Review: Pacific Rim (film)

They don't even say "pacific rim" a single time in the movie.

I went into Pacific Rim with mediocre expectations¹ but was very pleasantly surprised. I ended up loving it so much I felt a bit guilty about loving a movie with so much pointless action.

Just to spoil the first few minutes: The story is set a few years in the future. A portal has opened in the Pacific Ocean and giant monsters called Kaiju are invading from another dimension². They cannot be defeated by conventional methods³ and their blood is very toxic and acidic⁴, which precludes nuking them to oblivion as the blood would spread everywhere. So the solution has been to build giant robots, "Jaegers", to challenge the unsavory invaders to a round of goode ole fisticuffes. The Jaegers, it turns out, cannot be piloted by one person safely, because the mental strain is too great⁵, but must be piloted by two people in tandem⁶. This is why I say the premise turned me off - it's simply asking me to just accept too many illogical things, even for a mecha movie. Happily, if you do accept them, the stage is set for an epic battle of giant robot on giant monster, which is very enjoyable!

I, for one, think non-anthropomorphic human war machines fighting anthropomorphic dinosaur monsters also looks really really cool.

And to spoil a bit more, I thought the sequence at the beginning had a lot of emotional impact, where we see the protagonist's brother and co-pilot get yanked out of the cockpit by a Kaiju. The way the characters are introduced, and the abruptness of the death is staggering, as you realize you are now watching what might as well be a movie about a pianist who broke his hands in the first few minutes.

Something that I really loved in Pacific Rim were the characters. They were like the characters of Street Fighter - every single one was larger than life, a combination of a fighting movie stereotype matched to a national stereotype. These surreal characters fit perfectly with the surreal mecha battle setting. The two scientists were something else, I loved watching their banter and friendly rivalry, and I loved how excessively, absurdly eccentric they both were. And lastly, I have to mention Ron Pearlman's character- he chewed the scenery like a great big scenery chewing thing, and every second of it was heaven. Briefly teaming him up with Newt, the scientist, was a great idea.

Mandatory mecha that fires a missile swarm from its chest.

Another nice surprise was a decent romance plot. Like in many action movies, the love interest has very little actual social interaction with the protagonist, so there is no time for them to discover how deeply compatible their personalities are, and so on. Attraction could only be physical, but since the movie is full of attractive women, then the question why the protagonist is so focused on her in particular comes up. This is nicely averted in Pacific Rim - the attraction happens as the two create the neurological bond. I'm not sure she can even rightly be called a love interest. The relationship seem to stay platonic for almost the entire movie.

Oh, so it's that kind of movie...

It looks beautiful, of course. Del Toro has put in a great deal of effort into building the entire cockpit interior for filming, and it's paid off. The in-cockpit scenes look great. The Jaeger CGI was also decent (the Jaegers themselves looked great but some of the weapons looked a bit too CGIish). My complaint with it is a minor one that's been raised elsewhere: Every single fight we see is set in night-time rain. While I appreciate the dramatic properties of such weather, is every single day in the Pacific now gripped in storm? Couldn't there be a few more scenes where we can just get a good look at the Jaegers?

The most bad-ass looking Jaeger, unfortunately its only purpose is to get its ass kicked by Kaiju to build dramatic tension.

Speaking of scenes, back to complaining: The whole backstory of Mako was done well, in terms of the emotional content of the scenes. However, I think the several cuts to young Mako were a bit excessive. One slightly longer Mako dream sequence scene would have been enough to tell the whole story and, and the screen time saved could go towards more cool giant robot fight. The whole movie had a bunch of scenes that showed things that were really blindingly obvious by the time they were showed, and it seems they were only included to keep the stupid people interested and ensure a good return (it wasn't particularly bad or damaging to the movie, so if it actually works, I'm okay with it - more good movies should perform better so that they keep getting made).

Pacific Rim isn't too attached to its secondaries, either. I have 2 problems here: First, the Russian Jaeger and the Chinese Jaeger were fucking awesome. Why did they have to be destroyed so quickly, barely having a chance to show off some of their stuff (especially the 4-armed Chinese one!)? Yes, I know, it's more dramatic this way... But I still wish I saw a bit more. Not to mention the death of the characters: It was just glossed over as something insignificant, even though these are elite, irreplaceable pilots and long-time heroes to the people.

I despise people who say "turn off your brain and enjoy it lol", and hold that whole genre in contempt. And I'll admit that Pacific Rim didn't really have anything artistic to it, except in its aesthetics (both the visuals as well as the characters and how the narrative progresses - the backstory is sloppy and lame, but the actual story told by the movie has some elegance to it). Despite that, I enjoyed it a lot. Perhaps the reason is that it wasn't manipulative or pretentious about delivering its dumb action (and didn't promise anything it didn't deliver).

Score: 4/5


¹: Having seen the premise beforehand, I thought it seemed badly written, and suspected a "turn off your brain" movie which covers up bad acting with flashy CGI. Idris Elba is also one of my favorite actors, and I was a bit jaded with how Idris Elba's talent was wasted on a boring role in another big-budget recent film, Prometheus.

²: I never understood what this means, exactly. What other dimension? Length? Width? Time? Mass? Why can't sci-fi writers stop using this stupid cliche and just say the portal is a wormhole to another universe (well, technically the word "universe" implies there isn't any other, but anyway), or even better, a distant part of our universe? I gather that the intended meaning is that the "other dimension" is in fact a space accessible by moving from our familiar space along a dimension we are unaware of, but it still sounds silly and technically wormholes would cover this anyway.

³: This is one of the flaws that bothered me a bit. It is never quite explained why it is so hard to assault these large, hulking, lumbering monsters with tanks, airplanes and battleships. One could even devise ways of adapting conventional weapons to cause mainly blunt force trauma, such as artillery firing large, slow, solid metal rounds, helicopters dropping big wrecking balls, low-explosive yield cruise missiles which drive long metal rods into the Kaiju, and so on. We see some fighter airplanes do a fancy strafe of the Kaiju, flying between it's arms, legs, one getting caught in the jaw... This sequence was very annoying. Those airplanes were F-22s or F-35s (I couldn't get a good look, probably F-35 if this is the future). They do not engage with a machine gun. As a rule, jets from the late cold war onwards almost exclusively engage from dozens of kilometers away, with missiles. The GAU-12 cannon carried by some variants of the F-35 has a range of several thousand meters. It is an utterly stupid thing for these VTOL-capable supersonic planes to be flying right into the Kaiju's face to use their cannon (and not also using missiles). Why aren't they sending A-10s or just plain old bombers for a pure ground strike mission with no AA, anyway?

⁴: Another thing I don't like. Giving the Kaiju toxic blood seems like a great way of justifying giant robot fights, but it creates problems: First, if the blood is so toxic, why don't the Kaiju just cut themselves, and run all over important human areas, spreading their toxic blood everywhere before running back to the portal, to break the logistical capabilities of humanity with chemical warfare? And why isn't fighting them with giant robots just as harmful to the environment (the fights are shown to get very bloody quickly)? Even if the blood is that bad, one could lure the Kaiju into some kind of crater or volcano, and then nuke them; the blood would just stay in the crater.

