Inception hangs together pretty well, but it's not without problems. Here's a couple sticking points that I can't work out to complete satisfaction:
1- The first-level dream in the rainy city should seemingly last about a week for the dreamers. Yet when the van hits the water at the film's climax, the gang had clearly not been in that dream for anything more than a few hours. What did they do after they escaped the van? Evade Fischer's projections for a full week before waking up on the plane?
2- Did Arthur really manage to corral all of the dreamers in the second-level hotel-dream, move them to the lift, AND set the explosive charges in less than three minutes? Crikey!
Tuesday 28 September 2010
Sunday 19 September 2010
Thoughts on Inception
Inception is a cool movie - starting with it's most basic idea: that dreams are not just fleeting mental apparitions, but instead are more like places that you can go to. You can build a dream like a building, take a dreamer there and let them populate it, fill out the details with their subconcious mind. Then, if you play a few tricks, you can extract secret information. This, of course, is the prize skill of Inception's main character Dom Cobb; he's a thief that steals from your dreams. How's that for a cool premise? It's perfectly suited for a big-screen adventure complete with beautiful visuals, exciting action, and a delicate plot - all of which Inception delivers.
Now we have the premise, but of course it has to be a little more complex than that. There have to be rules, limitations and dangers even in the dreams, or else what's to stop the characters actively dreaming up a quick solution to every problem they encounter? Well, there is an answer; while you can play with the dream-reality a little, doing so too much will alert the target's subconscious to a foreign presence and the dream-scape will quickly become a hostile environment. This is Inception's best trick. It establishes very clearly exactly what the rules of the dream-worlds are, including their relationships to reality and other dream-worlds, and plays by those rules to produce a stunning and creative heist movie.
And that's what Inception is, it's a heist movie. It's not really any deeper than that at it's core. There are twists, obviously - the heist takes places over multiple levels of dream-reality, and the object is not to steal money or valuables, but to plant an idea in a man's mind. But it's a heist - you have the gang each with their own skill, you have the heavily guarded objectives, and of course you have the plan gone wrong. It's the adventure itself that's the major attraction, rather than the characters or the concepts. The playing board and the rules of the game are laid out at the start, and then the characters are sent wheeling away into one obstacle after another, through fights, chases, moments of emotional realization. It's a lot of fun to follow along with.
It's been touted as a movie that's convoluted or difficult to follow, but it really ought not to be. It's not -that- complicated! Once you've grasped the basic points, it all clicks into place pretty nicely. Apart from the opening, which launches right into a dream-caper in progress, there is no concept which is not explained to the audience ahead of time, and there is no deliberate obscuring of the mechanics of the plot. Inception isn't a movie that wants to confuse. It has a couple of unique ideas, but importantly it's always clear about the way that they affect the action.
The key thing - which Inception does very well - is that the story makes sense according to the rules that it sets for itself. That getting killed in a dream while sedated will send you to limbo, that a falling sensation or impact can wake you up, that dream-time is faster than real-time. That's great, and it's a critical part of some of the movie's best scenes, in particular the fight sequence in the rotating hallway.
The plot advances very quickly, and despite a two-and-a-half hour running length, does not feel long or bloated. There's not much to cut. It's marvelously well constructed, and it has a neat quirk that not a lot of stories have - it didn't have a villain. Think of the candidates - was Fischer the villain? No, if he's anything then he's a victim. What about Mal? She's more deluded than villainous. Saito and Cobb, in fact, are probably the best villain-candidates in the film, and they are both a little too easy to sympathise with to be classified as out-and-out bad-guys. There is no central mustache-twirler in Inception, no sinister master-mind with a plan to rule the world. And yet, the movie is packed with thrilling action sequences - shoot-outs, car-chases, and the fist-fight in the rotating hotel corridor. How many films can you think of that stage a similar level of action without ever setting up a central villain? It's a wonderful thing to pull off, and Inception does it very naturally.
If there is a criticism to be made of Inception, it's that Christopher Nolan could have been more ambitious with the dream-scapes. In fairness, it is explained in the film that the locations the characters visit while dreaming are designed places meant to appear at least superficially real, and are not ad-hoc constructs. There is scope in the movie for some odd occurances, although it may have been difficult to keep the movie tense if the gang were being pursued by angry pink unicorns instead of gun-men. The more restrained approach works very well in any case - and besides that, as a matter of taste I tend to prefer action grounded in reality anyway.
