Robert Downey Jr.as Tony Stark Don Cheadle as James “Rhodey” Rhodes Gwyneth Paltrow as Virginia “Pepper” Potts Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer
Note: This review contains spoilers for: Iron Man.
Moscow, Russia location Card.
A television broadcast shows Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) revealing his identity as Iron Man.
A collection of images, articles, and clippings regarding Tony Stark.
Ivan (Mickey Rourke) celebrates development of his arc-reactor technology with his pet bird.
The sequel picks up right as Iron Man ends. Tony’s identity revelation coincides with the rise of an unseen enemy, Ivan, who seems to have access to the same technology that Tony does.
The film opens in Russia. Tony’s (Robert Downey Jr.) speech from the end of Iron Manproclaiming his identity as the titular “Iron Man” plays from a television in a shoddy apartment unit. A disheveled, dying man, Anton (Costa Ronin), looks disgusted at the news celebrating Stark and tells his son, Ivan (Mickey Rourke), that the prodigal superhero’s fame is undeserved; he suggests that if the Starks had not wronged him in the past, it would be Ivan’s name being chanted instead of Tony’s. He apologizes to Ivan before passing away. Mourning becomes motivation as Ivan begins a 6-month journey towards avenging his father and ruining the Stark name, working on high-tech machinery including an arc reactor not unlike Tony’s.
Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) makes an entrance at the Stark Expo.
Cheerleaders blast Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) with their costume blasters.
Howard (John Slattery) talks on a projection as Tony(Robert Downey Jr.) samples his blood.
His blood is now toxic.
While Tony’s enemies grow in power, Tony himself finds himself dealing with more than enough in the form of blood toxicity issues.
Meanwhile, it seems that the time passed has only allowed Tony’s new-found stardom to get to his head. He drops down from a jet in the skies, dives downwards towards a stadium, and makes a spectacular landing on a stage in front of thousands of people. A group of cheerleaders clad in “Iron Man”-styled uniforms pretend to blast Tony with their blasters as a finale to his performance. It’s apparent that Iron Man’s status as a cultural symbol has grown exponentially since we’ve last seen him.
Tony gets out of his suit and welcomes the audience to the newly re-instated Stark Expo, an celebration of technology from around the world. To commemorate the re-inauguration, Tony plays a video recorded by his late father, Howard (John Slattery), wherein the latter explains the unlimited potentials of technology. While the video plays, Tony steps off to the side and takes a sampling of his blood which indicates that he is suffering from blood toxicity of some kind.
He leaves the expo and is served a subpoena calling him to testify before the Senate the next day regarding his private ownership of the Iron Man suit. Senator Stern (Garry Shandling), one of the committee members, tries to argue that the technology is a weapon and as such belongs to the people aka the military. Evidence is shown demonstrating the existence of other “Iron Man”- like technologies; other countries have begun to emulate Tony’s suit in an effort to advance their own military might. However, Tony quickly demonstrates that all other mimicries are pathetic clones unable to do any meaningful harm. He argues that the peace the public enjoys now is due to his efforts as both hero and “nuclear deterrent” and quickly gets the majority on his side, effectively ending the session.
Tony’s (Robert Downey Jr.) deterrence declarations ring across the world.
Ivan (Mickey Rourke) gets ready to make his debut as “Whiplash” as his electrical whips are ready for action.
Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) learns he’s dying from palladium poisoning, partly due his Iron Man duties.
Tony’s decision to be deterrent is unsustainable as is because his condition will eventually kill him via poisoning. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, death comes in the form of a rival seeking vengeance.
But Tony’s boasts travel further than he would have imagined. The camera cuts and reveals that Ivan has not only been listening to the court proceedings but is more than ready to prove Tony’s statement wrong. He picks up an electrical whip from his work-place and gets ready to bring the battle to Stark, now as “Whiplash”.
While this unknown and unseen enemy makes his way to Tony, the prodigal boy wonder is dealing with another equally deadly issue in the form of palladium poisoning from the arc-reactor technology implanted in his chest, the same technology keeping him alive. His AI assistant explains that Tony’ usage of the Iron Man suit is exacerbating the rate of his poisoning. The more he plays deterrent qua superhero, the more he pushes himself to an early grave. Thus, the newfound symbol of peace finds himself at a crossroads with death staring at him from every direction.
However, this seemingly apparent fresh plot is mostly nothing more than a neat re-threading of the previous films themes and story beats. Whereas Iron Man sees Tony start as an ignorant arms dealer who learns that corrupt organizations use his weaponry and seeks to be more mindful of his tech’s reach, Iron Man 2 sees Tony start as an ignorant weaponized suit user who learns that other individual use his suit technology and seeks to be more mindful of its reach. Even the poisoned arc-reactor core plotline matches up with the original story’s thread involving Tony updating and changing out his cores.
Therein lies the primary issue. There’s no “real” reason to watch Iron Man 2 because it has very little new to say. The primary story scratches the same itches the original does but does it in a less succinct and thorough manner. The few additions it tries to append to the narrative do very little outside of pad the run-time. Where the film tries to mark its point of difference and stake its claim is in its CGI-intensive action sequences, but these are lacking both the color contrast and polish necessary to have them be as engaging as needed. While the CGI isn’t terribly outdated, it ends up looking worse because the battle sequences feature little color variation and an abundance of digital clutter; the problems never become as egregious as they do in The Incredible Hulk, but when the film stakes so much of its identity on the spectacle and doesn’t deliver an awe-inspiring one, it feels like a wasted opportunity.
