But despite how Inception has been praised to high heaven by the type of critic who usually (and rightly) decries "high concept", i.e. trailer-friendly, movies, frankly it is one itself. "Caper movie takes place in dreams." What more needs be said? I know, I know, ontological mysteries make you feel smart, 'cause you can debate and defend your preferred interpretation until the cows come home. But it's still really not that deep a movie. Not that it's a bad movie, but it's ridiculous that Inception's fans act like it had Jacques Maritain as a technical consultant.
Basically, any movie you can sum up in one sentence, is a "high concept" movie. Again, not that that's bad—the Iliad and the Odyssey are both basically high-concept, i.e. "The Greeks besiege and eventually destroy Troy over a kidnapped queen" and "After Troy, a Greek king wanders, accursed, trying to make his way back to Ithaca". But there are other ideas out there, and you can't really sum them up in one sentence like that, not unless the sentence is gonna be a run-on. I mean, how do you sum up Sahara (the World War II movie), or even Star Wars and Indiana Jones?
Which reminds me, it was Spielberg's genius that managed to make a World War II movie into a "high concept" thing: Saving Private Ryan. And, whatever else you might like about it, he had to do it by running roughshod over the point of that war. Forget getting the Nazis out of Europe and the Japanese out of Asia; those are altruistic reasons, practically collectivist! No, we need individual reasons to fight—Hollywood leftists aren't as different from soulless Paulbots as they'd like to think. Forget all that noble hooey about making the world safe for democracy; keeping one irrelevant stooge alive "was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess".
Yeah screw you, Yankee, that godawful shitty mess was entirely the work of your boy Wilson, and various bribed-ass English Parliamentarians, deliberately sabotaging any chance for justice at the Treaty of Versailles. So it's just common courtesy for you to have to do the legwork to fix it. While we're on the subject, who was it opened Japan up to the outside world, again?
(As an aside, I find that whole "this time it's personal" thing, in movies, to be hilarious. E.g., Taken: you can't make prisoners worried they might drown, even if it'll save thousands of lives, but you can actually torture them to find one girl. Good. So force is never justified in service to society as a whole, or to a principle: but nothing is off-limits in service to a private grudge. And yet these same people largely favor restricting gun-ownership to the police.)
It's actually sorta funny, though, the things you can't sum up in a sentence. How do you sum up Halo in a sentence? Pretty unwieldy sentence, that. Ditto Ringworld, or any real science fiction—of which Halo is just about the only visual-media sample. And I'd love to see the polysynthetic grammar and wanton abuse of semicolons you'd have to resort to, to sum up Lord of the Rings in a sentence.
And notice, you can get some blockbusters out of them—I already mentioned Star Wars, Indiana Jones, plus LotR. Halo would be a great blockbuster, if you did it right, as would Ringworld, but let's not think about the possible causes of the similarity. Conan, as it appears in the books, would be a good blockbuster, and it would also be too hard to sum up in one sentence (the movie—and the only Conan is Schwarzenegger, sorry—simplified it by giving him a vendetta against the cult of Set).
I'm not even sure what exactly I'm saying here. I just got annoyed, while trying to find discussions of the intellectual bankruptcy of Hollywood, with all the people contrasting Inception favorably with comic book movies. Again, "dream or real?" isn't that deep a question—the answer is "you have to assume real, in the absence of contrary evidence". Compare that to Iron Man, or even Spider-Man: much deeper business. Leaving to one side that you can't sum up any comic book, other than very generally, in a sentence. (Sum up Green Lantern in a sentence. I'll wait.)
Back? Yeah, anyway, I was just concerned to point out that if a movie is simple, as Inception is actually (fundamentally) simple, that's certainly not bad: your story should never be more complex than it has to be. But just because it flatters you by indulging a pseudo-philosophical question that nobody over the age of 17 has any trouble with, doesn't mean it's not high concept.
Also, since the major source of these musings was this article, question: how would you sum up Top Gun in a single phrase, as I did with Inception, up there? Without being deliberately reductive (as Top Gun admittedly deserves, not being remotely as good a movie), I mean. The fact of the matter is that what's really going on is that Top Gun is stupid but character-driven, whereas Inception is markedly less stupid but situation-driven. I.e. and e.g., sum up the Bolshevik revolution. Not too hard, right? Okay, now sum up Lenin, or Stalin, or Trotsky, or Tsar Nicholas II. Much harder, huh?
Inception got made because, for all its (alleged) cerebrality, it's high-concept: the kind of thing even a marketer can understand (explain Ringworld to one, really, I wanna watch). Top Gun, on the other hand, is actually much more complex (yes, it's shit, but it's complicated shit). It wasn't made because it's high concept, because it isn't. It was made because it's full of cool stuff that appeals to that adolescent male demographic the film industry discovered as a source of revenue right around then.
PS. I realize, I might not be the guy to ask about movies. See, I tend to prefer TV series, as a format, to movies, for a reason I can sum up in (ironically) one sentence. Here goes:
I prefer SF and fantasy, and you can't establish setting deeply enough in a mere two hours.Okay, so yes, it has two clauses.
1 comment:
That's why I like Dark City better than Inception (one reason, actually, since Dark City is overflowing with awesomeness) Dark City is about the characters, and Inception is about the concept, with the characters jammed in. It was still a darn good flick, but more in the vein of Ocean's 11 or the Italian Job, and even the Italian Job has more focus on the characters. You have the rules the characters are up against - the layout and security of the casino, the strength of the vault, etc. And you write a way to circumvent those rules - hacking the cameras, disguise kits, minis, etc. Then you put some guys to explain the situation, and you give them reasons to do the heist - revenge, proving something, money, etc.
That's all Inception is, just in the mind. They did a nice job, and followed the formula to a t. It's a good formula, and makes for very entertaining movies, especially if the budget is nice and big.
Compare that to Dark City, where the entire plot revolves around who the characters are, literally. It has the elements of a mystery, and looks like film noir (the only good thing about noir is the style - otherwise it's pretty shallow), but it is about what makes someone who they are, fighting for it, and also fighting for love. I hate when people criticize him using his powers at the end to get the girl. What did they think he was trying to do the whole time? Save the world?
The thing you said about "this time it's personal" is true too, and it's because Hollywood doesn't dare show us what it's like to fight for an ideal. People who do that are stupid sheep. We should instead let our passions lead us. In "boy" movies this is done by a guy going crazy on whoever crossed him, and in chick movies, this is done by "finding oneself" even if she has to betray people. Boy movies are better, by the way.
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