Inception

Inception (****)

Inception is part Dark City, part Matrix, part Ocean's Eleven, part Sandman. It's also not quite like any of these, because it's not quite like anything else whatsoever. It's visual effects are impressive enough to at least put it on par with most of the big summer releases opening around it, but it has none of the convention, the cliche, the gimmickry, the timidity of the average cookie-cutter blockbuster. On some level, it fits snugly in the category of heist movie, but there's no bank--not a physical one anyway, and there's so much going on than merely the execution of the grand scheme. Christopher Nolan reaffirms what he pretty much already established with both of his Batman films, that he can create a grandiose effects movie with mass appeal and still make it fiercely original and thought-provoking.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb and he's an Extractor. What the hell is an Extractor? An extractor essentially hacks into people's dreams, during which a person's mind is vulnerable we're told, and steals people's ideas on behalf of a client (like a rival businessman). How do you steal an idea? Well, you literally pick it up and run with it. In the dream worlds of Inception, ideas are actual tangible things, perhaps written on a sheet of paper and locked away in a safe. Problem is, dreams are also populated with elements of a person's subconscious, and when they detect a foreign presence in a dream they'll attack it, like how white blood cells attack a foreign substance in a person's bloodstream. The techniques to do this were developed in a secret military program, we're told, but apparently it's existence has leaked out in certain circles, and some people have actually been trained to fight extraction, which basically militarizes the projections in their subconscious. What might normally be an old girlfriend strolling down the street becomes a commando with an assault rifle. If you die in the dream, you just wake up (not following Matrix rules here), most of the time at least, but you still feel the effects of however you got killed and there's no guarantee that you die quickly. The machine that does this is suitcase sized device with a big red button in the middle. Nolan, wisely, doesn't really try and explain the specifics of how it's supposed to work. They're not really important, and would only serve to bog the movie down in exposition that wouldn't really be believable anyway.

Cobb is a widower, and hasn't been able to see the two children that he had with his wife (or set foot in America for that matter) because he's a suspect in his wife's death. As to the circumstances of her death and whether or not he's guilty, that's something the movie reveals bit and bit and would be too spoilerish for a review. Cobb is working in Japan when he gets offered a chance at the proverbial One Last Big Job from Saito, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe, last seen in a Christopher Nolan movie playing Ra's Al-Ghul), who has high-level connections that can get Cobb back into America. The catch is that Saito isn't asking for Extraction, he's asking for Inception (hey, that's the name of the movie!). Inception is the antithesis of Extraction--planting an idea in someone's mind. The problem is that it's hard to convince a person's subconscious that it's their own idea. If it doesn't feel like something they would naturally think up, the idea won't take hold in the person's mind. What does Saito want to plant? He wants to convince Fisher, (Cillian Murphey, the other former Batman Begins villain) the heir to a rival energy business, to break up his father's company, essentially scuttling his billion-dollar inheritance. So yeah... that's gonna be tough.

To pull off either Extraction or Inception, you also need a Chemist and an Architect (is someone hard at work creating an RPG system based on this right now?) The Chemist will induce sleep deep enough to not be easily disrupted through a series of drug compounds, and the Architect will construct the landscape of the dream. The Architect can change up the landscape on the fly with a thought, but again, if the target figures out that there's shenanigans going on in their dream, the jig is up. For an Architect, Cobb recruits Ariadne (Ellen Paige), a student of his father's (Michael Caine), who is as much a stranger to the whole Extraction/Inception concept as we are, and thus mostly serves as our point-of-view character. In spite of being a fish-out-of-water though, she's smart enough to realize that Cobb has some serious demons in his closet and at several points confronts him about them, worried that they'll endanger the mission.

A good chuck of the second half of the movie, is just the execution of the big Inception plan. While at times it turns into very formulaic gunplay/car chase stuff, Nolan manages to keep the energy going such that it doesn't at any point feel pointless. And certain elements are anything but formulaic, as when Josh Hartnett's character has to fight in a hallway in which the gravity is constantly shifting making the whole room rotate on an axis. Things get a bit hard to keep up with as the movie approaches it's climax, as eventually there are four distinct groups of character(s) in four separate imagined places. The confusion that arises is slight though, and I have little doubt that Nolan crossed his Ts and dotted his Is in his writing and that it'll make sense upon repeat viewings. A lot of people seem confused by the movie's ending and I'm not sure why. It's ambiguous, but I thought it was clearly deliberately so, and I'd frankly defy anyone to devise a better way for the movie to end.