To make matters worse, the first film utilizes its CGI far more efficiently, blending in graphics with practical effects and sets which help ground the more grandiose moments. The spectacles deliver because there’s a vitality coursing through them that the second film never manages to reach with its focus on extravagant mechanized battle; the absence of the human element can be felt and robs otherwise sensational moments of the palpable tension that defines the previous film. Does this render them unwatchable or headache inducing? Not at all. By and large, the direction of the action and basic reincorporation of techniques through the fights makes them engaging in the moment. However, it’s the presence of that competency that makes the wasted potential all the more disappointing.
That being said there are worse fates than being a semi-decent Iron Man clone. The primary cast is as charming as ever, Downey Jr. in particular, and seem even more comfortable with their roles than before, even with the replacement in casting regarding Rhodey (Don Cheadle). The story, despite being a reformulation of the original, is still compelling enough to watch, especially if one is in the mood for more Iron Man content.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Iron Man 2 feels like it took its plot about people emulating “Iron Man” to heart and decided to go ahead and implement that same strategy at the level of the film, doing very little to the original Iron Man besides re-skinning it with a less than stellar CGI covering. While the strategy satisfies in a basic sense, it feels disappointing in comparison, especially now that the action sequences have started to slowly show their age.
Rating
6.7/10
Grade
C
Go to Page 2for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3to view this review’s progress report .
Note: This review contains spoilers for: Insidious.
Director James Wan’s sequel to Insidious opens in the past. A young Elise (Lindsay Seim) makes her initial visit to Lorraine (Jocelin Donahue) and Josh (Garrett Ryan) after being called as an additional line of help by her friend and fellow-psychic, Carl (Hank Harris ), who finds himself unable to deal with old woman spirit (Tom Fitzpatrick) haunting Josh. Elise hypnotizes Dalton to make him more suggestible and asks him to reveal information on the old woman. She searches the house in order to confront the malevolent entity. As the events of the night continue, Josh gets up and starts speaking to an entity who no one else can see, psychic gifts or otherwise. Josh leads the entity to a location in the house and points to the location at which point, due to his inexplicable behavior and the nature of the spirit, Elise recommends “sealing” his astral projection gifts away.
The title card drops.
A blue light passes over the title card.
The camera moves towards a red door and pushes forward…
…through a chasm of darkness…
..before landing on Renai (Rose Byrne) being interrogated by a police officer.
Renai (Rose Byrne) answers the police officer.
Insidious: Chapter 2’s title sequence isn’t as effective as the original, but it manages to set expectations for what’s to come. The blue lamp lets us know this tale will full venture into the world of the “Further”. As the camera moves through a red door and an abyss to a cornered off Renai, it becomes clear that her family’s struggles are far from over. She knows that Elise is dead. She knows that the spirit who haunted her spirit is responsible. However, she does not know if her husband is and the spirit are one in the same.
The bright red title card drops in as a sea of violent noises come to a crescendo. However, the malevolent color is displaced by a spectral blue that comes from the reveal of the “Chapter 2” in the title. A lantern similar to the ones used in the “further” goes across the title card, letting the viewer know that unlike the first film which had to tease the metaphysical, this film is more than ready to dive into supernatural hijinks.
Drawing to a close, the title sequence ends on a red door, and the camera glides through it and the dark void it opens to towards a faraway light in the distance. Eventually, the camera gets to the light, which turns out to be a lamp lighting a room where Renai (Rose Byrne) is being interrogated by a police officer over the death of Elise (Lin Shaye), an action which is revealed to the viewer at the end of Insidious as having been committed by a recently possessed Josh. Renai recalls finding Elise’s limp body and then finding the photograph of the old woman before running into an emotionally off Josh at the scene of the crime; her doubts were set then and have only continued to fester, but without definitive proof of her husband being possessed or just off, she has to learn to work with him . She confirms to the detective that she doesn’t think her husband is responsible for Elise’s death before going back home to continue dealing with the supernatural mess still wreaking havoc in the Lambert’s lives.
Chapter 2, as such, is split between telling two tales: the first follows the way the ‘Further’ intermingles and intervenes in the Lamberts life and the second explores the background of the spirit possessing Josh. While both stories inform and effect one another, the former is markedly more original and ambitious and gives the mechanics of the Insidious franchise a put-togetherness that other supernatural outings wish they could achieve. Comparatively, the latter story is contrived, not as tight, and plays like a series of lost opportunities, often settling for horror in the moment as opposed to building to larger moments of intense panic. While the nature of what’s revealed in this second narrative thread is “shocking” at a surface level, it does nothing to develop either the film’s themes or the themes of its prequel in nearly as effective a manner as the first narrative thread.
This first story takes the building blocks established in the first movie and expands on the metaphysical makeup of its supernatural domain: the ‘Further’, a place where circuits of desire are repeated while specters engage in the same acts over and over again in loop. This time the narrative focus is less on the domain itself and more on the the effects it has on the living world. It’s not the mechanics of the ‘Further’ which are explored as much as the way the domain intervenes in the world of the living, tying seemingly disparate moments together. Consequently, the film revels in building up scenes from one vantage point and then exploring them again from the other domain; the interplay between these jumps from the “real” world to the ‘Further’ and back again gives Wan an and scriptwriter Leigh Whannell more than enough space to explore creative spectral interplays.
Unfortunately, these mechanics are barely utilized to their fullest and are leveraged in service of the second story, which, while not being incompetently constructed, lacks the nuance or creativity of the first film. While the first story feels like an extension of the Lambert’s conflicts from the first film, the second story feels largely separated. The struggles depicted in the former have a texture and feeling because there’s a sense of empathy in the helplessness and nature of what’s going on, but the tribulations in the latter feel overly theatric and break the sense of immersion generated by the former. Realism takes a seat back to spectacle, and the themes get lost in translation, as the viewer focuses on terror for terrors sake as opposed to terror in serve of a larger thematic movement. As a result, visceral moments in the film shock when presented but don’t have the same staying power as the scenes from the initial Insidious which linger in the viewer’s memory long after.
