Inception vs. Avatar

Brilliant Inception shot

In what was to be an astoundingly dull year, there wasn’t much to look forward to from Hollywood. Fortunately, the summer was saved by the hands of the ridiculously reliable Pixar and well… Christopher Nolan. Since his movie Inception was released, it garnered a steady, albeit not spectacular, two-time American weekend top box office spot. It received very good critic reviews, calling it an ambitious, daring and highly original visual extravaganza. However, I’m not going to talk about that. If you’ve seen the movie or have been in a conscious state during the summer of 2010, you know it’s pretty damn impressive. Nearly all of the more notable critics however, issued several caveats.

Nick Pinkerton of the alternative arts newspaper Village Voice writes:

It’s obvious that Nolan either can’t articulate or doesn’t believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams—and his barren Inception doesn’t capture much of either.

David Denby of The New Yorker compares previous cinematic interpretations of dreams, favoring the famous Spanish Buñuel:

Buñuel was a surrealist— Nolan is a literal-minded man. Cobb’s intercranial adventures aren’t like dreams at all—they’re like different kinds of action movies jammed together.

A.O. Scott of The New York Times:

But though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires.

It’s true, for the infinite possibilities a dreamworld offers, Inception‘s dreams are fairly unimaginative. They don’t feature an overwhelming high-fantasy world like in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. There’s no dark, menacing atmosphere like the one Burton’s Sweeney Todd offers. In fact, the dreams Nolan present don’t exhibit any charm or personality at all. There’s nothing mysterious or unexplainable about his dreams. It all makes sense. He even explains why there’s nothing unexplainable: “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” Nolan trying to justify his own stylistic choice doesn’t hide the notion that he is in fact a literal-minded man. An imaginative, immersive experience he cannot deliver. Everything that makes a Miyazaki movie so fantastic are things Nolan cannot do.

The incredible imagination of Miyazaki's Spirited Away

Although he continually challenges himself to work these really interesting and ambiguous concepts into his movies like amnesia, each time he takes the same approach. Like a true problem-solver he analyses the concept and only keeps a handful of key properties he thinks the concept represents. He actually reduces a complicated idea to a set of laws, throwing away everything else in the process.

This is how Rex Reed of The New York Observer harshly phrases it:

Writer-director Nolan is an elegant Hollywood hack from London whose movies are a colossal waste of time, money and I.Q. points. “Elegant” because his work always has a crisp use of color, shading and shadows, and “hack” because he always takes an expensive germ of an idea, reduces it to a series of cheap gimmicks and shreds it through a Cuisinart until it looks and sounds like every other incoherent empty B-movie made by people who haven’t got a clue about plot, character development or narrative trajectory.

In Memento, he reduces the condition of short-term memory loss to an almost predictable plot device bound by rules. Apart from the ability to tell his story backwards, the properties he keeps in his model of the affliction are vulnerability to manipulation, paranoia and a few others. The rest, more significantly the emotional baggage, of the real-life counterpart he discards, he deems irrelevant. What results is a puzzling thriller, magnificently put together, but without any real feel for the affliction portrayed, nothing to take away from it.

In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight he strips the concept of superhero of nearly all features normally associated with comic books. He keeps the hero and villain aspects, but discards the over the top and sometimes deliciously in bad taste extremeties that made comic book superheroes such a major cultural phenomenon.

In Inception he intelligently retains some ideas around the link between dreams and real life like the Edith Piaf music and the concept of “the kick”. But any logic-defying aspect of dreams, he evades. He wouldn’t know what to do with anything that doesn’t rely on a certain known logic, that doesn’t follow a certain set of rules or certainly thinks the audience wouldn’t.

While Nolan attempts to demystify these concepts, by throwing away anything he can’t comprehend he ends up blatantly changing reality. What he doesn’t understand, doesn’t exist. He basically sucks out every form of personality and charm, and replaces it, not with his own imaginative interpretation, but with reality. This analytical modeling is just the beginning of his almost flow-chart-like process towards a movie. Inception in many ways is Nolan talking about his view of storytelling, of constructing a story and delivering it, incepting it if you will, to an audience in a methodical, almost scientific way. He knows very well what he’s doing, he even tells you: “The deeper the issues, the stronger the catharsis.” Also, he lets Eames explain that actions are driven by emotional, more basic underlying ideas, in this case the relationship with the father. All principles for a course of Storytelling 101.

