Inception's Usability Problem
gamermelodico.com
gamermelodico.com
but... says who? They sound like half-baked ideas that arm-chair movie critics have internalized and regurgitate at the slightest opportunity.
I was so much more interested in watching Nolan introduce more elegant but mind-bending ideas about the mechanics of recursive dreaming and then manifesting them with spectacular action scenes, than I was interested in the missing 'character development' milieu like watching the protagonist play with his kids, have a normal domestic argument with his wife, become a workaholic etc. etc.
The characters explained their plans and problems because it made sense for them to do so (ie. it never felt contrived for the audience's sake), and the explanations in themselves were entertaining. Deeper thematic ideas were still tackled, like the central point of how the protagonist needed to untangle himself from his subconscious regrets/guilt before he was ready to have a real life with his children, just not in the usual sappy ways that we've seen thousands of times before. And I refuse to accept that the film was confusing -- yes there were a couple of details that we discussed on the way home from the cinema but satisfactory explanations were forthcoming. All films have details like that, with Inception they're more fun to figure out.
Similarly, as a visual medium, showing things happening rather than explaining them has much more impact. Using dialogue (or worse, monologues) to explain something is weak storytelling; it's not making full use of the medium, and won't have the same impact as it could otherwise have. Other exposition techniques, like flashbacks, are often cheap - they can appear to make things momentous not because they're part of a story, but because they have some convenient echo in something jammed in precisely to deliver the echo.
There's much more to good movie-making: lighting, cinematography, and especially the soundscape, as technical elements that both paint beautiful pictures, and draw the viewer into the "realism" of the scene portrayed, usually by subtly overemphasizing reality.
They're definitely not half-baked ideas.
Take Fight Club as a simple example. It's both about adrenaline-pumping aggression and destruction, and a critique of masculinity. If it was only the first, it would be mindless; if it was only the second, it would be dry and boring. By combining the two, you get both juicy entertainment, and food for thought for the masses. Making something properly entertaining - more entertaining for the average viewer than e.g. a philosophy textbook - needs more than just ideas.
I agree, but here's one of Hamilton's complaints:
"I'd barely gotten my head around the fundamental framework of the host/architect/subject relationship before I was being told about "totems" that anchor dreamers to the real world and "kicks" that wake them up..."
Nolan showed some of these things visually in the opening sequence before explaining them explicitly when Page was introduced: an architect (Lukas Haas) had introduced himself; we were shown what an architect is supposed to do (the wrong carpet); and we were shown a "kick". I thought these things were fairly intuitive, but it's a good job his script exposited them explicitly, or apparently Hamilton would've been completely lost.
Perhaps sometimes a little weak storytelling is good for the audience.
For instance, one might feel that the architecture student's character is under-developed. If the film wasn't already 2.5 hours, I imagine they would have given this likeable character more scenes. But essentially they did show you everything you need to know about this character, because her fingerprints were all over the set design of the rest of the film. Can't get much more visual-medium than that.
And then people say emotion draws you in deeper than ideas, but here we are days after watching the film avidly discussing its ideas (the layers of dreaming and how they worked). Meanwhile a film like The Matrix which does have 'stronger' individual characters to generate emotion, was compromised by a terrible oversight in the ideas department (ie. the whole concept of humans as batteries/generators is ridiculous). A film doesn't need to engage every level equally or in the standard way to be one of the best, IMO.
You mentioned flashback, well 90% of Inception after the first scene was a flashback, except in this case for once it wasn't at all contrived, because it represented the two characters (protagonist and Japanese dude) de-orphaning their current dream-state by reforming connections to previous layers (remembering the other dreams) and then they could snap back out of all the recursions. In other words, I think the storytelling was masterful.
And what's more, the film was deeply involved in character development and human/emotional themes, because most of it was essentially exploring peoples' subconscious minds and relating that to real life matters. The anchoring struggle was the protagonist 'coming back to reality' in the sense of someone gripped by guilt/regret and being lost in their own imagination at the expense of real relationships/progress (similar to the Solaris remake in this way). Sure, maybe people think this side of the film was poor, but if they'd at least acknowledge/mention it I wouldn't accuse them of missing the wood for the trees or regurgitating standard criticisms without thinking them through.
On the point about flashbacks, probably my favourite film, Once Upon A Time In America, is arguably formed out of flashbacks, or possibly even "flashforwards". The effect, especially after multiple viewings, is something like In Search Of Lost Time in they way it creates a sense of nostalgia, in its case for poorly made life choices, unrequited love, and more. So I certainly wouldn't make the accusation that flashbacks are in principle bad, or necessarily cheap, just often so, in average movies.
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I think the whole movie was DiCaprio's dream, something he constructed for himself to plant the idea that he didn't have to feel guilty about his wife. Then it would make sense for all the other characters to be shallow because they're just projections of his subconscious and for him to be the only person in the dreams to project their personal lives into the dream. Just my $.02.