This is a shame because the first story could have served as the basis for the investigation the second story ventured on if better attention was given to the nature of Josh’s possession. As a location, the ‘Further’ gives fertile ground to explore the way trauma unfurls. Like the first film demonstrates, spirits are trapped into cycles of repetition and are made to re-enact their trauma ad-infinitum. Seemingly unable to find peace, it seems that being a trapped within the ‘Further’ is a horrific fate that any entity would seek to escape, but the furthest the film goes towards exploring that idea, a great source of motivation which could have served as the basis of the second story’s mystery, is having a character mention the idea off-hand a few times. Instead of just saying it, the film could have built on this idea visually and tied it to the Lambert’s struggle to find a locus of healing and stability. Wan and his production team do a great job at evoking ethereal and inexplicable horror, but it feels like they barely scratched the surface of demonstrating the brutality of the material they’re working with, choosing instead to go for familiar and easy-to-explain over ambitious and potentially more confusing. For example, there’s a great set piece involving a host of covered bodies but by the end of the film the scene says very little besides “evil exists”. It’s just unsettling imagery that disturbs momentarily before being cast aside.
Thankfully, lack of memorable scares does not entail lack of memorable moments and Wan and Whannell still manage to leverage the better parts of the story to great effect, satisfyingly bringing the prequel’s story to a resolute close. There are a few hiccups getting to this ending, but eventually, when Chapter 2’s two story threads come together, the narrative proper is allowed to go full throttle towards an emotionally satisfying finish line that concludes (almost) all the relevant story threads on a nice ending point. While this sequel entry isn’t as strong a stand-alone as Wan’s initial foray in to the supernatural genre, it’s certainly a good enough follow-up that fans of the original should check it out. It does what all good sequels should attempt to do: extend the interesting ideas of the first movie without re-hashing them in boring fashion. Just because the film doesn’t elevate all the interesting ideas to their potential, it does more than enough to distinguish itself from and progress its prequel.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Insidious: Chapter 2 is a film that serves up many of the same thrills of its prequel in terms of ambiance and technical construction, while bringing many plot threads to a neat and resolute end-point. While it settles for cheaper scares than its worldbuilding allows, thus squandering some of its potential, it delivers more than enough intrigue to keep fans of the original and those interested more broadly in supernatural horror and its related mechanics intrigued from start to finish. It may not nail all it’s beats, but it’s certainly a good deal more fun than many of its peers.
Rating
7.9/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur Elliot Page[1]Credited as Ellen Page as Ariadne Marion Cotillard as Mal Cobb Ken Watanabe as Saito Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer Tom Hardy as Eames Dileep Rao as Yusuf
Dom sees two children on the shore who seem out of place.
Nolan starts his experimentation in mimesis here, replacing the loud blare from Zimmer’s score with the rushing sound of the waves. The swell of waves crashing against the shore represent a world of potential. Every moment marks the birth of a new wave – a vortex of creation – that eventually gives way to another. It’s from this swirl that our protagonist, Dom, wakes up confused. He sees two children building sand castles on the shore. The children seem out of place given the disheveled appearance of Dom, but their act of creating sandcastles mimics the waves. After all sandcastles are an act of creation that give way to new castles as the waves wash away the old ones. It’s fitting that the man whose eventual mission will be to implant ideas is sandwiches between these two parallel movements of creation.
As the intro sequence plays, Hans Zimmer’s music envelops the soundscape ensuring that your attention is fully focused on the sound. The title fades to black as the music approaches a crescendo, swelling to a massive size before fading away to the sound of crashing waves. Our attention immediately switches focus as the importance we’ve given the score now shifts to the waves on screen. Water swells before crashing into the shoreline creating momentary impressions upon impact -explosions of being- before fading back into the ocean from where it came. Given the movie’s thematic connections with Tarkovksy’s Solaris, a science fiction film about a group of emotionally fractured astronauts stuck on an ocean planet named Solaris which seems to conjure the crew’s memories from within its oceans, it makes sense then that it is from this abode of infinite creation, the ocean, that the camera picks its next target of focus – a partially submerged man named Dom.
His eyes flutter awake revealing that he’s very much alive. It’s at this point that both Dom and the audience become privy to the fact that there are children present. The camera cuts between Dom’s perplexed face and two children who appear with their backs to him. They’re building a sandcastle. Like the waves, the sandcastle is a temporary explosion of creativity, coming into form for an instance before fading away, leaving only its impressions behind.
An older Asian man ( Ken Watanabe) tells Dom that the top he, Dom , carries reminds him of something from the past.
Dom’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) expression changes upon being reminded of the top.
Saito (Ken Watanabe) talks to Dom.
Dom(Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to get Saito to buy some extraction protection lessons.
Nolan uses cuts to demonstrate the malleability of different moments and scenes, showcasing the way ideas give way and lapse into others- whether they be dreams or memories. The normal shot, reverse-shot structure used to cover dialogue scenes is used to transfer us from space and time along with the characters. As the older Asian man talks and ignites a thought in Dom’s head, the reverse shot which would normally be the elder man is instead a much younger man named Saito. He’s oriented to the camera facing a different angle. As the camera cuts again to a much more composed looking Dom, we realize the orientation of the first meeting has also shifted, reflecting a shift in power as well. It’s brilliant filmmaking.
Before Dom can make sense of what’s happening, he’s accosted by armed security who check for weaponry before finding a gun on him. They take him to their boss, an elderly Asian man, for interrogation in a large ornate dining room. This man starts to play with a top he’s apparently taken from Dom before claiming that the object reminded him of something from his past – a distant memory. The camera cuts from the old man back to Dom at which point the movie employs a match cut to another conversation between a much younger Asian man, Saito, and a Dom from another time in the same ornate dining room, this time framed from opposite angles. It is here that Dom and his associate, Arthur, indicate to Saito that they are “extractors”, individuals who specialize in the art of stealing from peoples’ dreams, looking to teach him the tools of the trade to keep his own mental faculties safe.