Nolan has simultaneously created a popcorn movie and a thinking man's movie, something which you could say he already did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but Inception frankly surpasses them on both levels, and keep in mind that Dark Knight was my favorite movie of 2008 and that I'm border-lined unhealthily obsessed with all things Batman. The movie has spawned discussion everywhere. I've seen several blog entries, for example, arguing that the movie is actually a grand metaphor for filmmaking--that it's basically Nolan's 8 1/2. I'm sure over time wholly different interpretations with at least equal merit will arise. And yet, if you just want to enjoy it as one of the most ambitiously warped heist movies of all time, you can and have a hell of a time with it. A great movie.

The Realm of Endless Rain

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
04:48-10:13

Maybe Burmecians just have different opinion on nice weather, but personally I think that if your homeland is known as the "Realm of Endless Rain", it's time to get a new homeland. I dunno, maybe Burmecians would all want to live in Seattle if they existed in real world America. On the way there, I stopped off in the swamp, I picked up Quina, probably the oddest character since VI since Gogo, except that you get Quina way earlier in the game in IX and seems like an actual main character and not an afterthought "bonus character." I really have no idea what drug-induced haze inspired he/she/it as a character. The Eat ability is one of the more annoying Blue Magic systems. Obviously E. Skill materia was a lot easier in VII where you just had to get hit with whatever ability it was. Here, it seems like the enemy has to be at a fairly low percentage for it to be successful. There's some pretty cool Blue Magic abilities in the game though, like Pumpkin Head, which was the first one I picked up, and which deals damage equal to whatever the difference between your current and max HP is. Steiner has the same thing in his Sword Art abilities only it's called Minus Strike. Kind of an interesting high risk/high reward thing.

The Trance system kind of annoys me as well. It takes much longer for your trance bar to fill up than your limit bar took to fill up in VII, which I don't necessarily think is a problem except that, unlike in VII, if you get someone's trance to full in a battle but then it doesn't get around to that character's turn again it doesn't carry over until the next battle. Seems kind of lame that you can spend all that time getting it filled and then not getting to use it (that sentence sounds vaguely dirty). I'm also completely confused by the "Trouble" status effect, which doesn't exist in any other Final Fantasy that I remember, is the only status effect that doesn't go away automatically after battle [update: this actually isn't true at all. I guess I was just lucky up until this point.] (remember back in the day when you actually had to be sure to carry around all the various status healing items?), and can only be healed with an "Anointment" and not a Remedy. Just a completely bizarre addition to the game in my opinion.

FF has had some pretty ridiculous costumes throughout it's history, but whatever the hell Kuja's wearing has to be right near the top. I think IX also has to represent the height of the ultra-effeminate male in FF. Sure it continued a big in X and XII with Tidus, Seymour (speaking of weird outfits...) and Vahn, but there you had Auron and his five o'clock shadow and Basch with the big-ass scar on his face to mitigate that somewhat. I'm glad that as you get to this point in the game though, you have an actual villain on screen, instead of just autonomous black mage puppets and the unsubstantiated hunch that Queen Brahne might be kind of up to something evil. I suppose you could say that in VII you don't see Sephiroth until you reach Kalm Town, and then only in flashback until you acutally encounter him for the first time on the boat leaving Junon Town. In VII though, I think there was enough sufficient dickishness from President Shinra and his lackys to provide enough conflict for the first few hours of the game. As I said in my first post, I think IX gets off to a bit too lackadaisical of a start.

I guess I complained a lot in this post, but I really am enjoying this playthrough. I've completely forgotten huge swaths of the game since the first time I played it, and I'm having fun rediscovering it. The environments are unquestionably one of the game's big strengths. I talked about Lindblum last time, and Burmecia is pretty spectacular as well, even if it does look like it'd be really depressing to live there. Moving on to Clerya next, which is one place that I do remember well and remember being a really cool concept for an RPG town.

RPG Music Part II: Town Themes

This is going to be kind of a broad category that will basically encompass any kind of a theme that plays where you're in an area with people whom you're not trying to kill. This is going to be pretty Mitsuda heavy, I think. He has a knack for making music that evokes a certain tranquility.

