Hachibi-Jinchuuriki

I won't be posting stuff under this name anymore. This page will be cleaned in a few days and nothing will be left.

However I'm not leaving. Just moving to a new name, which is at nightsshades.deviantart.com/ in case you still want to keep up with me.

Wow.

I don't think I've ever watched a movie that made me think so much about what was going and what it actually all meant at the end. If I watch it again I'll probably see things I missed before and come up with entirely new theories on what everything exactly meant. As you can probably tell I really enjoyed this movie, I think even if you hated this movie you could still appreciate the movie for how it made you think.

There are going to be two parts to this review; first being the actual review and second being my interpretation of it, this part will container spoilers so if you haven't seen the movie then you'll probably want to skip that part until you see it.

Review- First off, the acting was great I have no complaints there. The characters were very interesting and engaging. The plot and pacing were excellent and it pretty easy for you to invest yourself completely in the movie. A really big plus for me was, again, that it really made you think and the movie didn't have an ending where everything was wrapped in a nice, neat bow but one that was open and left for interpretation. The CG was very good. But my favorite thing of all is the totally original concept, I've never once heard of the idea of collective dreaming, stealing ideas through dreams or the idea of planting an idea in their head through dreams. Its a rare thing to have never heard of an idea before.

On the negative side, if you're not 100% invested in this movie you will not get what's happening. It can be confusing and hard to follow but if you're really paying attention it shouldn't be a problem. There are also so plot holes and things that are a little too convenient but they really don't hit you while you're watching the movie, if you catch them they're probably afterward while you're thinking about it. But depending on you're interpretation of it the plot holes could not be plot holes but supporting clues.

The worst part was the wasted potential though. They are creating dreams but never once do they descended into a nightmare or something that made zero sense like a green sky, monsters popping out of nowhere, that kind of stuff. It makes me sad that they didn't do awesome stuff like that but at the same time I'm really excited for a (good) sequel or (good) spin offs for it at the same time. Not with the same characters because I don't want them to ruin what our interpretations of it was but with an entirely new team.

But the bad really never detracted from the movie. While the movie may have not been a masterpiece it was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time and one that succeeded in being true art, getting you to mull over your feelings on it and  what it actually meant long after you saw it. Inception gets a 9 out of 10, terrific.

Interpretation: Beware there are spoilers ahead

I thought Cobb's wife Mal symbolized both his guilt and his ties to his past that compels him to recreate her in his dreams, skewing his sense of reality, she also interferes with present, screwing up his operations, and keeps him from seeing the future, symbolized by his children. Until he finally lets go of Mal at the end of the movie its only then can return to reality and his children and move on.

And then they did the mind fuck at the end with the top.

At first I thought it was reality because when top was spinning it was wobbling a bit. The top is Cobb's totem, an object which people that go into dreams make for themselves to prove they're not in a dream, Arthur has a loaded die that only he knows its weight and what number it'll land on, Cobb's top will keep spinning in a dream but eventually will fall down if he's in reality.

But the more I think about it the more I'm in the 'its all a dream boat.' In 'reality' Cobb is being chased by a faceless organization, which is a common theme in nightmares. When he's trying to hide in a cafe the waiter outs him because he starts yelling at Cobb for no apparent reason, if you screw too much with the physics of a dream the projections, people that inhabit dreams as a piece of the subconscious, will turn hostile. When Cobb goes through an narrow space between buildings to escape towards the end of it Cobb is stuck good and has quite a hard time getting out, a common claustrophobic nightmare scenario. When he does get out of the niche Saito is waiting just on the other side of it for him, something that only happens in dreams.

Then I cam across this article chud.com/articles/articles/244… in combination with this one www.theawl.com/2010/07/the-key…. Both of which I agree with.

