Behind the Special Effects of Inception 196
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the yes-have-some dept.
from the yes-have-some dept.
Lanxon writes "Wired has a behind the scenes look at how Inception's reality-distorting special effects sequences were shot, in an interview with Chris Corbould — the man 'prized for his ability to stage a real-life tank chase in St. Petersburg (GoldenEye), to flip a working juggernaut down a narrow Chicago street (The Dark Knight), and to build a working Batmobile that can do 30-metre jumps without the aid of a single post-production pixel.'" Hopefully most of you who intend to see Inception have already seen it by now, so you don't have to worry about spoilers. It's getting pretty much universal praise.
Not much content (Score:5, Interesting)
I assumed the gravity special effects were all CG, but it's great to know they were done physically!
WHOOSH! (Score:5, Interesting)
Y'all're being way too literal - whether the top fell or it didn't, the point of the last shot isn't whether the reality Cobb is in is real or not, the point is that he walked away from the top as it was spinning. He stopped trying to get home because, as far as he was concerned, he was as home as he wanted to be.
Whether the reality we, as an audience, left him in was "real" or not is completely immaterial. Home != reality, necessarily; he ended up where he needed to be.
The film rocked on plot, not SFX (Score:5, Interesting)
So many people, including my wife, said they just didn't get it. I must really be in the minority, because I thought that it had a similar "wow" factor as "The Matrix", only with plot instead of special effects. I remember watching "The Matrix", and at the scene where Neo got unplugged, I had this overwhelming feeling of "Oh, my, god! I get it! This is so absolutely innovatively cool!" I really had the same feeling when watching Inception. And maybe my delight with it has to do with the fact that I am able to have lucid dreams on occasion. I specifically remember one where I woke up from a dream, somehow realized that I was still dreaming, and then woke up from that. Having personally experienced that made the concept at least understandable.
Granted, it wasn't a perfect movie, and it was probably too long, but I really think it had an innovative depth that hasn't been seen in movies in a long time.
I also feel that though the SFX were cool, this is a movie you really don't need to see on the big screen. The plot carries it well. The wow-factor doesn't come from the SFX, it comes from the plot.
Re:Spoiler Alert (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, this might not be the place for this, but I'm pretty sure this is the real deal (spoilers, obviously):
When Cobb's wife killed herself, she was correct in thinking that they lived in a dream. She escaped into reality. When he didn't wake up, she went back in to rescue him. She's pulling a Mr. Charles, posing as part of his own unconscious. However, her attempts to get him to realize he was dreaming were always based on making his dream life worse, which as Cobb tells us, doesn't work. Positive feelings are stronger.
In the end, she creates an inception in him-- the idea of a friend coming into his dreams to rescue him, and the idea that escaping from the dream will allow him to be with his loved ones. The Inception works, but takes some time to grow-- so he doesn't snap out of things immediately, but the top spinning at the end is a sign that the process has worked.
The big question in my mind is, who in the dream is real? Is Mal pulling the Inception all by herself, or are some of the characters members of her team? My guess is that Ariadne and Saito are part of Mal's team, or else she's sometimes masquerading as them (the way the forger does).
Re:Spoiler Alert (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, ok. You guys are so logical. I enjoyed the movie a lot, but got choked up at the end when he finally got to see his kids. I wanted to rush home and wake mine up and hug them. Guess I'm sentimental, and wanted it all to be real for him.
That's actually kinda the point, though. The movie philosophy is really rooted in the old idea that reality is in the mind. If you hold to that belief, then it doesn't matter that, in the end, he was asleep, as to him, what he was experiencing is reality.
Re:Universal Praise? (Score:2, Interesting)
But come on. The basic premise wasn't even capitalized on. Dreams are WEIRD. Dreams are crazy things where ANYTHING can happen. Dreams are absurd, as in Kierkegaard. There were so many precise rules to the way the whole thing worked it wasn't a dream, it was an alternate reality slightly different than ours, but a reality with real laws and rules governing it. Dreams don't have rules. In a dream I can walk down the street and then Paris flips over and then I'm also an egg salad sandwich who kills Hitler with a goose.