II. Town Themes

Arni Village (Chrono Cross)



I feel like this should be in one of those Corona commercials with the people sitting on the beach.

Peaceful Days (Chrono Trigger)



Mitsuda again, with SNES technology this time, with a peaceful, somber melody.

Termina (Chrono Cross)



Cross again, but this time a livelier piece for a livelier town.

Mushroom Kingdom (Super Mario RPG)



Just fun to hum along to.

Lon Lon Ranch (The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time)



It sounds kind of weird on the 64 hardware, but I like the melody and the lazy, western sounding guitar accompaniment.

A Brief Interlude: My Favorite RPG Music

I mention the soundtracks a lot in my FF posts, and it occurs to me that through the magic of embedding it would be pretty easy to throw together a post dedicated to some of my favorite tracks. This is going to be very Square heavy, if not Square exclusive (there might be a Zelda or two thrown in, which I'm considering an RPG series for purposes of this), because my RPG experience is very Square heavy. I don't think there's any question that Uematsu's music in the FF series and Mitsuda's music in the Chrono series are both central to why both series are so beloved (okay, I guess people are a bit up in the air about Chrono Cross), and I don't think it's merely the popularity of the FF series that's led to a world tour of concerts of FF music with prestigious orchestras. That a lot of Uematsu and Mitsuda's stuff was done on pretty primitive music hardware and still sounds good also says a whole lot.

I. Main Themes/Overtures

The Prelude (Entire FF Series)



The sort of strange, ethereal harp music is a perfect way for you to be greeted as you turn your system on. Instantly recognizable, but something you never get sick of.

Prologue (Final Fantasy IV and others)



A nice, epic sounding overture. A pretty early example of how the soundtrack gave the FF series a cinematic quality.

Terra's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)



Amazing. The opening credit's sequence with the mechas stomping their way to Narshe in the show with this playing the background was all you needed to draw you into the game.

Main Theme (Final Fantasy VII)



Pretty sure I already professed by love for this in my Final Fantasy posts. It's used mainly as a theme for the world map in the game, but listening to it it's almost sort of it's own mini self-contained story, starting off kind of somber, building up in intensity, turning dark and ominous, and then there's sort of a cathartic release at the end. This sounds incredible with a live orchestra.

Zanarkand (Final Fantasy X)



I wasn't quite sure what to make of this when I first played Final Fantasy X because the simple piano melody sounded like so much of a departure from what Uematsu did in other games, but I grew to like it. I think it suits Final Fantasy X, which I think is a really enjoyable game, even though it seems to get a pretty bad rap sometimes. The difficulty left something to be desired, but I thought it was as well produced and well conceived as any other game in the series.

Scars of Time (Chrono Cross)



Gorgeous. The kind of Eastern feel to it reminds me a bit of Joe Hisaishi's scores for Miyasaki movies.

This is the Age of Steam

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 01:51-04:48

One thing that I really like about FF IX is that they brought back the concept of distinct classes. In VII you can use materia to kind of mold each character into whatever you want, but independent of that everyone is pretty much identical in battle. And magic actually matters. After a while in VII, with a couple of rare exceptions, you're usually just as effective just kind of pounding away with physical attacks with maybe the occasional summon thrown in. In IX, your mages actually have to cast spells on pretty much every turn if they're going to be effective. I like the ability system for the most part as well. While you can't really get as creative as with materia, it is kind of nice to not have to micromanage it as much, and since abilities are tied to items, it gives you incentive to horde as much equipment as possible, even if you might not actually get a stat increase from what you pick up. I like the synthesis system as well, another easily understandable but engaging game mechanic.

Five hours into the game, it's occurred to me that I've retained pretty much none of the game's plot points from the first time I played it. Every locale I've been to thus far, though, has had me saying "Oh yeah, I kinda remember this." From the first time I played it, I always though the game's environments--a combination of the painted backgrounds Square relied on in VII and VIII--along with some more advanced honest-to-goodness real-time rendered scenery (allowing the camera to shift)--were one of it's strongest points. Especially after having reached Lindblum, my second playthrough has confirmed that I knew what I was talking about, and I know that some of the cooler areas are still to come. I love the steampunk-esque veneer that's built over the world's medieval fantasy base, and the sprawling city of Lindblum, with it's air trams and city gates that open with big clock tower style gears, is a great display of this.

More to come.