⁵: Yet another thing that annoyed me. This is a common fiction trope, but utter bullshit. The brain is not like a toilet that clogs if you try to flush too much stuff in it. It just processes what it can get, and ignores the rest. It is impossible (assuming no neurological diseases) to injure your brain by "overworking it", the most that will happen is you will get a slight headache, and your brain will work so poorly from exhaustion that you'll be forced to rest (or you'll just fall asleep). When you try listening to 10 conversations at once, do you collapse in an epileptic seizure because of "too much information"? No, you just can't follow most of them, and the noise annoys you a little. The movie also portrays this "overload" by having characters lose consciousness with a nose bleed, which implies more of a blood pressure problem than a "brain getting overloaded" problem. Lastly, even if "brain overload" was a real thing, the pilots are asked to simply move their limbs, which the robot detects and copies - something we do all the time, every day. I don't see how you can possibly overload your brain by flailing your limbs around in a harness.

⁶: First, it's a bit odd that the "load" of a Jaeger just so happens to be too much for one person, but not too much for two people. What a coincidence! It could have been 10 people, or 50, why not? And if a second pilot is all it takes, couldn't you make a simpler Jaeger (maybe with no upper body and just some jet engines instead?) that is safe for 1 pilot? And, if you were going to divvy up the work of controlling a Jaeger between two brains, why divide it with complete symmetry? You could just do what modern tank crews do: One person is commander (and gunner), one person is driver, optionally a third person is a dedicated gunner. The commander could handle Jaeger ranged weapons, talking to command, watching the maps and sensors, keeping track of damage level, devising strategy, while the driver only moves and fights close combat. This would also reduce the burden on each brain, but you wouldn't need any particular synergy between pilots, so it's an open question why this design was not used by the Jaeger project executives.

Review: Irreversible

Pretentious fucking cunt, stop fucking with the letters!

What a shitty movie.

The plot is that a slutty libertine leaves her meek, pathetic husband for an idiotic douchebag, gets raped, then the douchebag and the ex-husband (who are somehow friends) go looking for the rapist, can't find him, and instead beat some random guy to death.

As you can see, it's a boring, pointless plot. Nobody would watch it if that was all, I imagine Gaspar Noé recognized that as well and added some gimmicks.

First, the movie is extremely tasteless in that way that is oh so appealing to eager teenage boys and immature persons desperate to show how mature, cool and edgy they are.

When is this stupid idea that provocation equals art going to die off already? Look, you show a man getting his face beat to a pulp¹ with a fire extinguisher. You show a woman subjected to anal rape². There's disgusting penises randomly dangling everywhere³. There's blatant racism⁴ and homophobia. You're not provoking me. You're not moving me. I'm just annoyed because I'm subjected to this crap and there's no point to it. It's tiresome. After having invested an hour and a half of my time into this asshole's movie, contributing to his popularity and profits, all I get in return is contempt, and I (I think rightfully) feel cheated.

The second gimmick is that it's told in reverse. Whoop dee fucking doo. It contributes nothing to the film (except that I have to keep switching back and forth to figure out who is who and what's going on) and it's not interesting. If this was at least the first movie to do it, I could understand, but it's made 2 years after fucking Memento. "Tell the story backwards" was the mainstreamest fucking thing ever by then. Of course, it's just another layer of pretentious stylistic bullshit slathered over a pointless core.

Gimmick #3 is the fucking retarded camera work: Half the time the lights are strobing on and off and the camera is veering all over the place. I don't just mean the "edgy" shaky-cam like in Battlestar Galactica (I actually didn't even hate that) - at some points the camera literally turns upside-down and does 360 around the room (while the action is going on in the corner and you can't see). The scenes are all dirty and dark and you can't see shit. I had to turn my monitor's brightness up just to be able to tell what's going on!

I imagine some fart-sniffers think this is totally awesome and artistic and what not. Well I think it's shit. Using a shaky cam to indicate disorientation doesn't work when A) the camera is shaky all the fucking time and B) the character doesn't even act disoriented at all while the camera is spinning. If I had to guess, I'd say the camera is so obnoxious simply to continue the trend of contempt for the audience disguised as art⁵.

There's no point to Irréversible. The only good thing about is that Monica Belluci has nude scenes. The story is boring and clichéd. The delivery antagonizes the viewer. The characters are all despicable. Gaspar Noé is a hack. Why did I even watch this? Enter the Void was a piece of horseshit.

Score: 1/5



¹: Much of it looked quite fake to me. Even though I'm a big wimp about these things I couldn't help laughing at how terrible it was.
²: It doesn't even make any sense. The guy is a pimp arguing with his prostitute, then he sees some woman and just randomly decides to... rape her. In the middle of a wealthy area in Paris. Does he somehow figure he won't get caught? Does he not care? He certainly doesn't have much urgency about his movements. In fact, someone does see them, and then runs away. Why doesn't he call the police? I guess life is just shit and Irréversible is edgy and uncomprising like that.
³: A real rogue's gallery: Grimy patrons of a gay bar, a transsexual prostitute flashing her dirty hairy crotch, the forementioned rapist's tool after he's finished. If you're going to show porn, at least show some that isn't disgusting!
⁴: While looking for the rapist's favorite gay bar (no, I don't know why a gay man is raping a woman either) the douchebag, Marcus, becomes enraged because the taxi driver doesn't know where this particular bar (called RECTUM, because gay bars must always be the epitome of seedy and repulsive, probably because gays are subhuman filth) is, and asks Marcus whether he's gay (as I said, gays are scum so being so much as suspected of buggery is obviously the ultimate insult). The taxi driver happens to be Asian, and the douchebag hurls racist epithets at him. They then assault him and take his taxi. There's no consequence to this scene. It could be taken out and it wouldn't make a difference. But what I don't get is, why does the taxi driver have to be Chinese, and why must Marcus insult specifically his race? Can't he call him an old fuck, an idiot, an incompetent taxi driver, anything? If this was real life, I wouldn't put much malice behind the coincidence, but this is a planned out movie, so there's no coincidences. Gaspar Noé was writing the script, and he must have actually thought "You know what, I'll make this guy Chinese, that way I can have this character call him a slit-eye and it'll be that much more edgy!" at some point.
⁵: I think the way this works is, Gaspar Noé makes a movie that is as deliberately annoying and insulting to the audience as possible, and then pretends that it's all just part of the "art". Then, gullible idiots lap it up, because they want to prove to everyone how they are so refined, and they like such terrible movies that only a true film enthusiast could like because good films are an acquired taste.

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I love Half in the Bag. Which is odd, because you would naively expect a critic's value to be how much they are able to predict your reaction to a film, and I'm not sure HitB could even outperform a random number generator for me in that sense.

Still, though, they always manage to make interesting points about a movie. They're not even necessarily true, in my opinion- I disagree with a lot of what they say, especially for movies that I have seen myself. But it makes no difference. I'm still glad they bring up their points, because even though in my mind they are wrong, being forced to stop and think and figure out exactly why they are wrong, and to be made aware that it is even possible to have an opinion on the issue such as theirs, is a very satisfying thing for me. They've hated a few movies I thought were good, and they've raved about quite a few which I hated, but in either of situations it has never felt like a waste of time to watch the movies on which I disagree with them.