The room shakes as though and earthquake is happening.
The movie cuts to the face of a watch whose hands go from moving slowly to moving much faster.
People riot on the streets as a car in the background explodes.
Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) sits unconscious in an new apartment location.
The movie cuts to the face of a watch whose hands go from moving fast to moving much slower.
The flames coming from the car’s explosion seem to slow down along with the clock.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) walk outside and notice the world shaking in non-natural ways.
The parallel watch sequence demonstrates the logic Inception will continue to use (and will explain later). Impacts from seemingly disparate moments bleed into each other – this is not only a mechanic of the universe but the first indication that the important thing to focus on is the intensity of feeling. This is cemented by the way that the impacts of both scenes’ respective rumblings are tied to the respective dilations of the watch face.
Saito indicates he’ll think about the deal from the two before leaving the room at which it starts to shake violently, as though an earthquake is causing the foundations of the house to rumble. The duo comment that Saito is on to their ruse before the movie cuts to the face of a watch whose hands move slowly before quickly ramping. This ramp up is matched with another cut a riot happening in the streets of a wholly distinct location. The camera moves from the rumble on the street to an apartment overlooking the chaos. Inside the unit, a new character is show tending to what appears to be Dom and Arthur’s unconscious bodies. We cut back to the image of the watch whose hands goes from fast to slow, a reversal of the previous temporal dilation. A car explodes on the street, shaking the screen before the movie cuts back to Arthur and Dom who are walking outside in a world that seems to be shaking just as hard as the explosion that came before.
In a sequence that runs a little over 5 minutes, Nolan manages to establish and present the core mechanics by which his world operates and make clear the themes he’ll be tackling – the way memory and reality bleed into one another, granting meaning to existence. The initial match cut makes it apparent that this is a world where memories and dreams interconnect- one moment, the future, gives way to the interruptions of a past, that may or may not itself be nothing more than artifice. The conversation with Saito primes the viewer to begin probing these ideas, questioning the nature of the first scene and what it’s meant to represent. The parallel watch-sequence is not only a beautiful demonstration of the exposition that Nolan will give us later on, but also hammers home the idea of intensity and duration. The rumbling that starts in the dining room, goes to the riots, stays with the exploding cars, and leads to a world literally shaking as time continues to ramp forward and slow down emphasizes that what matters is intensity , not duration.
This is Inception – a time-diluting, dream-invading, thriller that will have you questioning the “reality” of what’s being presented on the screen at every moment. After this initial sequence, Dom is offered a job with a reward that he can’t resist. The reward? A chance to see his children. The job? Implanting an idea into a person’s head, thereby changing their future decisions – in other words a kind of psychological terrorism. [2]In Kon’s Paprika, Chiba’s exclaims that “Implanting dreams in other people’s heads is terrorism!” It’s funny then that one of the bigger reaction to Inception by many … Continue reading. He goes on to make a team to help in his operation and the “heist” movie really begins.
In a traditional heist movie, a group comes together, usually skillful criminals, to carry out a theft of some kind. The unifying force between movies in the genre is the presence of an object that gets stolen – whether it be money or technology. Inception flips the genre’s trappings on its head by changing the object getting stolen from something physical to something metaphysical – that of free will. After all, the idea of implanting an idea into someone’s head assumes that you are replacing some other idea that was originally there. In other words, the object the thieves are trying to steal are the autonomy of a subject.
Eames (Tom Hardy) explains the nature of the mark’s relationships to his inner circle. Dom (Leonardio DiCaprio) and co. listen on.
From left to right: Saito (Ken Watanabe), Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Eames (Tom Hardy), Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio), Ariadne (Elliot Paige)
Traditional heist-planning sequences aren’t missing. They’ve just been modified to deal with the psychological nature of the heist being planned. Instead of talking about firewall security, the group has to probe into the inner psyches of their subjects mind and lives so they can more easily break into said subjects subjectivity and influence it. These sessions take place in both the “real” world of the movie and the “dream” world of the movie.
Likewise, the traditional heist-planning sequences have their counterparts here. Instead of discussing how to get past a certain firewall, the characters analyze their subject(s) from the microscopic details of their daily behavior to the larger way they deal with relationships among their associates. In this way, the structure of the heist film maps onto what feels like a psychoanalytic session, the extractors serving as psychoanalysts treating their mark as a analysand. Each maneuver the crew utilizes to plant their idea doubles as technique an analyst would use in a session. Unwinding in parallel to this external psychological session is Dom’s internal journey to overcome his respective psychological trauma. As he rushes forward to plant an idea into another to control them, he has to deal with his own wayward ideas which refuse to submit to his control – a schema which makes us ask how one can implant a thought in stable fashion to someone if one’s own thoughts constantly float around outside of our control.
This conundrum of subjectivity is reflected in the rules of the story early on as it’s revealed that people breaking into a dream bring along their subconscious projections with them. The subconscious is nothing more than a sea of cognitive material formed from the fabrics of our day to day – images and ideas that slip through our self-constructed barriers to the parts of our mind out of our control. These ideas come from others – people, cultures, legal institutions. Would this entail that social behavior by its nature is always involved in some “inception” of a kind if our ideas are “implanted” by some other agent?