What about the final question: was Cobb dreaming at the end of the movie? My instinct is that he was back in the real world, and that the top was about to stop spinning. Of course, cutting away from the top just before the moment of truth was the only way to end the movie – I wouldn't change it.
Inception a straight adventure with a neat idea at it's core. It's not played for pretense. It's a thrill ride through a reality where dreams are places, and enterprising individuals can make a profit by going into them. It's presented with style and intelligence; it's well acted, and it features a couple killer one-liners. It even has a fantastic score. Isn't that cool? I liked it a lot. I feel like I could write more about what I thought of it, but there's a thousand words here and that will do for now.
Now we have the premise, but of course it has to be a little more complex than that. There have to be rules, limitations and dangers even in the dreams, or else what's to stop the characters actively dreaming up a quick solution to every problem they encounter? Well, there is an answer; while you can play with the dream-reality a little, doing so too much will alert the target's subconscious to a foreign presence and the dream-scape will quickly become a hostile environment. This is Inception's best trick. It establishes very clearly exactly what the rules of the dream-worlds are, including their relationships to reality and other dream-worlds, and plays by those rules to produce a stunning and creative heist movie.
And that's what Inception is, it's a heist movie. It's not really any deeper than that at it's core. There are twists, obviously - the heist takes places over multiple levels of dream-reality, and the object is not to steal money or valuables, but to plant an idea in a man's mind. But it's a heist - you have the gang each with their own skill, you have the heavily guarded objectives, and of course you have the plan gone wrong. It's the adventure itself that's the major attraction, rather than the characters or the concepts. The playing board and the rules of the game are laid out at the start, and then the characters are sent wheeling away into one obstacle after another, through fights, chases, moments of emotional realization. It's a lot of fun to follow along with.
It's been touted as a movie that's convoluted or difficult to follow, but it really ought not to be. It's not -that- complicated! Once you've grasped the basic points, it all clicks into place pretty nicely. Apart from the opening, which launches right into a dream-caper in progress, there is no concept which is not explained to the audience ahead of time, and there is no deliberate obscuring of the mechanics of the plot. Inception isn't a movie that wants to confuse. It has a couple of unique ideas, but importantly it's always clear about the way that they affect the action.
The key thing - which Inception does very well - is that the story makes sense according to the rules that it sets for itself. That getting killed in a dream while sedated will send you to limbo, that a falling sensation or impact can wake you up, that dream-time is faster than real-time. That's great, and it's a critical part of some of the movie's best scenes, in particular the fight sequence in the rotating hallway.
The plot advances very quickly, and despite a two-and-a-half hour running length, does not feel long or bloated. There's not much to cut. It's marvelously well constructed, and it has a neat quirk that not a lot of stories have - it didn't have a villain. Think of the candidates - was Fischer the villain? No, if he's anything then he's a victim. What about Mal? She's more deluded than villainous. Saito and Cobb, in fact, are probably the best villain-candidates in the film, and they are both a little too easy to sympathise with to be classified as out-and-out bad-guys. There is no central mustache-twirler in Inception, no sinister master-mind with a plan to rule the world. And yet, the movie is packed with thrilling action sequences - shoot-outs, car-chases, and the fist-fight in the rotating hotel corridor. How many films can you think of that stage a similar level of action without ever setting up a central villain? It's a wonderful thing to pull off, and Inception does it very naturally.
If there is a criticism to be made of Inception, it's that Christopher Nolan could have been more ambitious with the dream-scapes. In fairness, it is explained in the film that the locations the characters visit while dreaming are designed places meant to appear at least superficially real, and are not ad-hoc constructs. There is scope in the movie for some odd occurances, although it may have been difficult to keep the movie tense if the gang were being pursued by angry pink unicorns instead of gun-men. The more restrained approach works very well in any case - and besides that, as a matter of taste I tend to prefer action grounded in reality anyway.
What about the final question: was Cobb dreaming at the end of the movie? My instinct is that he was back in the real world, and that the top was about to stop spinning. Of course, cutting away from the top just before the moment of truth was the only way to end the movie – I wouldn't change it.
Inception a straight adventure with a neat idea at it's core. It's not played for pretense. It's a thrill ride through a reality where dreams are places, and enterprising individuals can make a profit by going into them. It's presented with style and intelligence; it's well acted, and it features a couple killer one-liners. It even has a fantastic score. Isn't that cool? I liked it a lot. I feel like I could write more about what I thought of it, but there's a thousand words here and that will do for now.