So ultimately, they are excellent critics- whenever I decide to see a movie based on what they say, I never regret the decision. They even supply something like insurance: Even if I think a movie sucks, I can still think about their commentary on it, and I will have gotten something worthwhile out of it anyway.

To get to the point...

So that's how I was convinced to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Their episode dealing with it is quite good, so I'll just point you to it if you haven't seen it yet.

I guess I'll start with the rape scene. The way they talked about it, I was expecting something truly amazing and clever. What I got was a scene which is basically only there as a quick and dirty (har har) way of signalling to the audience that "this is bad guy, you should hate this guy". The floor polisher man, too, did nothing for me. Maybe the theater I was in just had a really shitty sound system, but I could only hear him before the blowjob part started. So, yeah.

They did manage to make the guy intensely unlikable, though. Granted, it's hard to fuck that up, when the character is one-dimensional and his one dimension is that he is a slimy sack of shit who rapes an adorable awkward, shy Rooney Mara. Still, it was interesting how they managed to make the second rape scene really uncomfortable.

I didn't really catch many "beautiful Sweden" scenes. There are several scenes where you glimpse the Swedish landscape, mostly covered in snow, but the landscape isn't really the focus of those scenes, and I didn't find any of it particularly captivating (maybe it's because I'm a bitter old man). What I did catch was how soul-crushingly bleak Sweden looked (probably also for the same reason). It was full of gray streets and gray houses with gray-blond people drinking gray tea in their pale rooms filled with beige-gray, blocky furniture. It was just like playing Skyrim! This time, though, it was at least appropriate, considering the tone of the narrative.

It was also interesting how some of the scenes were shot. One of my favorites is near the beginning: We see a character's office from where his laptop is sitting. He walks in, fiddles with something on a small table, then sits down behind the computer. Ordinarily, we'd watch him walk in, lean over the table, then turn around, walk to the computer and sit down. Instead, the movie cuts abruptly from him leaning towards the table to him sitting behind the computer like a little time-lapse video. It's not the first time it was done, of course, but it was still kinda cute.

Speaking of the Dragon Tattoo-Sweden, it was hilarious how everyone spoke with this Scandinavian accent, because you know, we're in Sweden, for 95% of the movie. The other 5% is when they travel to London, and even then, most of the talking in London is done by two Swedes with accent intact. I don't know what the point of it was, really.

The story

The development of the narrative follows the book very closely, and it seems the book is one of those books where it is obvious the author cares nothing for producing well-structured, "good" literature and just writes about whatever the hell he damn well pleases. It's a bit jarring and quite funny when some of this seeps into the movie- there's a part where Lisbeth, the eponymous (is it really an eponym if it's a narrator-given nickname?) girl with a dragon tattoo, just randomly goes to a bar and picks up a chick and sleeps with her. This serves no purpose other than show two chicks making out. It establishes Lisbeth as bisexual (as if it wasn't obvious already), and I guess you could draw some link between that and her history of sexual abuse, except it makes no difference. Her bisexuality has no bearing on anything at all in the rest of the movie (and it's kind of silly to consider sexual preference a big part of someone's personality, isn't it?) and it would have changed absolutely nothing if she was straight, so I dunno what's up with that. It was this funny "oh, and did I mention she's bi? Cuz she totally is, guys!" moment from the movie. Ssssure, movie. Whatever you say. :rolleyes:

Speaking of pointless things, what's with the cat? There's this cat that Mikael, the other main character, adopts and gradually bonds with over the course of the movie, and then the cat just... Dies. I mean, yeah, spoilers, but whatever. Anyway, they find the cat's mutilated corpse. And then... Nothing. The movie just forgets about it. What on earth was that for? It's not like the movie needed padding, it was long as fuck. Nor did Mikael need further establishing as a goody-two-shoes softie. And it was such a cute cat... What the hell, movie? Poor kitty. =(

Besides that, I had a very similar opinion of the structure and flow of the narrative to another "book movie" I saw recently, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. They both appear to follow their book pretty closely -I read neither- and the movie ends up feeling quite different from movies which are made straight from movie scripts. The plot doesn't have the familiar, simple, obvious elements that movie plots have, and you can't really break it down into "the story starts like so, then this guy does that, and then it concludes when this thing happens". It's just, "stuff happens", and the main plot isn't that central to the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or bad, but it certainly makes for an interesting (and slightly odd) movie.

Complaints

It was a bit of a hassle keeping track of who is who and whose relation to who is what. I imagine it was one of those thing which is described adequately in a book, for a book, and when it's a movie it's suddenly not as easy to follow anymore. I mean, in a book, a name is very prominent and effective as an identifier, partly because just about every book talks a lot about third persons. Watching people talk about other people is boring, on the other hand, so movies have characters say only their dialogue; and it's unnatural to say someone's name often when interacting with them, so I'm not surprised I lost track of all the Wernerströms and the Jorgens and the Hurgens and the Gurgens and what have you. Although, maybe it's just that I'm bad with names.

Lisbeth, and Mikael were quite interesting in general, though. Lisbeth herself is really weird, and has some weird (and nasty) stuff happen to her, and deals with it in cool ways which are interesting to watch. Mikael is actually quite boring, but it just so happens that a boring character like that is a perfect counterpart for Lisbeth, and it's funny to watch them interact.

I'm also not sure how I feel about Lisbeth looking gradually more "conventionally pretty" as the movie progresses. In her first appearance, she shows up with this weird mohawk and leather outfit. Then we keep seeing her looking much more conservative: She ties her hair in a ponytail, dresses in more usual clothes and puts on less crazy black make-up. The first time I saw Lisbeth, I thought, "man, what a weirdo", but later on I just thought she looked cute. It seemed somehow cheap and against the spirit of the character. Obviously, I'm supposed to think she is weird because that's her character, but I'm also supposed to like her because she's one of the protagonists. While the "normalization" of Lisbeth accomplishes both, in a sense, by the time I liked her she wasn't at all anymore, even though it seemed to me like the kind of character you're supposed to like despite them being weird.

Conclusion

From what I've seen, I get the impression that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, while not badly written, is hardly great literature. It seems like one of those "good bad books" (hope you don't find the hyperlinking too pretentious, but that's what I mean by the term). The movie is certainly a "good bad book movie". You don't take away much if anything from it, but you do enjoy seeing it.

The plot is really predictable (down to the cute bittersweet end), in that it's often obvious what kind of development (usually there's only one possibility) would make for an interesting story at any given point, and the movie doesn't disappoint in orchestrating exactly that development. On the flipside, although you can easily see what will happen next, it's not that obvious what will happen after that, because you can never tell where the movie goes with anything, so it's not such a tedious experience. As someone who has neither seen the older Dragon Tattoo movie, nor read the book, I can recommend seeing this movie if you are likewise unfamiliar with the franchise. Otherwise, well, you've read my review, make up your own mind.

Score: 4/5

Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

You thought this site was just for ridiculously late, lazy, loquacious video game reviews? Well, guess what: turns out I can also bitch about movies months after their release!

Trailers are like scam artists. Everyone knows full well you shouldn't trust them, and yet this one just seems so trustworthy, and then you fall for it anyway. I had been waiting for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ever since I saw the trailer back in last summer, because the trailer is a work of art.