At a technical level, Nolan achieves this conundrum through the magic of cutting. That’s right. Just normal cuts from scene to scene. Traditional movies dealing with dreams and memory as subject matter tend to approach field with surrealist imagery, imperceptible messages, and an obvious desire to be recognized as distinctly “dream-like.” The point is to call attention to the nature of the dream versus reality. Inception approaches dreams in the complete opposite way – treating them as they come to us in real life. Completely naturally. By using audio, especially Zimmer’s simultaneously bombastic and inquisitively resonating score (seriously just listen to the difference between the adrenaline pumping “Mombasa” and the somber epic sounding “Time”), as a throughline, Nolan is able to intercut between scenes occurring in different locations without alerting us to a change in scenery. For example, characters can begin talking in one location. The camera will cut to a completely different location as their conversation continues to play out in the background, the characters now missing from the frame. Then the camera cuts back to the characters in a different location, the same conversation continuing. It seems innocuous until it’s revealed that the final conversation in the sequence is actually occurring in a dream as opposed to the first conversation which occurred in reality.
Dom (Leonardio DiCaprio) looks in awe as Ariadne bends physics in the dreamworld to clone the world into new planes.
Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Elliot Paige) walk up the new plane of reality.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) explains to Ariadne (Elliot Paige) the way dreams allow people to cheat logic.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shows Ariadne (Elliot Paige) the Penrose steps as an example of paradoxes that dreams allow.
Inception’s dream visuals are astounding and larger than life, constantly cheating reality and reveling in doing so. From the early demonstration of the way gravity can shift to the way paradoxes can come to life, it’s made clear that anything is possible.
That isn’t to say the movie approaches dreams just through subtleties – the majority of the obvious dream action makes major use of spectacular set pieces that will leave you in awe if at nothing else, the sheer slick fluidity by which everything operates. Those looking for a visual feast will take great viewing pleasure in watching the way structures form out of nowhere or the manner in which gravity shifts directions. Instead of embracing the surrealist spirit in the vein of Satoshi Kon with scenarios that beg interpretation (whose own movie about dreams, Paprika, served as some influence to Nolan himself) , Nolan “mechanizes” surrealism to fit the mold of a thriller, letting action play out against a tapestry that rests on the tenuous connection reality and the unconscious.
In fact, one of the great feats of the movie is the way it forces the audience to engage with it in its totality by misdirecting them in the most obvious ways. The breathtaking visual effects in the “dream” worlds and the focus on clear and robust exposition all make it seem like the spectacle of the movie is the focus – the focus on what is real and what is not real. However, what this interpretation tends to miss is that the duplicity between what is real and what is not real is something Nolan is actively showing you on the screen. He’s not hiding it or making the tenuous nature of reality ambiguous. Like Solaris, Inception makes it apparent that everything is not what it seems- the barriers between memory, reality, and dreams are revealed to be tenuous at best. If the movie stresses to us the duplicity between the real and dream world, the question becomes what does such a revelation tell us? What does existence look when we’re constantly traversing one realm to another, calling one “real” and one “dream” ?
With all its moving parts working in tandem, Inception can be seen as a a serious reckoning with the story of Chuang Tzu who dreamt he was a butterfly so vividly that he experienced shock upon waking back up. The dream was so lifelike that it led him to ask, “was I Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly or am I now really a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu?” [3] The Philosophy Foundation – The Butterfly Dream. (n.d.). https://www.philosophy-foundation.org/enquiries/view/the-butterfly-dream.. In other words, given the depth of experience in both domains how can (un)consciousness determine what is reality. Nolan’s answer seems to be reality itself doesn’t matter as much as the experience itself. It doesn’t matter whether or not Chuang Tzu was a butterfly or a person as much as if both experiences left an meaningful impact on that unified consciousness (ex: soul) which perceived them. It’s the emotional journey that matters more than the literal journey – the latter only serves as a jumping off point to begin the former’s discovery.
The end result of these two journeys is a heist movie about perception whose very reality is constantly under question, tying form into content and narrative into theme. It’s a movie that treats its audience intelligently, showing first and explaining just enough later, forcing engagement with the subject matter. The cerebral elements of the movie never overpower the visceral elements or vice versa giving fans of both visual splendor and philosophical inquiry things to chew on. At it’s heart, Inception is nothing more than the story of finding ourselves in our own absences.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Inception deftly combines the genre mainstays of a heist film with the cerebral intensity involved with the best of science fiction. It is a movie that trusts the audience fully, constantly demonstrating the rules of the world it presents to wow and dazzle. At no point does either element, cerebral or visceral, overwhelm the other as Nolan manages to keep the thriller sequences and metaphysical discoveries tied to each other. Cinema, in both form and content, is used to reveal the duplicitous nature of ideas – their source, their interpretation, and their impact on (un)unconsciousness. The result is a truly human story that asks what it means to have freedom and what it means to use that freedom to live a life worth living.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Chloe Grace Moretz as Abby Kodi Smit-McPhee as Owen Richard Jenkins as Thomas
Release Date
2010
Language(s)
English
Running Time
116 minutes
This is a hard movie for me to rate and I’ve struggled with coming up with a number for a long time. I initially saw the movie in 2011 and thought it was amazing. I was completely enamored and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It got me reading the Wikipedia page to find more information ,and I saw that it was a remake of a Swedish movie called Let the Right One In, which itself is based on a novel of the same name. I thought it’d be fun to see the original movie and read the book to see how the Reeves version compared. The process left me in a strange position. While the Reeves version is stellar in composition, it comes off feeling like a replica of the original movie with an English dub. There are slight changes in setting, the starting point the movie leaps off from, and the way the theme of growing up is handled, but it’s not enough to make the movie feel like something wholly unique (like Evil Deadvs The Evil Dead) .