Thursday 9 September 2010
Gratuitious Space Battles Review
Gratuitious Space Battles is - wait for it - about gratuitious battles, in space. Dreampt up and coded by Cliff Harris of one-man games-outfit Positech Games, GSB is a neat product with an amusing, irreverant tone and a surprising amount of depth.
The showpiece feature of the game is, of course, the gratuitous space battles. In the finest tradition of the all best space operas, everything plays out like a second world war naval engagement in the stars. Great hulking cruisers lumber around the battle-space blasting chunks out of each other with brightly coloured beams and space-torpedoes, while one-man (or alien) fighters zip past missiles and peck away at larger craft, or engage in twisting dogfights.
The first thing to say regarding these battles, which are drawn in two-dimensions, is that they are positively gorgeous to look at: set against backdrops of planets or nebulae, they are full of bright colours, unique ship designs and lots of neat details. Small drones will launch from the innards of damaged cruisers and begin to repair damage to the hull, for instance. Stricken craft on the edge of 'complete structural failure' will spit out escape pods just before the fireworks go off, and the remains of exploded ships will sink slowly away into the depths of space as the battle rages on without them. A lot of space battlin' can fit on the screen at any one time, and it can be genuinely interesting to just sit and watch the action unfold, even with a fast forward tool sitting in the bottom left of the screen waiting to be clicked.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The meat of the gameplay is to be found not in the battles themselves, over which the player has no direct control, but rather in the game's ship design and battle planning segments. The first task for the budding space admiral is to design the ships that he/she/it will order into battle. There are three classes of ship to play with: massive cruisers, medium-sized frigates, and tiny fighters. Each has its own role in the space-armada, though frigates do sometimes feel a little too vulnerable.
Ships are designed by first selecting a hull, each of which has different properties, and then appending to it an array of modules: weaponry, engines, shields, crew quarters and a variety of other components. There is a huge list of modules to choose from for each class of ship, and the total possible combinations must be a very big number indeed. The process of designing ships can be surprisingly involving: skimp on the engines to save power? Stack up the shield units, or stick on two more massive death lasers? Do those fighters *really* need shields, especially when they go quicker without them? These are the sorts of questions you'll ask yourself when putting together your space fleet. Although the sheer number of different modules may make ship design something of a grope in the dark to start with, it didn't take me long before I was piecing together purpose-specific ships - anti-fighter frigates, torpedo-fighters, ultro-cheap cruisers and so on. If you've ever enjoyed messing around with a big box of lego blocks, the appeal of the ship design in GSB ought to be quickly apparent.
After the ship design comes the set-up for the gratuitous battle itself - prior to each engagement the player must position their space fleet and issue orders to each of the craft at their disposal. There is no shortage of different orders to give, ranging from commands to keep moving, to co-operate with other vessels, to orders to mantain a certain distance from opposing vessels - useful for making sure that all of a ships weapons are in range. Positioning is also very important - concentrate your forces, or spread them out? Keep the fighters with the big ships, or order them off to make a nuisance of themselves amongst the alien fleet? There are plenty such things to consider here for the aspiring space-fleet commander.
Post-battle there is a useful stats screen, offering information about the battle and the glorious victory or 'strategic sacrifice' of your death-fleet. It provides detailed information about which weapons and ships caused the most damage, what percentage of shots fired by each weapon hit their target, which were nullified by shields; casting light on the question of which craft contributed to the cause and which were merely there to enjoy the bright lights. Depending on your performance in the battle, and which difficulty level you played on, you will also be awarded points which can be spent to unlock new ship modules and hulls.
There are only about twenty official battle scenarios that come packed with the game - including all the scenarios that come with the race-DLC expansions. This is not a major problem however, as GSB includes an in-game browser for downloading and playing challenges put together by other players. These vary in difficulty, and there are all kinds of different fleets out there waiting to be annihilated, though the process of figuring out how to defeat each one becomes a little too formulaic after a time. The base game comes with four different races, with differently styled ships, and there are three more available via DLC - and for those who feel that Gratuitious Space Battles is just *too* gratuitious, there is a simple campaign expansion on the cards as well.
Gratuitious Space Battles is a very creative product, full of charming little touches that come from a willingness by the developer to keep improving the game with periodic patches. It also has a depth that springs naturally from a very simple core concept: that it's fun to watch flying platforms of giga-death blast laser beams at each other in space. Everything in the game operates in support of this idea, and it works tremendously well.