I mean, look at that fucking trailer. That's fucking beautiful! You almost seriously consider whether you'd pay a full movie ticket just for the trailer. I mean, my god. That music. That dialogue. That delivery.

But, after seeing the actual movie, I was very surprised at the utter disconnect between it and the trailer. In fact, I think I can cover a lot of the problems with the movie by tracing the divergences from the trailer- this will probably end up being as much a review of the trailer as the film.

As I've already said elsewhere, I don't believe in avoiding spoilers, but a significant part of Tinker Tailor's allure is the mystery plot, so I'll make an exception for it. Most of the things I want to discuss don't involve big plot points anyhow.

So let's start. One of the first few things you notice is how beautiful the music is, and how brilliantly it works with what's going on in the scene. The way those fucking violins underscore the tension, it's amazing, right? Well, there's not much of that in the film. Sure, it's still got plenty of parts that should be tense, and they are not wanting for tension- in fact I was literally on the edge of my seat, and holding my breath all the way through. It's hardly the mind-blowing experience the trailer promises, but if you don't think too hard and let yourself be taken in by the abstruse exposition, you can get a fun, tense experience watching it. I mean, the film is good. It's just not great, and nothing like the trailer, nor is there such skillful interplay of music and pace.

To use a fog-of-war metaphor...

Shortly after, in the trailer, there's that oh-so-alluring promise of pithy, succinct exposition dialogue, landing with the momentum of a sledgehammer, all crammed into a handful of short words. There's a mole. Right at the top of the circle. He's been there for years. Short. Quick. To the point. Within moments, it's perfectly clear what's going on- to you, to the characters. This part effectively projects the idea that the characters are shrewd men, who are able to analyze complicated crises at a moment's notice. This is not the case in the movie. Nobody, including you, ever has any idea what's going on. Everything and everyone is always confused. When the movie is over, you still struggle to piece together the various plot points to figure out what actually happened.

Now, loath as I am to berate a book movie for being too faithful to the book, some of Tinker Tailor's problems do appear to stem from the adaptation being so close. It's really not the same to receive a given quantity of information by reading a few pages about it and to do so by seeing a few scenes in a film with a combined length of several seconds. This isn't really bad per se. In the worst case you can simply familiarize yourself with what happens in the book and the issue evaporates. Unfortunately, however, it is clear that if exposition and pacing was handled the same way as they were in the trailer, the film would have been so much better, and they weren't, and that's somewhat irritating in a "what might have been" sense.

Just to elaborate even more: This "right at the top of the Circus" line (it's "Circus", the codename of the intelligence directorate) appears quite a while into the movie. That's not Simon McBurney briefing Oldman- he's actually paraphrasing someone else, and the impact is far smaller. It's also a superfluous bit- by then you have already learned much of what this line would tell you from other scenes.

Anyway, moving on. We see Gary Oldman again. He is also a shrewd man. He listens to the facts with an aura of easy confidence- it is obvious he will approach the task methodically, break it down into pieces and take simple, but amazingly brilliant steps to unerringly approach the resolution. How do you find an enemy? You call an old friend, and ask him to do something for you. But what? Surely some secret contingency plan only Oldman and Cumberbatch are privy to, indicated by the camera looking at them from a distance, with obscuring scenery in the foreground. Oldman gives some parting advice- he has to assume they're watching. What is this secret, dangerous thing they are planning? Oh my god, how exciting!

Well, in the film, Oldman and Cumberbatch do indeed work together, in secret. But Oldman asks for a favor as part of a long planning session at his house. With you, the audience, already "participating" in the meeting, it is irritating to feel as if you should know what they are talking about, but not having a clue. Anyway, the something Cumberbatch needs to do isn't that exciting, and you find out what it is soon enough, and then you watch him do it, and it's all ever so slightly modest in the way of suspense.

Oh, and that part about them watching? That's a third unrelated scene, where Oldman tells Cumberbatch to cover up their tracks.

The point I'm trying to make here is, the trailer has one perfectly made scene. All the movie has to do is continue from there. Instead, they've gone and broken it down into two (well, three, the street meeting in the trailer is yet another unrelated scene) different scenes with nowhere near the impact. I mean, of course it isn't exactly like that- I'm sure they didn't wait until the trailer was done to start making the movie! But the trailer clearly demonstrates that the film has all the elements needed to produce some brilliant sequences. Why were they absent from the actual film itself?

Moving on, Oldman's (and our) unwavering confidence in his competence, takes a sudden blow. David Dencik informs him that things aren't always what they seem in a casual meeting at some airstrip- perhaps he is about to set off on his way elsewhere, leaving Oldman bereft of his just recently revealed capacity for assisting him in this matter.

This is one of the worst offenders. In the movie, Oldman has kidnapped and forcibly brought Dencik there for interrogation. Seconds later he is about to fall apart and desperately beg for his life. He thinks the plane is transporting his executioner. The movie version is still a good scene and the acting is enjoyable, but it's nothing like the trailer one.

Moscow planted the mole, Oldman discovers to his shock. Nevertheless, he is drawing closer to his target: He is one of five men. Actually, it's three, and for some half of the movie, two men. One of those five is Oldman, the investigator, himself, but nothing much is made of this little quirk. Another one is Ciaran Hinds, who is not suspicious, gets eliminated from the list very early, and is given little attention therafter. A third suspect is revealed to be innocent halfway through. Anyway, meanwhile, time is running out, as every minute Oldman spends gives the mole opportunity to cause further damage: He killed their man in Istanbul!

Well, for one, the thing about Moscow planting the mole, and the five suspects, are things established outright from the very beginning. There is no clear sense of Oldman's character gradually narrowing down the possibilities- he just stops caring about certain people and you have no choice but to assume he has decided they are no longer suspect. And the killing in Istanbul, that has barely anything to do with the mole. They're talking about some other character who is assumed to have defected but who hasn't, and thus has to be proven innocent.

The image of Mark Strong firing a rifle seems to indicate some pivotal confrontation near the end of the movie, but in fact there is no such confrontation anywhere in the movie except the brief firefight in the beginning that gets the story going. I'm okay with there being no confrontation, but it's still an example of the trailer being blatantly dishonest and misleading and that I'm not okay with.

The line about everything becoming so ugly would have worked perfectly if used to underscore the mess of a problem that Oldman has to deal with, as the trailer suggests. It's used in an entirely different capacity, and yet again, has nowhere near the impact. Oldman's apparent verbal duel with his nemesis is actually a part of his drunken, rambling monologue in the beginning of the film, and all it accomplishes is some clumsy backstory exposition. Well, to be sure, he's reminiscing about how he met who later turned out to be Karla, the enemy commander. But Karla never shows up, and the movie is about Oldman vs. the Mole, so yeah.

Conclusion

Really, the trailer appears to show some very unforgettable moments from the film, and a very well put-together experience. The elements are still there in the film, and they are very well crafted elements individually, but the way they are jammed together a bit awkwardly. All the great lines and acting you think you see in the trailer is squandered on unimportant things, and the important points of the movie are nowhere near as well done as the trailer hints at.