For those of you unacquainted with the book or 2008 movie, the story follows an ostracized young child, Owen, who’s struggling to find his place in life. He’s bullied at school and can’t really relate the adults around him. Eventually a young “girl”, Abby, moves in next door. Unbeknownst to Owen, Abby’s actually a vampire. As the two interact more often, a budding friendship is born, and their lives are radically changed. Given that information, the opening shot of the movie feels completely out of place with audience expectations. It starts in on a disfigured individual who jumps to his death from a hospital building, leaving behind a note that says “I’m sorry Abby.” This initial scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie and tinges the experience with a more sinister sense of mystery. Who’s the person , how did they end up there, and why were they apologizing? It gives the movie a lot of action before the slower paced story kicks in and is one of the unique things Reeves did to spice up his adaptation.
Traditionally, coming-of-age stories are about trying to find your path and footing in the world. The unpredictable chaos of everything combined with hyper-active hormones leads to a sense of confusion and wonder. Trying to determine how characters will progress becomes part of the fun. This movie subverts that expectation and is another original Reeves move. Adults are reduced to mere outlines of human interaction. Owen is rarely shown interacting with them and when he does those moments are often reduced to trite conversations with little weight. Hell, in a move I really like, Reeves never shows Owen’s mom’s face. The absence of any positive adult influence makes the progression of Owens story easy to predict, so if you like trying to guess or interpret those types of the things, you may feel like the movie tells you too much. However, if you accept the conclusion, the movie takes on this cool surreal feeling. It’s almost poetic watching the foregone conclusion slowly play out.
Smit-McPhee and Moretz knock it out of the park and give the movie a real heart and spirit. Their chemistry as friends is genuinely touching to watch and reminded me of a lot of moments in my childhood. You can see them warm up to each other, and because the movie takes its time, the subsequent places they go feel emotionally satisfying. Smit-McPhee really hits the nail on the head of bullied kid who desperately wants to feel like he has agency again. He manages to be creepy but sympathetic. You want him to find a path to happiness, even if he gives you the heebie jeebies with his weird masculine inducing rituals. Moretz absolutely nails child vampire. She’s innocent, but she’s also horrifying. She asks basic questions like “What’s a girlfriend?” but then has to consume other people’s blood to survive. None of these shifts feel out of character and it keeps Abby feeling complex.
Just because this is a romance with cute moments of friendship doesn’t mean it’s sunshine and daisies all the time. People are brutally murdered and their blood canvasses the white snow. The contrast is stunning and makes it clear that violence pervades our everyday existence. It can come from anywhere and doesn’t line up with what we think. The visual effects team does a great job at showing the horrors of vampire life by demonstrating the consequences of breaking vampire rules and by making the kill sequences feel deliberately violent. You can feel the pain respective character’s go through. Out of the two movies, I think this one is more visceral in its scares, so if that’s something you’re looking for you should check this out.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Even if Let Me In feels a little too derivative of its 2008 Swedish counterpart, its worth giving a watch if you’re looking for a coming-of-age romance with a horror twist. It’s equal parts heartwarming and horrifying and has some of the best child performances I’ve ever seen. Imay rag on the movie for feeling like a clone of the original, but that’s not a bad thing. It means it has a great story, memorable characters, poignant and relevant themes, and great horror sequences. Reeves definitely refines and polishes some of these elements and I appreciate him making the movie more accessible to a widespread audience. I just wish that the movie felt more distinct .
Rating
9.4/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Alan Tudyk as Tucker Tyler Labine as Dale Katrina Bowden as Allison Jesse Moss as Chad
Release Date
2010
Language(s)
English
Running Time
89 minutes
You wouldn’t expect it from the title, but Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a heartwarming, hilarious, bloody good time of a movie. It follows a group of college aged kids who go to a forest to camp out. They run into a pair of hillbillies, Tucker and Dale, who they immediately typecast as murderous degenerates. As the misunderstanding between the two groups rises, blood starts flowing, and utter chaos ensues.
The story is crisp and to the point. No joke ever feels like it overstays its welcome and the creativity in execution and sense of comedic timing is immaculate. There are dark comedic moments that’ll have you laughing and looking away from the screen, but there are also genuinely funny moments that you’d see in a more lighthearted comedy. Somehow, the movie manages to combine both of them seamlessly leading to a unique comedic feel. The movie is narratively sound as well. The ending has a lot of interesting twists that are both hilarious but give the movie more of a thematic bite. It’s immensely satisfying to watch everything play out. The movie knows exactly what it wants to be and how to get there.
Despite all the absurdity on the screen, the movie boils down a story about misunderstanding and projection. The way that it explores that via the characters and their actions and subsequent revelations is a constant reminder to not fall prey to faulty first impressions. This including perceptions of oneself. Often times, the person who stops us from achieving our potential , is our insecurities. The movie is just as much about the way we count ourselves out, as it is about how we turn others into caricatures based on certain attributes. It might not be the most nuanced message, but it’s conveyed with such a deft hand that you can’t help but appreciate it. Plus, it’s not like the message is bad or anything. The world could do with people judging others less.
None of this is to say the movie is perfect. Despite doing a great job with its leads and the leader of the college kid/main antagonist, Chad (aptly named dare I say) , the rest of the characters fall to the wayside. They exist for the sake of the plot and feel like joke extensions.I would have loved to see them developed with their own personalities to add to the layers of commentary and comedy at play. Furthermore, the setup for some of the kills also pushes the limits of believable. Yes, it’s a comedy movie and is supposed to be over the top, but there’s a threshold to how dumb a character can be.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is comedy about the pitfalls of misunderstanding and making improper assumptions. The movie is hilarious and proceeds at a brisk pace with twists and turns that should keep you entertained from start to finish. Some of the characters and their decisions feel a bit over the top, but you’ll hardly notice it as you’re laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Rating
9.1/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
A lightbulb appears.The camera flips around the lightbulb.The camera tracks down to a young boy sleeping. A spirit shows up against the wall. An Old Woman smiling menacingly holds a red candle with a burning light as darkness surrounds her. Insidious’s red title car drops. The intro sequence shows the house. The intro sequence shows the clock. A specter shows up in the frame. The camera pushes in on a clock. Renai (Rose Byrne) sleeps as the frame stays in black-and-white. Renai (Rose Byrne) slowly gets up as the color comes back in. The intro sequence sets in play the key motifs: the color red being associated with malevolence, the weight of time, the control of which direction the light is coming from. The opening swiftly moves through its series of images starting on a lightbulb, moving to a spirit holding a candle, and then showing location shots of where the hauntings the story will explore will take place. The transition from black-to-white back to color lets us know that the Lambert’s rendezvous with horror is just beginning.