4/5
PLUS
-Gorgeous 2D graphics
-Sense of humour
-Interesting gameplay
-Excellent developer support
MINUS
-Small number of official scenarios
-Repetitive
The showpiece feature of the game is, of course, the gratuitous space battles. In the finest tradition of the all best space operas, everything plays out like a second world war naval engagement in the stars. Great hulking cruisers lumber around the battle-space blasting chunks out of each other with brightly coloured beams and space-torpedoes, while one-man (or alien) fighters zip past missiles and peck away at larger craft, or engage in twisting dogfights.
The first thing to say regarding these battles, which are drawn in two-dimensions, is that they are positively gorgeous to look at: set against backdrops of planets or nebulae, they are full of bright colours, unique ship designs and lots of neat details. Small drones will launch from the innards of damaged cruisers and begin to repair damage to the hull, for instance. Stricken craft on the edge of 'complete structural failure' will spit out escape pods just before the fireworks go off, and the remains of exploded ships will sink slowly away into the depths of space as the battle rages on without them. A lot of space battlin' can fit on the screen at any one time, and it can be genuinely interesting to just sit and watch the action unfold, even with a fast forward tool sitting in the bottom left of the screen waiting to be clicked.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The meat of the gameplay is to be found not in the battles themselves, over which the player has no direct control, but rather in the game's ship design and battle planning segments. The first task for the budding space admiral is to design the ships that he/she/it will order into battle. There are three classes of ship to play with: massive cruisers, medium-sized frigates, and tiny fighters. Each has its own role in the space-armada, though frigates do sometimes feel a little too vulnerable.
Ships are designed by first selecting a hull, each of which has different properties, and then appending to it an array of modules: weaponry, engines, shields, crew quarters and a variety of other components. There is a huge list of modules to choose from for each class of ship, and the total possible combinations must be a very big number indeed. The process of designing ships can be surprisingly involving: skimp on the engines to save power? Stack up the shield units, or stick on two more massive death lasers? Do those fighters *really* need shields, especially when they go quicker without them? These are the sorts of questions you'll ask yourself when putting together your space fleet. Although the sheer number of different modules may make ship design something of a grope in the dark to start with, it didn't take me long before I was piecing together purpose-specific ships - anti-fighter frigates, torpedo-fighters, ultro-cheap cruisers and so on. If you've ever enjoyed messing around with a big box of lego blocks, the appeal of the ship design in GSB ought to be quickly apparent.
After the ship design comes the set-up for the gratuitous battle itself - prior to each engagement the player must position their space fleet and issue orders to each of the craft at their disposal. There is no shortage of different orders to give, ranging from commands to keep moving, to co-operate with other vessels, to orders to mantain a certain distance from opposing vessels - useful for making sure that all of a ships weapons are in range. Positioning is also very important - concentrate your forces, or spread them out? Keep the fighters with the big ships, or order them off to make a nuisance of themselves amongst the alien fleet? There are plenty such things to consider here for the aspiring space-fleet commander.
Post-battle there is a useful stats screen, offering information about the battle and the glorious victory or 'strategic sacrifice' of your death-fleet. It provides detailed information about which weapons and ships caused the most damage, what percentage of shots fired by each weapon hit their target, which were nullified by shields; casting light on the question of which craft contributed to the cause and which were merely there to enjoy the bright lights. Depending on your performance in the battle, and which difficulty level you played on, you will also be awarded points which can be spent to unlock new ship modules and hulls.
There are only about twenty official battle scenarios that come packed with the game - including all the scenarios that come with the race-DLC expansions. This is not a major problem however, as GSB includes an in-game browser for downloading and playing challenges put together by other players. These vary in difficulty, and there are all kinds of different fleets out there waiting to be annihilated, though the process of figuring out how to defeat each one becomes a little too formulaic after a time. The base game comes with four different races, with differently styled ships, and there are three more available via DLC - and for those who feel that Gratuitious Space Battles is just *too* gratuitious, there is a simple campaign expansion on the cards as well.
Gratuitious Space Battles is a very creative product, full of charming little touches that come from a willingness by the developer to keep improving the game with periodic patches. It also has a depth that springs naturally from a very simple core concept: that it's fun to watch flying platforms of giga-death blast laser beams at each other in space. Everything in the game operates in support of this idea, and it works tremendously well.
4/5
PLUS
-Gorgeous 2D graphics
-Sense of humour
-Interesting gameplay
-Excellent developer support
MINUS
-Small number of official scenarios
-Repetitive
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