Yeah, yeah. I know. A trailer, misleading? Well I never, stop the presses! But with Tinker Tailor, it's extraordinary how much the divergence from the trailer defines the inadequacies of the film.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is still a decent movie, though. It's not a great movie like the trailer implies, it's not really insightful or poignant. It's almost like a whodunit, except it's about spies and not murder. It's very enjoyable to watch - the cast did do a great job, the art direction is great, the whole movie is beautiful. Just make sure to completely forget everything you saw in the trailer, and don't expect something extraordinary.

Score: 5/5

Game of Thrones 1x01: Winter is Coming

If only they had that kind of budget for every episode.

So we get a a cold (HAR HAR) start with a trio of horsemen clad in furs and black cloaks exiting a tunnel. They are rangers, scouting north of the “wall”. In the ASOIAF series, there aren’t any necromancers or liches or zombies or monsters you see no end of in run-of-the-mill fantasy books, but there are numerous legends and stories about how they were terrifying mankind way back when. It’s nice how it’s so long ago, and there’s no real evidence of them, so it’s up to the characters to decide if they’ll believe the silly monster stories, the serious ones don’t; for all the fantasy aspect of it it’s still all remarkably similar to our world in this way. Anyway, supposedly all the monsties come down from the north when the multiannual winter (lol, silly climate science, keep out of my fantasy book!) arrives. I guess they melt otherwise or something. Maybe they just like playing snowballs.

Oh, the name for these monsties, collectively, is “Others”. “The Others take him!” is a popular curse.

The Wall, as you can see, is huge. The words “hundred” and “meters” should give you an idea- it’s far taller, thicker and longer than any real wall (maybe not longer than some though). It was built of stone thousands of years ago, it’s only covered in ice. How did they manage to do this feat of engineering? Some guy called “Bran the Builder” did it is the in-universe explanation. Maybe he was a wizard or something. Incidentally, the whole continent has a very medieval England-ish feel to it, and it's hard to look at the Wall and not be reminded of Hadrian's Wall.

The cocky boy with the “noble” (I’m on a roll with these puns today) features is Waymar Royce. He is cocky, because his dad is a lord with lots of land and power. Now, the Night’s Watch is a bunch of people who have dedicated their lives to manning the wall for when Others come down. They’re a bit of a laughing stock at this point, since no one’s seen an Other in ages, and the whole Night’s Watch thing is starting to sound like a silly religion. People don’t come here if they can help it.

Which leaves two kinds of people, pretty much. When a criminal is caught, they get a choice of “taking the black” - convert their death sentence to lifelong service in the watch. Hence, the majority of the Watch is scum – rapists, thieves, murderers, and the like. Authorities (the lords) love doing this because they get rid of petty criminals, and the Night’s Watch stops pestering them for help. (they’re a donation-funded non-profit, see)

Also, in Westeros when a Lord dies his oldest son takes his place. What about the other sons? In the real world, when things like this happened, the younger sons would always scheme and plot and try to get the older brother killed so they can inherit instead. But if they take the black, they’d have to forswear of all claim to their inheritance, so it’s a great way to prevent civil war. A bit mean, sending your kid to what amounts to a gulag, but hey. (Speaking of which, it's also interesting how the Night's Watch is this cold, desolate place in the North where life is miserable and hopeless, which is used as a penal facility for degenerate thugs and political enemies)

I also really like how well Rob Ostlere works in his role, this is almost exactly how I had imagined Royce looks. It's a shame he's only around for one episode. I really loved the beautiful snowy landscapes, too.

Guess the stories were true after all.

Surprise! They see a ghost! In the books, this was the first books prologue. They all have a prologue, and then the book jumps between the handful of that books “POV characters”. It’s a bit of a running gag, Martin always kills everyone in the prologues. By the way, the White Walker’s sword isn’t just a fancy icicle- it cleaves right through Royce’s expensive longsword. These guys mean business.

We see that the lowborn boy from the prologue in a grassy field- he has managed to sneak past the wall and run south into the lands controlled by Lord Stark. In Westeros, there are 7 big name houses – the continent is called the land of the Seven Kingdoms. They are the strongest lord in the area and answer only to the King. There’s lots of other small-time lords (they have armies and keeps and lands though, too!) but they all do what the ruling house says, they’re his “bannermen” because they fly both their own banner and that of the great house they serve. They only do this because they the ruling lord would kick their ass otherwise, but you can probably guess, if they get a nice opportunity to rebel they rarely think twice. House Stark is the great houses of the north, their lands are also the first thing after the wall, which is why they are traditionally the first defense against the Others, besides the Watch.

Once you join the watch, you don’t ever leave, so the boy technically deserted the Watch by running. That’s why Stark men catch and arrest him, and the penalty for deserting is death. It’s interesting how seriously Starks take this - on the one hand, who cares about their stupid cult all the way up in the middle of nowhere? But then again, if Watchmen just walked out and got away with it, can the nobility trust them to keep younger sons out of the way?

If by my sword or my...

The poor kid tries to tell his story, but Lord Stark isn’t that gullible. “I saw a ghost” doesn’t work too well. The huge sword is called Ice, it’s the Starks’ oversized ceremonial execution sword passed down from generations. 

"I wonder what that could possibly mean. HMMMMM."

Then there’s the direwolf. If you’ve read any fantasy at all you probably know what one is, but it’s this kind of superwolf that’s bigger and nastier than normal wolves. They’re like orcs or dwarves or something, every fantasy setting has dire animals.

In Westeros, all noble families have sigils, or signs, or coats of arms. It’s a kind of special symbol, usually the picture on the symbol has some historic meaning, especially for the houses that were founded recently. GRRM loves to go on about heraldry in the books, and there’s a LOT of sigils. Anyway, the 7 great houses all have just an animal, unlike the cool small houses. Starks have a direwolf. Baratheons (a house in the east, but the king is also a Baratheon so they’re like the top dog house that gets to boss everyone else around) have the stag. The Stag and the Direwolf have slain each other in battle, and only the pups remain, alone and helpless! DUN DUN DUN.

By the way, most noble houses have one city/castle where they hang out most of the time. The great houses for example, of course expect to be treated as honoured guests if they ever visit a bannerman’s keep. The Stark “capital” is Winterfell. The Baratheon capital is “King’s Landing”. It’s also a huge city which happens to be the capital of the Seven Kingdoms, since the king lives there and all. It’s a bit weird with Baratheons, though, since the king’s two brothers didn’t take the black – one hangs out at court at Landing, one has his own castle… Somewhere.

Guess he won't be running any more... arrynds.

That’s Jon Arryn. Arryn is another great house, they’re the guys with a white bird symbol. They hang north of King’s Landing, in this fertile hilly area called the Vale. I guess it’s cause birds like hills or something? I dunno. Wait till we see a small lord’s sigil- great houses are boring as hell.

Jon used to be the Hand of the King. That’s like the vice-king, except he does all the work.

In the Seven Kingdoms, there are two common religions. The one popular in lands besides the Starks’ is the Faith of the Seven. There’s seven gods, I think they’re meant to be aspects of one god. One is a mother, one is a son, and so on. There’s all sorts of dreary religious symbolism and what not. That’s who is conducting Jon’s ceremony.

"Morning wood, hubby?"

