liked.

OT: No, I understood the movie just fine. If someone couldn't follow it, they really weren't trying. That, or they were on something.

 

[justcallmeslow]

1. If the "spinny thing" fell then each character was indeed a separate person.
2. If it kept spinning, all the characters in the movie were just projections of the protagonist (DiCaprio and they were just different aspects of his subconsciousness, representations of different parts of his personality.

Here's something to realize. He did something rather stupid partway through the movie: He explained how the mini-top worked to someone. The architect. So it's very real that it IS a dream, even if it functions normally as if he wasn't in one.

When he's just met the new architect and is in the warehouse with her you see the top fall over. It's shown that it will spin indefinitely in dreams. You see him get back to that base level, the same as the warehouse, after the job, so it's definitely NOT a dream.

 

[Booze Zombie]

I found it pretty straight forward. I can never tell if people are joking when they go "WITHIN A DREAM, WITHIN A DREAM, WITHIN A DR-", so I'm not sure on the general understanding of it all.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I thought it was pretty straight forward. It surprises me if people didn't understand what was going on, that counts for Sucker Punch aswell.

I have a suspicion that a lot of people don't really pay attention when watching films, rather than they are too stupid to understand or follow them.

 

[kasperbbs]

No, i had no trouble understanding whats going on, they spent a lot of time explaining everything, perhaps a little too much.

 

[AngelicSven]

To me, Inception was extremely straightforward if you paid attention. Though I had a friend who didn't get it, she had to watch it three times total.

I meant show those people Primer or Memento, though I didn't find those to be the movie equivalents of Quantum Mechanics either.

 

[SillyBear]

It had a completely straight narrative. Not one thing was hard to follow.

 

[TriggerOnly]

not even alittle.

 

[pearcinator]

I understood it but it was over-complicated. There was so much exposition the whole way through it that they even spurted out more plot during the action scenes. It was good but far from Nolan's best imo (The Prestige)

I thought Memento and Dark Knight were both better than Inception too. Inception also had one of those 'lol troll'd!' endings I despise so much...give me a fucking ending!

 

[Custard_Angel]

Inception was a dumb persons smart movie. That's why it was popular. Watch Primer if you're looking for a smart persons smart movie. Basically shit all is explained and it requires you to know stuff to be able to understand it all.

 

[Outright Villainy]

I guess it's confusing if you're not paying attention. But seriously, you're paying up to ten bucks to see it, surely everyone is going to be, you know, watching it.

I don't know anyone confused by it anyway, beyond the whole ambiguity at the end, which was pretty intentional of course.

 

[Dogstile]

Not the hardest thing to understand in the world. Dreams, projections if the spinny top span forever, real world if not. Time warps the deeper you go.

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

Inception was ridiculously simple to understand.
Yes - it is clever, and I'm not trying to take that away from the film or the writer/director, but Inception is very clever in a totally unpretentious way. It lays everything out nice and clearly without trying to confuse or mislead the audience, and much like the film's main action sequences and overall setup we can see layer after layer after layer as the director reveals them to us, and in that revelation we get the overall genius and intelligence of the film.

There is one tiny, tiny thing that annoys me about Inception though.
The spinning top at the end.
And the way that people obsess over it.
Just saying, but it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER if the GODDAMN SPINNING TOP falls or not - it is a CATHARTIC FUCKING ENDING for Cobbs character arc because he walks away. Cobb no longer cares, therefore, if the audience was following the film, they should no longer care about the stupid fucking spinning top.
It wasn't even his to begin with - so the point of it isn't to say "Oh this could be a dream", but instead to say "Look at where he is now - he has left his past, his guilt etc. behind him. This was his last job. The totem is no longer needed, his guilt is no longer needed, all that he wants is right in front of him now."

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