We open on a large lightbulb before the camera flips itself around 180° – the world we’re entering is not one that plays by our expectations. The camera tracks revealing a young boy sleeping before moving right to traverse the rest of the house. Discordant strings rise in the background as a shadowy figure shows up on a wall – a confirmation that we’ve entered a whole new world. Finally, the moves past the figure to reveal a Woman in Black, smiling and standing still in the center of the frame; in her hand, she holds a red candle with a bright flame – the only light in a screen full of darkness.
The screech of the strings reaches its apex as the bright hellish red title card comes onto the screen. Every other image after in the title sequence features a black-and-white image of a location and red font that slowly fades away as an ethereal gray wisp spelling the same words comes out of the initial word, almost like the spirit of the words taking leave. Many locations and objects show up multiple times, priming the viewer for their future appearance’s. Some of the frames reveal ghostly figures hiding in the shadows while others showcase spectral happenings like chairs moving by themselves. This seemingly innocuous presentation is anything but and primes the audience for spectral encounters to come by sowing the seeds with an assortment of images whose meanings are yet to be shown.
Eventually the montage ends and the camera pushes in slowly on a clock surrounded by shadows before the screen turns completely black. A woman, Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne), happens to be sleeping. As she wakes up, the color in frame gradually returns. Sleep is over and the time for waking is here.
Renai (Rose Byrne) stands with a clock behind her. Rose puts up her books, one of which is titled: “Self Healing Through Music”. Renai (Rose Byrne) and Dalton (Ty Simpkins) talk next to a red lamp about the lack of Josh’s childhood pictures. Renai (Rose Byrne) tries to deal with all the kids in the morning. Rose’s books are on the floor. The camera tracks from left to right on the house. Renai (Rose Byrne) plays the piano as the baby monitor sits above her. Renai (Rose Byrne) reaches up to turn on the light. The furnace on the floor turns on in response. Dalton (Ty Simpkins) wears his red superhero cape as he tries to turn on the light. Renai (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Patrick Wilson) put Dalton (Ty Simpkins) to bed. A red lamp is next to the bed. Renai (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Patrick Wilson) talk about their hopes for their future. The clock starts ticking in hypnotic fashion. Kali sleeps in her room which is illuminated by a red lamp. The camera pushes in on Dalton (Ty Simpkins) as he sleeps. The camera pushes forward on the dark pane. Josh (Patrick Wilson) is unable to wake Dalton (Ty Simpkins) up. The camera tracks from right to left on the house. Every motif set-up in the introduction is expanded on here, leading up to the incident supernatural incident with Dalton. Renai tries and maintains some normalcy and then something unexpected happens. Books she puts up fall down. Music she plays gets interrupted. The ladder she uses to put on the light literally breaks. After a few warnings, the hypnotic ticking of the clock marks the “true” start of the Lambert’s nightmare and hints to the audience that the house contains within it some alternative agency.
Renai goes down the stairs. Behind her is the clock that’s been featured multiple times already – a harbinger of doom. She takes out some books from the moving boxes scattered around the cluttered study and puts them up. The title of the book in front reads: “Self-Healing Through Music.”
After putting the books up, Renai has to deal with her 3 children: Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor), and Kali, the infant in the group. She gets their affairs in order during a hectic kitchen scene where her husband, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), offers very little help. However, upon leaving the room she sees her books have now been scattered on the floor – a sign of things to come. Frustrated, she confronts her family who claims they had nothing to do with it. Unable to get any answers, she asks Josh to help with the kids and school – a request he denies to be apparently being busy. Her exasperation grows and the scene concludes with an establishing shot of the house, tracking from left to right.
Afterwards, the camera tracks onto Renai playing the piano. The books have now gained an additional purpose besides source of first supernatural sign: they are Renai’s work tools. She’s a musician trying to compose. Immediately it’s clear: this moment of musical creation is the overworked matriarch’s reprieve from her daily duties. Unfortunately, the specters seem to understand this as well and refuse to let her have her time. The baby monitor which has been creeping on the frame in the corner takes center place as the cries of the child interrupt the music and force Renai to come upstairs.
Upon ensuring Kali’s safety, Renai sees a door that draws her forward. She opens it and goes up to the attic of the house where she sees both a ladder and a lightbulb. A lightbulb starts the film and it appears here once again, enticing Renai to turn it on. She climbs the ladder and tries to grab the switch; upon doing so, the rung she’s standing on breaks. Immediately, a bright red-hot fire starts on its own from a furnace near the bottom of the floor. Just like the opening, the presence of a bulb is followed by the presence of an ominous red fire surrounded by blackness. It’s no coincidence that the bulb is above and the furnace is below; the use of red is evocative of hell and the flames associated with the damned location. Coming up here was a mistake – now the fire has started.
Nighttime comes and with it comes the start of the Lambert family problems. Dalton goes upstairs to the same room while wearing a red superhero cape. As any hero would do, he tries to bring the light; just like his mom, he gets up on the ladder to reach the switch, but unfortunately for him, the broken step in the ladder gives way underneath him and he crashes, falling unconscious momentarily. His parents realize he’s missing and run up to him to find him conscious but in pain. They get him all fixed up and put him into his bed before themselves retiring for the night. The couple finally unwinds as Renai talks about her music and her hopes for the future. The two laugh and call it a night.