 

The second kind: In the North, mostly in Stark lands and among the crazy hobo people who actually live north of the wall, they worship the “Old Gods”. They have these weird trees (called weirwood! Hah!), that look like they have faces, so they plant a bunch of them in a circle and go sit there and pray to “the Old Gods”. Well, there’s only one in Ned’s “Godswood”, not sure what’s up with that, and the face is really lame too, so yeah. Supposedly the farther north you go, the cooler the weirwood faces start to look.

Ned’s wife Catelyn is actually a Tully- they are a great house south of Starks and west of the Vale. They rule the “Riverlands” which is like a land with a lot of rivers, and their sigil is a fish, because you know, fish live in rivers and these guys are all about rivers. Anyway, the Tullys worship the Seven, not the Old Gods, so there’s this religion thing between them.

"King angry! King SMASH!"

King Angryface is actually Ned’s old friend from when before he was king. They haven’t seen each other in a while. In the books, Ned worries that becoming king made his old friend haughty, proud, lazy… And just the general disappointment at seeing him let himself go, so to speak.

"We are not amused."

Queen Angryface (oh good lord, even their children are angry!), well, they’re not on great terms with the hubby. He only married her because he couldn’t get the girl he wanted and she’s from House Lannister and it made political sense. The Queen is aware of this. House Lannister is west of Tullys, on the shore, their capital has gold mines and they’re filthy rich. They have a lion sigil. Also Lord Tywin Lannister (he doesn’t show on screen for a while) is one mean motherfucker.

"Get your mouth off my cock, woman! My facial tic's acting up again. MORE WINE!"

Peter Dinklage is incredible as the Imp. The only problem is that he is too handsome. The book Imp was always described as very ugly, although that may just be because of his height. Tyrion the Imp and Jaime are the two sons of Tywin Lannister. It’s weird for Lannisters - everyone hates the Imp, including his father. He’s actually a really smart guy, but eh. Except, that is, his brother Jaime. They get along pretty well. Jaime is in the Kingsguard, he’s like a bodyguard for the king. It’s like the Night’s Watch in that you don’t leave it, and can’t be heir to your dad’s lordship anymore. That leaves Tyrion as the only heir, but Tywin hates his guts so much. Lions.

Tyrion loves whores, by the way. You can see how he’d have trouble with being liked by people, what with the stigma of him being short and all, but whores don’t care so long as he has money.

"Dear diary. Today I decided that maybe I should go easy on the atropine after all."

Remember how I said King Angryface wasn’t always king? Actually, before there were Targaryens. They had a dragon sigil and liked to marry their sisters (no really). They were the Kings for a very long time, legends say they rode dragons to battle, but there’s no dragons anymore (OR ARE THERE!?!?). Thing is, the later Targaryen kings were kind of sort of dicks, I mean not that Angryface isn’t a bit of a dick himself, but the Targs were HUGE dicks, I mean, metaphorically, that is. So anyway, Robert figured he’d rebel, so he did, he got a bunch of noble houses into his scheme and dethroned the then King Targaryen. Dany and her brother Viserys are the two remaining members of the dynasty, they are on the run somewhere on another continent. Dany is supposed to be 13 or so, obviously the actress isn’t, you’ll see why later.

Watcher in the Night

Benjen Stark is Ned’s brother. Taken the Black! He’s actually one of those crazy people who think being in the Watch is still about sacrifice and selflessness. Jon Snow really admires him. Jon is Ned’s son, by the way, but not from Cat. He’s a bastard, literally. For some reason Ned keeps him around, but Cat hates his guts. He’s a bit like Tyrion, everyone always disses the poor guy. Anyway, his last name is Snow. In the seven kingdoms, each land has its own “default bastard surname”- in the Riverlands it’s Rivers, in the Vale it’s Stone, in the Baratheon lands (they have lots of stormy coasts) it’s Storm, in the Southmost desert-y area called Dorne (another house as well) it’s Sand.

"They don't call me the Kisslayer for nuthin', hun!"

Jaime Lannister may be nice to his brother, but he’s a bit of a douche. Thing is, he’s the best swordsman on the continent, supposedly, and he’s famous for it, so he doesn’t really have to care. He’s called the “Kingslayer” – he used to be the Targaryen king’s bodyguard too, but then he killed him, and people hate on him for that, like Ned does here.

Pearls before swine.

The Dothraki are a sort of nomadic horse people. Reading the books, I thought they were sort of kind of pseudo-Mongolians. Except these guys live in much warmer climates, and they look nothing like any middle-asian peoples, and honestly the language sounds really out of place. All the middle-asian horse nomads spoke Uralo-Altic languages. One of their features is that adding suffixes to a word doesn’t alter the word itself, unlike, say, Russian (замок -> замки with the o “disappearing” in the plural, for example). From what I’ve seen of Dothraki, the inflection is all over the place. Tradition and culture wise, they don’t really fit either- the Mongol, Hun and miscellaneous Turkic hordes were fairly conscientious about the treatment of women and unnecessary killings, unlike what we see in the series. The hair that would get in the way during fighting doesn’t fit, and they use melee weapons almost exclusively, while actual Asian horse-borne nomads relied a lot on mounted archers. If you think about it, they're really not all that Mongol or Asian at all, but it’s so strange how the moment you see them, you can’t help trying to interpret them as if they are.

This, together with how they’ve been portrayed as wild Barbarians, has caused a bit of a stir over how women are portrayed and how the show is racist and what not. If you ask me, I dunno. It’s fantasy and the Dothraki really aren't that distinct at all. I wouldn’t be as weirded out if GRRM didn’t give them such a strong Mongol-y feel without any actual Mongol-ness but then again, it’s interesting how he goads your stereotypes into making you uncomfortable without actually showing anything substantial.

We see Jorah Mormont here, he’s a knight from one of the noble houses normally loyal to the Starks, I think. They have an island or something. Their sigil is a BEAR. Among some TREES. Now how awesome and manly is that? This isn’t some lame fish and bird crap we’re doing here. Anyway, Jorah got deported from the kingdoms because of a crime, that’s what he’s doing all the way in Essos, the larger continent to the southwest of Westeros (the seven kingdoms). The Dothraki, the city of Pentos (where they are now) and all sorts of cool crazy stuff is in Essos.

Speaking of which, Viserys’s buddy with the loud red vest and the funny beard is Magister Illyrio. He is mayor of Pentos of sorts. Pentos is a city state, I think they elect their rulers, too.

Dany was sold to Drogo, the Dothraki khal, because Viserys wants to use his huge army to go back to Westeros and retake his throne. Dany doesn’t care, she’s terrified of the guy and their whole culture, and she only really just wants to go home. This is gets important later on.

Also, I just love how pitiful this girl can make herself look with them eyebrows. I mean, look!

"Can I keep this horsy daddy? PWEEEEEEEEEASE?"

Speaking of linguistics, Mormont’s line here is ridiculous (yeah I know we finished speaking of that way back when, but whatever. I’m a sucker for linguistics). I don’t recall if it was in the books. But in any case, the gravity of his tone aside, he’s espousing here something called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If you happen not to have heard of it, the core is the idea that if you don’t have a word for concept, your culture can’t understand that concept. It’s an old idea and the specific formulation depends on the person formulating it. Anyhoo, that’s not true. First off, primates without a language (though there’s experiments showing vocalizations used by one group of monkeys are meaningless to another, for example) as complex as what humans have can still understand quite a few concepts. So can children raised without exposure to language, although it’s understandably harder for them to do so.