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How do I know this? Well, what was the climax of the whole drama? When he confronts his wife's projection in the skyscraper near the end. That's when the most important/meaningful lines of the film are delivered, which are to the effect that dreamed characters/projections can never compare to the real thing, even in a very powerful imagination. That's why the film ends with him back with his kids and why we know he's not dreaming. He no longer wants his wife because she's a projection, but he wants his kids because they're real. He knows the difference.
Nolan cuts just after the top wobbles because he wants us to search for real meaning in the film, rather than have things settled by the director's arbitrary power.
I found Inception to be a masterpiece. Yes, there was a lot of explanation to do, but it never felt unnatural and was necessary for the mind-blowing climax. Unlike Memento or Mulholland Drive, everything made sense to me right away. And ending the movie with the spinning top was just a genius move, especially since it was so carefully placed right after the intentionally dream-like airport scene. Never has such a static scene held so much tension.
As for the exposition point, I think something can be said in defense of the story in the link.
(Spoilers follow.)
Re: emotional attachment. One of the things that annoyed me about Inception was that the big reveal of what happened to Marion Cotillard is totally internal to the weird mechanics of the world. She got driven crazy because she had to be manipulated into giving up the dream world. Erm, okay. To me the main plot with Cillian Murphy had a more interesting core: a guy's self-understanding in relation to his inheritance and successful father. Both are shallow and not "deep", both "develop" in the movie, but the second has some meaning to me and the first doesn't, and it seems to me to be a real advantage.
Re: exposition. I agree that one can get overly concerned with this. But I think it's annoying when exposition goes on during the entire movie, so that rules are introduced in order to explain something going on right that second. For example, all of a sudden it matters whether or not you die in the dream world, and it has to be explained why. Or the elaborate and (to me) cool idea of worming one's way through someone's subconscious by constructing labyrinths and stuff is suddenly thrown out in favor of action sequences involving a "militarized" subconscious. It makes the movie feel more ad hoc and random.
If the movie is going to just be about the mechanics of a world with weird rules, then fine. It's not favorite cup of tea, but I can definitely appreciate it. But there are better and worse constructions and presentations of artificial mechanics, and more and less involving plot vehicles for exploring it. Though some of Kirk Hamilton's particular complaints strike me as silly, I overall agree with him that Inception was inferior to the Matrix in this regard. If anything I think the right analogy with Inception is the second Matrix movie.
I too prefer to think Inception as a spiritual successor to Matrix. It explores the idea of layers of constructed reality in a recursive fashion that I hoped Matrix sequels would reveal.
Also, I suspect Matrix world would seem less weird to computer geeks than the world of Inception. The opposite is also true. Inception appeals even to a non sci-fi buff. That is a remarkable achievement for such a complex movie.
There are a lot of questions towards the end, but they make you think much beyond the canvas of the movie. That is truly a rewarding experience.
Absolutely agree regarding throwing out the labyrinth in favor of a fight scene. Throughout the entire movie prior to the snow-dream I had really been looking forward to, what I hoped would be, a thought-provoking or mind-bending maze through the world of dreams and subconsciousness. To have that pushed aside in favor of gunfights was incredibly shallow and disappointing.
Well David Mamet for one:
Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.
Any time any character is saying to another "as you know", that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.
http://ezinearticles.com/?David-Mamets-Rules-For-Writers---W...
Not having seen inception, I can't judge if the exposition somehow avoids this problem, but in general I feel like Mamet is as good an authority as any to appeal to :)
A limbo state within a dream, within a dream, within a dream, (within a dream?).
It reminded me of recursion in programming, waiting for it all to unwind.
Not to mention all the rest of the things which just added to the complexity of the whole experience. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it and could follow the plot, but it constantly felt like it was adding complexity just for the sake of it, not necessarily improving the experience.
I don't really understand why they had an entire training montage where she learnt to bend the world, experimented with physics, limits of dreams, even taught her some clever tricks such as 'penrose stairs'. Yet, when it came to her utilisation in the film, she was not seen to do anything? (I know she designed the levels, but ultimately her role in doing that seemed to be ignored. I was awaiting her to use her 'amazing skill' to do something great to help save the day.
Many of these ideas were presented in The Matrix but the "idea" of n-deep illusions was central to Inception. I appreciated the time multiplication, even given the 20x fast brain function bodge.
Why were the acceleration changes only go one layer deep? Perhaps inner ear sensation (balance, acceleration) in the dreamer's world are the only modifiers. It doesn't matter, the construct produced intriguing new effects that I was pleased to experience.
We should be arguing about interesting ramifications. Personally I'd like to believe that Mal was correct and Cobb was dreaming all through the film.
The film reminds me of a couple of Red Dwarf books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life (especially) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Human These are definitely worth a read if you are interested in science fiction.
Disagree heavily. Many of the most complicated games from the past had no tutorials, but people were still able to figure them out. Figuring out was part of the fun in fact. Most people I know simply ignore tutorials.
And I can't blame them, because developers tend to be horrible at putting tutorials together. Most tutorials today start with the most basic things imaginable- moving your character and moving the camera. These things don't change from game to game. Only a very small number of modern games have tutorials worth playing.
