Conception.

"You mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?"

- Ariadne, Inception

Although I didn't eat any dinners alone during my trip to Toronto, my afternoons were pretty much my own time. As such, I overcame my long-term aversion to Leonardo DiCaprio and trotted down to the Scotiabank Theatre on Richmond Street to see Inception.

The concept behind the film is simple enough - a professional thief is hired to insert something rather than steal it. The difference in this case is that rather than diamonds or money, the thief in question steals information from people's minds while they're asleep, and he and his team are attempting to place a foreign idea into someone's head, against the active and deadly resistance of the subject's subconscious mind.

It's difficult to avoid comparisons to the Matrix films, there's a similar combination of layered realities and surrealistic environments.  Inception also raises echoes of Memento, writer/director Christopher Nolan's staccato masterpiece from 2000.  But in many ways, Inception is more of a strange science fiction equivalent of Ocean's Eleven or The Italian Job, a sort of fast-talking hit-and-run heist flick set in REM space rather than Las Vegas.

As such, the actors faces some odd acting challenges, such as pretending to be fast asleep in the back of a speeding van while it dodges gunfire, flips over, and crashes through a guardrail backwards.  Regardless, everyone in the ensemble cast does a good job of dealing with the film's odd combination of shootouts and slumber.

His ability to feign sleep aside, Leonardo DiCaprio has matured well and is well en route to overcoming the legacy of his early pretty-boy days.  He gives the role of dreamthief Dom Cobb a sort of brooding, almost depressed desperation which is completely appropriate to the character.  Ellen Page is also growing nicely into her talent, although I have to think that in the long term she may face some issues.* 

Inception isn't perfect, and it doesn't hold up to stringent analysis in some areas, but overall I found it to be an entertaining and clever piece with some interesting concepts.  I was intensely impressed by the carefully ambiguous and beautifully timed final seconds of the movie. It's rare that a five second difference in an ending would completely alter if not ruin a film, but in this case the conclusion is timed to a razor fine line.

The unfortunate part is that since seeing the movie I've heard several people explaining - or trying to explain - the ending to someone. Sigh...it must be disappointing to Mr. Nolan that he took a break from Batman movies to make a smart little science fiction flick, and people don't get it.

My only real objection to the basic concept is that I doubt the ability of even the subconscious mind to populate a world with varied and unique projections of people and places. I think that we're very much creatures of repetition, pattern and cliché, and as such it's difficult for me to accept that anyone would be able to create a world of such detail and complexity that it would be accepted as real. Frankly, I suspect that most of us would end up with something more like those endlessly repeating backgrounds from Fred Flintstone's living room.

- Sid

* With the best will in the world regarding her abilities as an actress, Ellen Page is well below the height limit for success in Hollywood. Good luck with that, Ellen - if Tom Cruise can make it, so can you.

достаточно!

(Contributed by Laurie Smith)

Enough picking on the Russians already!

Sid invited me to do a guest posting on his blog and after expressing initial concern about not being up to the task from the standpoint of eloquence and style, I decided to give it a shot.

I had the pleasure of recently seeing three movies, and they all fit Sid’s criteria for moviegoing: they contained aliens or explosions. In this case, explosions in all three and a sci-fi theme in two of them. On the airplane to/from Toronto I watched Hot Tub Time Machine and Iron Man 2. In Toronto, Sid and I went to see Salt.

The Russians have long been cast as the bad guys when it comes to international political intrigue and espionage, and it seems that this stereotype persists even today. In Hot Tub Time Machine the three friends travel back to 1986 (great for 80’s music lovers!) because a can of Russian “Chernobyl” cola spills on the hot tub controls and causes a meltdown and a black hole. The time travelers are accused at one point of being Commies, with radioactive secret Russian soft drinks. In Iron Man 2 the musclehead techno-scientist villain is Russian and Mickey Rourke even does an acceptable job of speaking the language. In Salt the conflict between Russia and the U.S. results in a gang of highly trained hardcore Russian assassins and a plan to destroy America.

Seriously folks, enough picking on the Russians already! Half my family heritage is Russian so I’m always interested in seeing how Hollywood portrays the nation. One of my favourite movies, The Sum of All Fears, is unfortunately all about a threat of imminent war between Russia and the U.S.  Isn’t it time to pick a new villain? How about vilifying Luxembourg for a change?

- Laurie

"Time keeps on slipping...into the future."