Even more specifically, there was one case where they found a tribe whose language had words only for two colors, white and black. They only had two numbers, which I think mean something like “few” and “many”. According to SWH, these guys must SUCK at distinguishing colors, and counting. So the researchers made them do some counting problems, and to sort colored chips by color. Well, they didn’t suck at all. It’s one of the very strong counter-evidences against the SWH; I think the tribe is called Pirahã.

Of course, it’s logical to expect that you tend to have a lot of words for something you busy yourself a lot with. The eskimos don’t have an absurd number of words for snow, as the urban legend goes, but they do have a big vocabulary dealing with igloo building. And language can be a very powerful aid in memorization and learning, hence obviously there is some link between culture, language and cognition, but the SWH in the strong form is just too hamfisted to do anyone any good.

What is it doing in my ASOIAF then? Search me.

Sorry this has been such a long post, but I guess there’s a lot of background they ended up invoking with the fast paced first episode. Hopefully I can keep the later ones short. I’ll wrap this up with one of the most important events in the series:

Yup, that's the queen you see fucking in a barn. Yup, that's not the king she's fucking. Yup, that guy is her brother. Welcome to A Song of Fire and Ice! Enjoy your stay.

What? No, of course you didn't just see Lena Headey's ass. That's a double, silly!

Inception: Dream logic

The dream logic just doesn’t work. So you are on a balcony, sleeping and dreaming that you are in a hotel. Someone throws you over, your sleeping body is in free fall, accordingly the dream also loses gravity. It’s an old, clichéd idea, and untrue. I for one have had plenty of dreams interrupted, but not once has outside stuff managed to sneak in. But fine, the movie frankly comes out and says, look, this is how my internal logic works, ok? Sure, movie. I'm not the kind of guy who complains about warp-drives in Star Trek.

But suppose in that balcony dream, you have a dream within a dream, you dream you are on a beach. You get tossed, your real body experiences 0 g. This is transmitted to your top dream, and the hotel loses gravity. Now your sleeping dream body in the hotel also doesn’t experience gravity. This gets transmitted to the beach- But in Inception it doesn’t. Why? “Uh, let me get back to you on that later.”

Then, apparently they have control over dreams. One person builds them, one person populates them, and the others get to do minor things (conjure up pistols, change their appearance). Why not build cooperatively? Enemies chasing you, just conjure up rocks above them, or a great pit below them, done. Maybe the machine is designed somehow to prevent this, or more than one person mucking about confuses things. I dunno.

Also, in one scene, a character is shooting enemies with a rifle. Aemes comes over, exclaims that “you need to dream bigger!” and raises a grenade launcher. Wait, they can do that? Why not just dream up RPGs? Tanks? Helicopters? Lightsabers? Crazy futuristic space alien weapons?

Ok, so lightsabers would obviously tick the victim off. But so what? They can capture and torture him indefinitely. You could dream up some crazy torture equipment, I bet. Then there’s tanks. It should be trivial to dream up an invasion or military compound or something. They even do it! But curiously they won’t dream up tanks for themselves. I guess maybe it attracts the projections, but when you have an AC-130, who cares if their little snow-Humvee is attracted to you, honestly? Just gun them all down.

Then the machine. It looks like all it does is take venous blood, give it a little detour through the plastic hose where chemicals can be injected, and send it back in. The only connection is through the wrist. How does information get shared? What links the brains? Magic? To their credit, at least they didn’t actually go and make up some shared consciousness silliness. Oh well.

And the whole waking up business is fishy, anyway. Sleep, while somewhat mysterious, is very well known to be closely linked with firing of certain neurons and certain neurotransmitters. There’s no such thing as someone being in a sleep so deep they can’t wake up, you can always wake them up by injecting the right chemical. There’s comas and the like, of course, but a coma isn’t just a deep sleep. That’s stupid. In fact, given that what we see in the movie requires sedatives anyway, just cut the sedative. Soon the effect would wear off and the dream would destabilize anyway.

Inception: King of fools

So what’s with all the idiot characters thinking they are geniuses? First we have Saito, with his best smug grin, exclaim “Ah, dream within a dream!” Oh wow, what an incredible idea! What if people were in a dream, and they dreamt that they fell asleep and were dreaming in the dream? Woah, man. Maybe it would seem incredible if I was high, I guess. And very stupid. But Saito seems very proud of his insight.

Then there is the exchange, “you want to do two layers?” “Three.” during which I honestly burst out laughing. “This one goes to ELEVEN.” Reminds me of those jokes about multi-blade razors. “Fuck it, we’re going 13 levels!”

The realization should be immediately apparent to anyone who thinks about this concept, that a dream within a dream is theoretically possible, and that what we call real life might as well be a dream and we’d never know, and the dreams could be nested ad infinitum. Yes, each layer adds to the instability, but so what? How do you know that you haven’t been subjected to an advanced sedative without your knowledge? But nobody even mentions any of this. They are all awed at the idea of a dream within a dream like it’s some incredible insight.

Inception: Paging Ellen

Is Ellen Page supposed to be an annoying, stupid undergrad that nobody likes but they keep her around because they need her for now? If so, give the woman an Oscar. So her teacher sets her up for a job. The man is weird, suspicious and doesn’t give her any details. He doesn’t even tell her anything about it. “First I need to know you can do it, before I say what it is.” She just smiles and nods! First rule of job interviews: If the boss is crazy, DON’T TAKE THE JOB. I guess ignorance of this could be excused in this case, after all she is in an undergrad. Maybe she thinks Leo is hot and just wants to get in his pants, I dunno. Anyway, it gets worse.

She is told the job is illegal, in no uncertain terms. She doesn’t even flinch! What the hell, some stranger asks her to commit a crime and she just… Accepts? Wow. Maybe the pay is gre- But they don’t even discuss the pay! Sure, unpaid internships are a common way to build up portfolios, but there isn’t a portfolio here, and I doubt she’s expecting to land a nice job working with a sleazebag thief.

Then we get to the dreams. The first thing she does with her power? Act like a toddler at the playground. She folds the street in two and makes two opposing mirrors. Oh wow. When I joked about this sort of stuff in middle school, my friends called me childish.

Speaking of which, I don’t get the bit about Arthur kissing her. If there was some awkward attraction, possibly one sided, from Arthur towards Ariadne, it would be sort of interesting. I could see him having less than gentlemanly intentions with his “try”. But it’s played off as some half-hearted idea that Arthur got, tried, and failed. Oh well. It doesn’t help that this is maybe Arthur’s only idea in the whole film (ok, I guess there’s the elevator). It’s just a pointless scene, the kiss is awful, it doesn’t develop either character, it doesn’t add to the desperation of their situation (they don’t seem to care about the projections much before or after, nor is Arthur at all upset or disappointed when his desperate attempt fails).

Inception: Crimes of idiocy

So let me get this straight about the ending: Mal came to the hotel room, made a mess, toppled the furniture, then leapt across the space to the opposite window… Wait, what? I guess she could have made a mess and then snuck to the building across to startle Cobb, but why make a mess? Just leave the window open. Not like he’ll ignore an open window.