The thing with the time dilation was the most absurd. I mean, never mind that just because you have a dream within a dream doesn't mean you have a brain within a brain (which would be kind of necessary to be thinking at, whatever, 1000x normal speed), but really? That's the only way the writers could think up to inject some sense of urgency? He'll be down there for...TEN YEARS! Oh man. What a drag. Should've set the alarm a half hour early today.
All of this is forgiven if the ENTIRE THING (including all the shared dream, machine-doohickey Architect stuff - how does she actually go about building these dream worlds? We only ever see her making cardboard models. Hmm...) is a dream, but then...
Kind of a boring dream.
Egg salad sandwich, man.
Re:Spoiler Alert (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh? I thought the obvious ending was that his wife was right, and they were still in a dream even after getting run over by a train. Her projection even points it out, that he's being chased by a faceless international corporation (aka someone else's projections are hunting him down).
Further, as is common with most movies, everything begins in medias res, or in the middle of things - we don't have any idea what he was doing before the movie started (or before the prequel comic, if you read that), everything just gets going. Several times in the movie they point out that one of the ways you can tell you're in a dream is that you don't know how you got to the present state, you just assume there's a reason and go with the flow. We just don't notice it in reference to the movie itself because that's how movies work, but really think about it - what was Cobb doing before going into Saito's head? What was he doing before the Kobol heist in the comic? Everything just kinda started.
What of the other characters? Well, we see quite frequently that Cobb is capable of projecting his own subconscious into other people's dreams (Mal, the train). All we need to do is apply that to them. He's projecting the main characters of the movie into the dream, in order to provide his own backup. Isn't it just convenient that all the people he needs exist and are free, or can be convinced to join in? We as viewers of a movie don't think twice about that, because that's included in the basic structure of a heist movie; you have to gather the best experts in the field, after all. However, in real life, someone as talented as Eames probably wouldn't just be sitting around in Africa doing nothing, he'd have his own agenda.
On further inspection, it's pretty clear that the various characters can also be described in terms of Cobb. Arthur and Eames are just blatantly obvious: Arthur is Cobb's cold logic, capable of perplexing logical twists, quiet and methodological, rule-bound but those rules can be incredibly complex (see his explanation of the infinite staircase and his use of it in combat, for instance, or his rocket propelled elevator idea). Eames, on the other hand, is wild inspiration and crazy dreams, with his leaps of illogic (he's the only character who expresses any interest in knowing what Fisher finds in the chamber, for instance). For example, when the idea of inception was presented to Arthur, he immediately said "no, it's not possible" - he clearly knows it can be done, but what he's saying is we can't do it. Eames immediately says "Oh yeah, totally doable", because his ego knows no bounds.
Ariadne (the architect lady) is a little more subtle. Notice how she is insistent on the fact that the "top" level of the movie is the real world? Well, if she is a projection like Mal, then she's a manifestation of Cobb's belief that the "top" level is the topmost level of the dreams, whereas the Mal projection is a manifestation of Cobb's belief that the "top" level is not the topmost level. They fight, Ariadne wins.
The Indian chemist guy I have no idea, he's just kinda there. In terms of a heist movie he's the scaredy cat comic relief character, but he's very subdued and pretty much just a bland generic projection.
Further, in theory Cobb's top doesn't stop spinning if he's in a dream. Watch closely - he never leaves the top alone long enough to know if it's real or not. He always stops it partway, or it falls off the sink, or something; he never just sits and watches it spin until it stops. Of course, mimicking the weight and feel of the top would require someone else had touched to totem before, but that's not hard - we don't know what's happened in a theoretical "higher" level, and in fact because it's Mal's totem she would know it intimately as well.
There's lots more I'm sure, but I've only seen the movie once. However, I think in the final analysis you will find quite a few hints that the movie is intended to bring you to the conclusion that Cobb is in fact still dreaming, and that the layer that is the "top" in the movie is not the "top" in reality.