Richard Corliss of TIME:

Inception may or may not be a hit, but it is certainly caviar for film lovers. Even more than Nine, this is truly a movie about moviemaking. Its conversations are like story conferences (the production designer, Ariadne, consulting with the director, Cobb); it’s full of what might be considered alternate scenes and outtakes and is peopled with characters who could improv and abduct the plot. Finally, its noble intent is to implant one man’s vision in the mind of a vast audience.

The most impressive thing anyone retains from watching Memento is how it all works out. And with ‘works out’, I mean story-wise. The pure effort of writing such a challenging screenplay must have been tremendous. The logistics of feeding information in the movie feels almost like micro-management. However, as previously mentioned, there are no lessons learned about amnesia, nor is there much of an empathic reaction in the viewer. Cinematically, the movie doesn’t offer anything special, although the dark, moody paranoia in the movie is more than what the relatively barren Inception offers. Inception also stands as a giant feat, or, as Lisa Kennedy of Denver Post writes, “a boldly constructed wonder”. David Denby writes:

Inception, is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.

It is indeed, on Nolan’s part, more a result of hard work than of cinematic genius. More of engineering than of artistry. Don’t misunderstand me, I fully recognize the creativity put into the process. It really is engineering at its best. As an engineer myself, I definitely see the beauty of it. Or to quote a recently adapted TV series: I love it when a plan comes together. And it is this kind of satisfaction that Nolan strives for and achieves in the heist thriller. Nolan’s also one of the only big name directors without a disdain for directing story. Most other top directors focus directing in terms of scenes and dialogue (Tarantino, Coens) or moods and psyches (Scorsese).

Todd McCarthy of indieWIRE sums it up quite nicely:

The film does not deal in subconscious or mind-altered visions such as those served up in Salvador Dali paintings or abstract experimental films but, rather, in concrete and essentially realistic images. But these all come quickly and purport to serve specific purposes, so they contain, unlike the plot, meager mystery, little that is inchoate or haunting and nothing that reflects the doubts and fears of a moralist or the soul of an artist. Impeccably made as it is and, like “Vertigo,” blessed with an indispensable score, unquestionably the best thing Hans Zimmer has ever done, “Inception” plays like the film of a brilliant mathematician, scientist or engineer rather than a work by someone who, in another era, would have been a novelist, poet or philosopher. Nolan is a thinker, all right, a very busy explorer of mind functions, but capable merely of diagrams when it comes to the heart and soul.

I actually did experience the drama Nolan inserted into Inception as reasonably effective, though I attribute most of this to the exceptional cast, as with his previous movies. I’d even say his dramatic arc entirely relies on DiCaprio and Cotillard. It’s a bit unfortunate that Paramount moving Shutter Island out of Oscar season resulted in DiCaprio being in theaters with two very similar roles just a few months apart. I also think Nolan overestimates the effect of the tormented brooding protagonist by itself. In The Dark Knight, you at least had the juxtaposition of the self-doubting, troubled, frustrated, hopeless and desperate Wayne and the ever-confident, absolute Joker. Everything in human perception relies on contrast. In Memento, The Prestige and Inception, there’s barely any source of light to the protagonist’s dark center. A few shots of Mal and Cobb in love are not enough to intensify and place into context the guilt Cobb suffers from. Though you could say Nolan feared the film was already packed so tight, adding additional content could make it convoluted. But you don’t need a lot of screentime to make a powerful statement that lingers for the entire movie. A recent very effective example is Up‘s marriage montage justifying and creating sympathy for the old man and his initial unfriendly temper and grumpiness. In just three minutes Docter sketches an entire lifetime with ups and downs, with their joyful jobs working in the zoo and building their dream house, with the joyful, feisty Ellie being supportive to the worrisome Carl, illustrated by putting on ties, with a traumatic and personal issue creating miscarriage, with their shared dream and regret of going to Paradise Falls and with ultimately, his wife’s death.

Ellie and Carl in the Up marriage montage

Todd McCarthy:

One could ask for no woman more entrancing than Cotillard to embody a romantic ideal or a woman you’d want back, but unfortunately this whole aspect of the film seems like an intellectual conceit rather than a deeply felt impulse; [...] Here, the emotional component feels like just one part of a vast puzzle or game, albeit perhaps the most important piece.

Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum:

The reality that jostles the reverie is that, as brainiacally engaging as the movie is, Inception‘s emotions beat with a much fainter pulse. Nolan outfits Dom with an old-fashioned love of wife and children, and waking-life emotions of grief and guilt. But between DiCaprio’s characteristic (and, don’t get me wrong, often interesting) affect of broody complication, and the generic nature of Dom’s longings, the heart is far less engaged than the head for most of the show.

While you may indeed make the case that Nolan wasted some opportunities with both the dramatic arc and tackling the concept of dreams, most of it doesn’t bother you as most of what he does offer you, is so good. His engineered screenplay is overwhelmingly impressive, like a giant statue overarching the audience. There’s so much going on, and it indeed all comes together. What did bother me though, perhaps somewhat less than with The Dark Knight, is that Nolan has difficulty directing action. Giant setpieces do not cover up the fact that the actions scenes are a bit of a mess. Especially during the uninspired snow mountain action scenes, which he has called a homage to the Bond movies, people are hitting, chasing and shooting at eachother, while you wait it out for the story to continue. However, although you can’t watch the gravity defying hallway scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt without thinking of The Matrix, the scene is interesting by itself. Not so much due to what actually is displayed on the screen, but more due to what Nolan intended to be displayed on the screen. I mean: it’s a no-gravity hallway fight! Yet again, Nolan proves to be a great thinker, but perhaps less of an executor. But in movies, bluffing and suggestion can get you far. Mind though, director of photography Wally Pfister is still excellent, although the enormous similarities in angles and lighting to The Dark Knight, most noticeable in the city scenes, suggest routine.

Inception shot, reduce brightness to get a The Dark Knight shot

Like I said, his previous movie suffered even worse from the same problem. There he continually fails to deliver a coherent sense of time and space. And this isn’t because quickly moving actors, rapid cutting and jerky camera movements automatically lead to a confusing scene, those methods are used to provide a sense of urgency. If you look at The Bourne Ultimatum, which displays one of the most heavy camera motion and cutting intensive action scenes ever filmed, it does allow the viewer to know at any time what’s happening, where and how. This achievement cannot be overestimated, unfortunately action scenes are often taken for granted.

Impeccable editing in The Bourne Ultimatum

You also don’t need a high budget or impressive sets and props to deliver quality action scenes. Some of the best action scenes in recent memory, from an unlikely and unexpected source, are the flashback scenes in Slumdog Millionaire. Here directing, editing, cinematography, sound effects and music beautifully work together to add an enormous energetic drive to the scenes. Make no mistake: cinematically, this is some of the best the medium has to offer. With its simplistic storyline and borderline juvenile romance it shows that it’s not the message that matters, but the messenger.

The opening scene in Slumdog Millionaire

The riot scene in Slumdog Millionaire

The chase scene in Slumdog Millionaire

If we go back to the high budget blockbusters, there’s a movie with a similar philosophy: James Cameron’s Avatar. In contrast to Nolan’s Inception, Avatar is all about charm and personality. Hell, the movie basically consists of Cameron making a move on the audience for three hours straight. With an extreme eye for detail he lures the viewer into the world of Pandora. A mystical world, an utopian world. Movies often claim to transport the audience to a new world, but Avatar delivers. With the experience of alien worlds and the inspiration of the deepest underwater abysses, he invents an entire biological system. His 3D epic reminds us of the movies of long ago, movies based on the sensation of wonder and amazement. He carefully takes the time to draw in his audience and patiently paces his seduction scheme.

Your average Avatar shot

He also has no problem staging both one on one chases and the most massive epic battlefields. However, the movie is also intellectually bland. You don’t even need to see the theatric trailer to know how it’s all going to play out. In the land of high-profile blockbusters, Avatar is the antithesis of Inception. Both ambitious ten-or-so-year-projects, you have a modest, introverted Brit in the form of Christopher Nolan in one corner, and the extraverted, charismatic, perhaps a bit eccentric, Canadian James Cameron in the other. Their own personalities are clearly reflected in their movies.

The epic battle in Avatar

Unfortunately for Cameron, intellectual blandness is far easier to recognize than a narrow imagination. More importantly, it’s far easier to mock. But should it be? Doesn’t the audiovisual medium, doesn’t film as an art value expression of imagination and emotional involvement higher than intellectual challenge? Isn’t art more poem than puzzle? This issue encompasses the vast majority of the criticism towards both movies.

Ending on-topic, here’s a trailer mash-up:

Johan Honggokoesoemo

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