And anyway, what’s with her “trap”? It doesn’t make sense. All Cobb needs to do is wave and yell the moment she hits the ground. Somebody sees him at the window, instant bulletproof alibi! The street below them has 4 or 6 lanes at least. How’d he push her out of a building that far? Why is there no sign of struggle? Any competent lawyer will get Cobb off the hook in a flash. And surely it would look fishy when a psychiatrist examines the children and they don’t seem abused or in danger from Cobb?

Now, I’ve never heard of such a thing as being “declared sane”. Sure, there’s documents you get for driving licenses or diving cards and what not, and they include mental health. But all that means is the doc checks if you ever got sent to the funhouse, and your behavior with him obviously shows you are not completely batshit. So they sign you off. That’s it. Maybe you lied, maybe they didn’t ask the right questions, maybe you are actually a psychopath inside, obsessed with acting out Carmageddon in real life. He wouldn’t know! These things are a 5 minute visit to the doctor, and all they show is whether you have overt, very obvious issues. The legal system is probably aware of this, so saying “hey, she was sane enough to drive!” is a bullshit defense.

As for a more thorough examination, you simply can’t take someone and say they are “completely sane”. Just checking for one disease takes many sessions over weeks, and the DSM has hundreds. The psychiatrist’s job is hard enough with willing clients who try to helpfully describe their issues, it would be trivial for a crazy person to fake sanity (Obviously, there are extreme cases. If a guy walks in wearing a tinfoil hat and starts checking the room for bugs, yes he is obviously out there. But just because he doesn’t, can you say beyond reasonable doubt that he isn’t paranoid?). This is like TSA asking travellers if they are a terrorist. I mean… Geez.

So how Mal obtained such documents, such that they are hard proof of her sanity, is beyond me. But that’s not the only problem. See, even in a fantasy universe where this is possible, wouldn’t someone obtaining unusual documents proving their sanity, just before committing a rather insane act, look a wee bit suspicious?

In all honesty, Cobb should’ve just gone to court. Doubtless his occupation could pay for a decent lawyer, I’d be surprised if he didn’t have a team of them already.

And finally, why bother with Saito just to see his kids? So he can’t enter the US. Well, move to Switzerland and take the kids there! Genius idea, I know. Is it the grandmother? Get one of his teammate to kidnap them. They know the reason is solid, and even if not they are all immoral knaves anyhow. The most the relatives can do is probably file a missing person report. Cobb is a man adept at disappearing from powerful multi-national corps. Sure, he botches this in the movie, but I can’t imagine him surviving in his job without being good at it, and he implies he is.

Inception: And his tiresome wife

Cobb's wife. She could be a great femme fatale nemesis, but instead, we get a passive aggressive memory who keeps making a nuisance of herself. She doesn’t do anything, she’s not interesting, she adds nothing. She could have been part of the team at the beginning of the movie, that would allow me to actually care about her being dead.

The current Mal could still be effective, if she was haunting Cobb. Two things ruin this, however. First, she does more harm to Cobb’s friends- she shoots Arthur in the leg and insults his taste in expressionist art (that bitch!), she lunges at Ariadne, she shoots Fischer. She barely harms Cobb at all. Now, if whenever Cobb was isolated in the dreams, she appeared and relentlessly closed in on him with ruin in her wake like some pyramid head without the pyramid, it would be a whole different story. Second, Mal is awfully needy. Every time she shows up, she does nothing but yell “me me me why is this dream not ALL ABOUT ME!” It’s obscene and irritating. So many times I wished Cobb would glare at her and yell “Mal, can’t you see I’m busy here? Just bugger off now will you, I don’t have time for your bullshit right now!” Whenever she shows up, Cobb almost instinctively begins to defend against her- he doesn’t seem particularly entranced by memories of his love either. It’s not that he wants her in his mind but knows surrendering to that memory will destroy him. He doesn’t want her there at all, and she is too obnoxious to leave.

Inception: That damnable Di Caprio

Cobb as Leonardo Di Caprio is an absolute sleaze bag. He is written as a sleazebag, and Leo acts like one. When the legality of his work comes up, he smugly dismisses it. He sets up rules for his teammates, but doesn’t follow them. He arrogantly scoffs when they bring up the fact. He blames his failings on others. He destroys a young man’s psyche without a moment’s hesitation. The man’s a crook and a total jerk.

Now, I don’t mind this kind of character. I usually love them. Sometimes I may even feel sympathy towards them. But I expect a fitting motivation. Maybe lust for power, or money. Maybe simple megalomania. Cobb? He just wants to see his kids again. Ain’t that sweet! He’s a proper crook with a heart of gold, our Cobb.

Man, I don’t care. He’s an asshole. He won’t see his kids? Great! Serves him right. Kinda sucks for the kids, I guess, but then again I don’t care about the kids either- I never see them do anything but play in the sand for a moment, and that they are used as symbols of impending doom doesn’t help.

I am just irritated by the lead character for some reason. Ariadne, on the other hand, would have made a great protagonist. We’d follow her as she suddenly discovers the world of extraction through her teacher, as her relationship with Cobb evolves from professional cooperation to disgust at his lack of scruples to sympathy for his grief. It might even convince me to care about Cobb. It would do away with the confusing preludes. It would allow Cobb’s plan to rescue Saito to be an epic revelation, to which Ariadne and the audience can react with enthusiasm and excitement, as they should: It’s the climax of the story!

Instead we get to watch a petty scumbag thief be mean and inconsiderate to his friends, shirk responsibility, pity himself and then have the gall to pretend he has noble goals of reuniting with his children.

Inception: Introduction

So, this is about Inception, which I watched recently. Mostly, it’s some rough plot analysis and whining about things I didn’t like, with a few things I liked. So expect spoilers, boredom and frustration.

The film was released quite a few months before I watched it, so you can see how I’m a tad late to the party. Naturally, I heard it being talked about, a LOT. I knew it was about dreams, and that it would end with “They are actually also living in a dream!” from the start. It turned out that last bit wasn’t exactly true.

One other thing was the minor fad of “the movie stupid people watch to feel intelligent”. So I expected pretentious sleight of hand to disguise a complicated plot that doesn’t make sense, and resolved to pay extra attention to spot as many holes as I could.

That was a very bad idea! Inception is a run-of-the-mill mindfuck with a “gotcha” plot. It throws piles of obfuscated nonsense at you, only to disarm you and deliver its final “Haha, thought I was gonna do that one huh? Gotcha!” It’s like that riddle where a bus visits various stops, and so and so people get on and off each time, while you haplessly try to keep up with the arithmetic, and turns out the question is how many stops it visited.

The whole plot is an irrelevant red herring. All you get for seriously thinking about it is a nasty headache and a lingering feeling of “man, what.” So, what happened? Cobb and his buddies enter dreams and steal secrets. But Cobb is kinda hung up about his dead wife, so she keeps messing up their dream antics and being a nuisance. They try to steal from Saito, a businessman, but mess up (because of the wife. Women, right?) Saito then hires them to put a bad idea in a competitor’s mind, so his business fails and Saito benefits. They come up with a crazy dream-within-a-dream scheme to do it, encounters certain problems, overcome them, and Cobb goes back to his kids, in the real world… Or does he? Maybe he’s still dreaming! Guess we’ll never know, because it faded to black before we could see! Oh man, so exciting!