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Behind the Special Effects of Inception
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.
Here's the spoiler: The Slashdot summary is about as long as the article it links to. WTF? Who allows crap like this to get on the front page?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There wasn't hardly anything in the way of special effects in "Memento," and not much in "The Prestige." Yet those were his two best films and much better than this. "Inception" isn't *bad*, mind you. But the fact that people are concentrating so much on its visual effects is probably a good sign that the script isn't strong enough to carry the movie by itself. Everyone walked out of "Memento" way more blown away than they were from this movie, and no one was saying it was because of the cool FX. The farther away Nolan gets from Batcycles and FX, the more he has to concentrate on the script. And that's a good thing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This is a bit off topic, but all you /.ers need to see this movie, if for no other reason than that it is an allegory for memory management, stack frames, orphaned pointers, etc.
What on earth is a "working juggernaut"?
It's a movie, the whole thing was Nolan's dream. He shared it with us.
far as he was concerned, he was as home as he wanted to be.
BS. He made it abundantly clear in his confrontation with his dead wife's memory that he was *not* satisfied with the idea of only having his kids in a dream. He directly stated that he wanted to be with them "up there," in real life. The entire reason he was even on the mission is because he turned down that easy out.
I will agree that the plot was thin, but this specific point was repeated multiple times. I am surprised you missed it.
I think the phrase you are looking for is that "not once have you ever seen a CGI-rendered scene that you could identify as CGI-rendered that did not look CGI-rendered."
The ones that didn't look utterly fake looked real enough for you to assume that they were real. That's kind of the whole point, you see.
The ambiguity of the ending is important, it implies the possibility that not only was his wife right, but still alive and awake.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Guess I'm sentimental, and wanted it all to be real for him.
It is real for him, regardless of whether it is a dream or not.
Just like those were real emotions that you were feeling, despite it all being fiction on a screen.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I think the obvious ending is that we're not supposed to know.
I think its quite obvious the director wanted to have a good 'hehe, I'm not telling' inside joke with his audience, and I'm good with that.
Your version is just one possibility of how things may have turned out. The truth is, we weren't told.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I would argue that the ambiguity of the ending is important because it plants a seed of an idea in the audience; namely, the idea of whether Cobb is still in a dream or reality. In essence, the movie performs inception on the audience. Pretty cool trick IMO.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.