Then the ticking of the clock starts; a momentum builds as the hypnotic rhythm cascades through the house. We see a series of images as the clock’s pulse continues: a leaking faucet, Foster asleep in his bed, Kali asleep in her crib with an ominous red light illuminating the room, Renai and Josh soundly asleep. Finally, we cut to Dalton and the hypnotic lull of the ticking clock stops. The camera pushes in slowly towards him and the darkness surrounding him. All the while the sound intensifies transforming from a low buzzing to a violent set of discordant noises – a callback to the title card’s ominous arrival.
The next day comes and Josh comes in to Dalton’s room to wake the still sleeping child. He repeatedly asks Dalton to awaken but comes to realize his son is unresponsive. A quick hospital later confirms that the aspiring superhero is in a coma like state with no apparent medical explanation. The narrative jumps forward 3 months as the camera tracks on the house again this time from right to left – the situation for the Lambert’s has changed once again as they find themselves taking care of their still-comatose son while eerie and supernatural events continue to pile up in their everyday lives.
In 20 minutes, Insidious has established a family dynamic with nuances in the main members of the grouping and set in motion a series of visual motifs – the color red, lighting up dark spaces, the baby monitor, music, the “presence” of the house – that will build to patterns of terror all while never jumping the shark. Similar to Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, the driving force propelling Insidious is based on the anxiety that the “modern” family is unable to secure itself against outside forces that threaten it; in this case, the parents are unable to protect their son.
As the opening shows, the couple has made the move to provide a new start for their family. Renai is overworked but hopeful for change, Josh is supportive of his wife and children but isn’t the most helpful partner at home, and Dalton is a young boy looking to be an purveying hero. In spite of their struggles, they hold on to the hopes for a better tomorrow. This is why their son’s condition and the family’s subsequent trials are so cruel and poignant: the journey delves into dark places where the failures and traumas of the family, left unresolved, will come to roost among their unsuspecting children.
These fears are allowed to roost because Director James Wan is more than content letting the feeling of unease build up slowly in service of letting the genuine moments of fear terrorize the audience in poignant fashion. By setting up patterns and building up the tension and letting the spectral occurrences linger in ambiguous contexts, forcing the audience to stew in their nescience, Wan gives his film that quality which all the best horrors have – the ability to get under the skin without one being aware of the same. Motifs become patterns which anticipate a future without giving it away, so Wan is able to employ them in tandem to keep building up just until the right moment. This is also why Wan can go against expected evaluation of some of these patterns; because their teloses are unknown, they can be repurposed to pull off unpredictable story moves. By the end of the film, all these moving parts become intimately linked with one another and act as puzzle pieces for the viewer to finally piece together to come to an understanding, an understanding whose ambiguous underpinnings allow Wan to pull a Silence of the Lambs style moment that truly has to be witnessed first-hand.
It’s funny because despite borrowing so much from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, Insidious does much of what the former film did: offer a breath of fresh air on the “haunted house” story. Like Hooper, Wan pushes the boundaries on what hauntings can entail and do. In fact, I would argue that Insidious is a breath of fresh air for the genre and offers an overhaul on the “haunted house” story in much the same as Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist did. Hooper’s film offers a positive interpretation of the supernatural alongside a negative one and demonstrates the way that specters operate and link up in parallel with one another. In this way it ties the nature of its families hauntings to social happenings in a larger sense, serving as a larger take on the American Dream and the powers of family. As evidenced above, Insidious does much of the same but focuses less on the social commentary of the hauntings than on the metaphysical breakdown of how those hauntings occur and interact with the world.
The film’s key contribution to the cannon is its exploration of “The Further”, the film’s term for the supernatural realm that houses specters. At one point, the Lambert’s ask a psychic, Elise (Lin Shaye), to help them with their son and her crew, method of investigation, and treatment procedure which involve “The Further”. These scenes and the ideas visually present in them are distinct and evocative all at once, giving Insidious a wholly unique aesthetic and set of rules for supernatural engagement. There are more ideas regarding the supernatural in here than in 5 other lesser movies put together. Despite using Poltergeist and its ideas as a base, Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell don’t remain complacent and push the boundaries on what hauntings can entail and do.
Alas, Insidious is unable to fully tap into the potential its framework allows and settles for oddities that feel like they would have benefited more from structure. Ambiguity is great, but tying that ambiguity to thematic purpose on top of setting up narrative surprises helps those moments play more effective. They gain an emotional resonance because they speak to something larger and end up being more memorable. While Insidious does a great job at navigating the contours of its family’s personal struggles, it lacks the depth to make those struggles touch on other issues, reducing the story’s reach. Given just how much leverage “The Further” gives Wan and Whannell, it feels a tad disappointing that they don’t probe into larger questions.
Yet, Insidious has to be applauded trying something new and doing it with such technical fluidity. There’s a propulsion to the way the narrative unfolds and the pressure constantly ratchets up. Recurrent motifs and discordant strings help make the journey towards the eventual scares all the more dreadful as Wan allows the anticipation to build to a fever pitch before giving the audience a chance for release. There’s no cheap throwaway moment here and even if not all the pieces line up the way they should at all times, the extended durations showcasing when they do work more than make up for any disgruntles.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Insidious’s propulsive narrative, technically sumptuous filmmaking, and innovative takes on the “haunted house” story sets new benchmarks for what audiences should expect from “mainstream” horror films. Director James Wan effectively utilizes ambiguity in relation to genre trappings to prime the audience for spookier scenes which are further accentuated by the film’s distinctive mystical and metaphysical stylizations. Even now they give the film a distinctive texture and weight that helps Insidious stand against the crowd.
Rating
9.2/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