Instead of explicitly introducing concepts, concepts are introduced in-game one by one. There's a gentle ramp-up, and the goal is to have the player unaware that they're playing a tutorial.
It's very tricky to get the right balance between teaching and action in the first few levels.
Examples of games where the tutorial is the first few levels (off the top of my head): Halo, Portal, Half Life 2
First, there are a lot of mini-tutorials throughout the game with no instructions where you can not advance until you learn some easy skill - like breaking wood with crowbar, shooting a padlock to open a door, putting concrete blocks on a swing for it to rise, etc.
Then, there are cases where you'd want to practice a skill before the using it in battle - like using Magnusson devices to hit striders. You get instructions and a chance to fire it seveal times to get a feeling of its trajectory without having to load the game a dozen times during the real battle.
However, I do have an 11 year old son - I usually learn games by having him explain to me the bare minimum of controller commands and learning as I go after that.
If an 11 year old can't explain in 30 seconds enough to get me started in a game then I probably will get bored and go back to playing Halo 3 online.
I think in Inception they took things too far, multiple dream levels, weird limbo states, etc. They could've just built a far simpler movie and it would've flowed a lot better.
It's comparable to software. Often the most enjoyable user experience is one with very few features executed extremely well. Compared to a piece of software with every single feature or idea plugged in, executed fairly sloppily.
Inception was lucky it had a great core concept, cast and good effects to hold up for the on going confusion throughout the film.
The comparison I feel is Matrix compared to Existence, where 'Existence' in this scenario is Inception.
It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).
Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.
As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.
It's true that the rules are changed, but they're changed almost immediately; we have one encounter in a dream where we see that being killed means that you wake up, and this understanding is then taken away from us during the next dream (not counting the various tutorials). One may question the utility of a rule that is given only to be immediately taken away, but I believe that the point here was to make us feel the shock of the unexpected danger in which the characters found themselves—we are supposed to be shaken out of our complacency just as they are.
The second point seems truly bizarre. I think it's fair to say that a large chunk of the ‘meaning’ of the movie is that we are left to wonder at the end whether we have reached a ‘real-life’ ending, or are still watching someone's dreams. The fact that everyone seems fine, despite the severe dangers that were advertised, is, from this point of view, not lazy story-telling but a way of making us uncomfortable with the easy answer of taking the ending literally.
It was a hollywood movie, not Primer. Nolan had to explain everything well enough for mainstream audiences to get it. From my experience watching the film with several different groups of people, most of whom don't give a damn about sci-fi, he succeeded admirably.
This movie is a THINKER not unlike the mind-bender Primer, which almost certainly requires multiple viewings and a wiki page to fully grok. Understanding these movies is not supposed to be passive (giving you exactly what you need to know when you need to know it would enable you to be a passive viewer) and when the movie is over you're supposed to be thinking about what you just saw for more than 5 minutes and on more than a superficial level.
This movie was very good at what it tried to do. It didn't get bogged down by in-depth explanation of the technology involved in dream-diving, didn't give us super complex character back-stories, and didn't overwhelm the user with technologies to that world. I felt we were provided with a set of basic building blocks (in the form of world-unique jargon) and then given a tour of a complex world based on these blocks - and it was damn cool. If it had tried to do more than his the movie would have gotten bogged down.
Then I realised I was getting upset about a blog entry, and thought: wait, no. This is how the internet works. People post their opinions on blogs, like-minded people (of which I am clearly not one in this case) will enjoy sharing with them. The fellow has opened my mind to another way of interpreting a story, another angle from which I can appreciate the work. And maybe by understanding his opinion I can reflect better on my own enjoyment.
Then I thought a little harder. No, the internet works by ignorant people ranting against each other until they achieve a state of mutual indignation which overrides any basic logical thoughts they might have possibly had about the situation. It was at this point I wished I had not deleted my original post. Sorry internet, I have failed you.
Are you kidding me? This movies is packed with all sorts of action, character development and general goings on! For a video game the action stops and you have to jump or counter 3 or 4 times to continue. At what point in Inception does the plot stop moving for more than 3 seconds? There is always something going on.
Even when Ellen Paige is getting a tutorial in architecture (yeah, a tutorial in the movie) there is tension when the world starts reacting negatively.
Exposition dones wrong does indeed sink movies and makes them boring. But you have to do it somehow, especially if it's a science fiction. Inception does it so, so well.
But it wasn't engaging. The dialogue was clichéd, the characters bland, and for a summer action movie it lacked a "crowning moment of awesome".
More than anything though, it felt as if the writers took a good idea and tried to make it complicated (but not too complicated) without any real spark of inspiration. Apart from the reversal or deception going into the deepest level, they were just piling on the layers.
Wow, the fight in the hotel hallway didn't do anything for you? For me, that topped anything I saw in a Wachowski brothers movie (I was literally gasping); it felt like a character expertly manipulating rules of physics that he could not manipulate, rather than simply ignoring the rules that were inconvenient.