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

- Groucho Marx

Posting from Ontario today - I'm currently sitting on the patio of the Delta Chelsea hotel, located near Yonge and College in downtown Toronto.  It's a beautiful sunny day, and although the hotel wants to charge the ridiculous daily fee of $13.95 for hardwired internet access in the rooms, they have free wireless downstairs.  Unlike the various dullards who are crammed onto every available flat surface in the lobby, I noticed that there was this outdoor section near the food court area....hmmm....so here I sit typing away outdoors in a shady spot with a nice little breeze, pleasantly isolated from the hustle and bustle of Yonge Street, sipping a frigid iced tea between sentences.

It's interesting to visit a familiar city on a semi-regular basis of about twice a year.  It's a bit like slow time travel - changes can be large and noticeable, or small and subtle.  In fact, this is probably the only feasible method of time travel, although it's not exactly what most people have in mind when they discuss the concept.

When you think about it, all you really need for successful time travel is a reliable method of suspended animation* and a great deal of faith in either automatic timing systems or your fellow man.  Want to move to the year 3010?  Climb in, close the lid, slowly drift off to sleep....when you wake up, presto, 1,000 years in the future.

As with most of the basic science fiction concepts, this one is first introduced by H. G. Wells. In his 1910 novel The Sleeper Awakes**, his character falls into a mysterious trance rather than being put on ice, but the results are the same.  Most of the novel is the sort of thinly veiled socio-political criticism that too often dominates Wells' writing, but it does offer the interesting idea that after sufficient time, a person in suspended animation whose financial life continues to be active would eventually possess all the money in the world. (In the "A Fishful of Dollars" episode of Futurama, Philip J. Fry proves the benefits of compound interest by unintentionally leaving 93 cents in his bank account for 1,000 years at 2.25% and ending up with over four billion dollars.)

The idea was continued by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1956 work The Door Into Summer, which amplifies on the problems faced by Wells' protagonist in terms of adapting to a completely different society in the future.  Obviously all of the scientific knowledge possessed by Heinlein's inventor/hero is obsolete, but the deeper problem is that all of his knowledge is obsolete, in every aspect of life.

They brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning...and I had to have help in dressing. They were not so odd in themselves (although I had never worn cerise trousers with bell bottoms before) but I could not manage the fastenings without coaching. I suppose my grandfather might have had the same trouble with zippers if he had not been led into them gradually. It was the Sticktite closure seams, of course-I thought I was going to have to hire a little boy to help me go to the bathroom before I got it through my head that the pressure-sensitive adhesion was axially polarized. Then I almost lost my pants when I tried to ease the waistband. No one laughed at me.

By the way, the hidden joke is that this particular Sleeper has ended up in the distant future of the year 2000.

When I mentioned that faith in one's fellow man was required for Sleeper time travel, it's not only in the area of having someone wake you up.  Larry Niven's story The Defenseless Dead combines a growing need for transplant donors with a large pool of "corpsicles" - people in cryogenic suspension.  The result?  The Freezer Laws, which decree that anyone without sufficient funds to support them upon awakening is officially dead and as such can be used as a source of spare organs.  In other words, you still wake up, but "one piece at a time", as one of the characters comments.

In my opinion, the best use of the idea of stasis time travel has to be Vernor Vinge's clever Marooned in Realtime, a murder mystery disguised as a science fiction novel, or vice versa.  Vinge's novel is based on the idea of bubbles of suspended time - "bobbles", in the parlance of the novel.  Bobbles are indestructible and with sufficient power can be created to be of almost any size or duration.

The novel takes place after the Singularity, a point in human development where humanity has made a quantum leap to another state of evolution, leaving behind a silent, empty planet.  However, people who are in bobbles suffer the fate of the lame boy in the Pied Piper legend, left behind when the doors to paradise close.  The more technologically advanced survivors decide to use their bobbling technology to travel through however many millenia are necessary to collect all of the remaining humans as they emerge from their bobbles, in hopes of rebooting humanity as a species.

Problems arise when one of the originators of this plan is murdered.  The weapon?  Old age - they're trapped outside the bobbles and left to die while everyone else travels a thousand years.  Needless to say, the clues are not in the best of condition after the crime is discovered.

Of course, interesting though all of these ideas are, there's one problem with this particular approach to time travel.  After all, once I've finished my little faux time travel visits to Toronto, I can go home again...

- Sid

*  Just for the record: regarding my own personal time travel visits to Toronto, I do not consider living in Vancouver to be the equivalent of suspended animation.

** Originally published in 1899 under the title When the Sleeper Wakes, but Wells did some rewriting and re-published it - which may mean that Wells also originated the concept of the director's cut.