Basically both say that Inception is a giant allegory for movie making. Cobb is the director, Arthur is the producer, Eames is the actor, Saito is the funding, Ariadne the writer, Yusuf is the technical guy, Mal is Cobb's inspiration and FIscher is the audience. Projections could also be seen as the potential for a hostile audience. The more you screw with a dream the more the projections realize you're not supposed to be there until they force you out. In movies, the audience goes in with suspended disbelief but the more unbelievable actions, dialogue, fight scenes, explosions, etc. happens the more they realize they've wasted their money on a crappy movie and that's the last thing a director wants.

Mal is beautiful and seductive but ultimately destructive if that's all you have, with her screwing up Cobb's operations and shooting Fischer. At one part she asks Ariadne is she knows what it feels like to be a half of a whole, with that kind of passion there is no room for anything else, not even their children. But later when Cobb has to choose between Mal or Fischer he ultimately shoots Mal because all of what Fischer is going through has become more important to him then his own vision. Even though Cobb never sees his ultimate revelation, he trusts that Fischer will have it.

As for the ending, with the movie allegory theory, here's how it goes. When Fischer gets his epiphany at the end, while the whole thing is just a dream, his emotions are very real and that's what's important. We're never given an answer if the top keeps spinning because the movie is asking us 'does it matter if it wasn't real?'

My feelings on this movie can be summed up in three words.

What. The. Fuck.

How the fuck could you screw this up?! The TV show was great but the wonderful director M. Night Shamalan completely pissed on all that the series was. There are so many things in this movie that piss me off but I'll try to keep it short.

#1 The Characters- This has nothing to do with the race of the actors (though I thought it was messed up Monk Gyatso was black and young) but the characters themselves. Aang is not a goofy, happy-go-lucky kid, he's dead serious. Sokka isn't sarcastic and doesn't try to make a joke, he talks straight and seriously. Iroh is not a fat, happy man that always has a proverb and likes tea, he's just as serious as everyone else and I don't think I once saw him with tea. Zhao wan't menacing with a temper, he talked like he was about to deliver a punch line and was a douchebag (he invites Zuko to dinner just to ridicule him and tells Iroh he's a tactical genius and says he needs him but then tells him he failed at the 100 Day Seige and points out his son died in that battle). Basically he movie failed to make me care for any of the characters. The only character that escaped getting destroyed was Zuko, I thought he was still pretty much in character and Dev Patel was the only decent actor in the entire thing, everyone else flat out sucked.

#2 The Bending- The bending was ridiculous. They had to do a series of complicated moves just to throw a stickin rock! In the show's theme song all an earth had to do to throw a rock was stomp on the ground and kick forward. I'm not saying the martial art looked hooky, it was fine, but it take a lot of time just to do something simple so their threat level goes down quite a bit.

#3 The Dialogue- Unemotional, boring, full of one liners instead of actual conversations and clunky exposition. Need I say more?

#4 The Pacing- Very fast, so fast that non-Avatars fans would probably get very confused. There was one part where General Zhao gives this clunky line of exposition saying he'll use this scroll from an ancient library to find and slay the moon spirit. What makes the whole situation so pathetic is that it was completely necessary to understand what was going on.

#5 Religious and Technological Overtones- In the beginning of the movie it said that the spirits guide the avatar to help him maintain balance between the nations. But the Fire Nations dared to defy the will of the spirits. It kinda sounds like if you defy the will of god you're automatically evil. There's also a few times in the movie where they say that Fire Nation 'came with their machines.' From the way the people said it it sounded like that technological advancement was bad too.

#6 Is Everyone In This World Stupid?- This is a very serious question. Firebenders in the movie have to have a fire burning nearby so they can bend. Understandable, so why don't people PUT OUT THE FIRES SO THEY CAN'T BEND?!!  They only except is it being night and you needing the light but even then it should be the bare minimum. Only once in the entire movie did someone think to put out the fires but five minutes later you can see plenty burning. Continuity, what's that? Also there's a point where the group is captured and put in a prison, that more like a camp, full of earthbenders. They say they've been captured and its hopeless so Aang rallies them to fight and they do. The problem? THEY'VE BEEN SURROUNDED BY EARTH THE ENTIRE TIME!! When Aang rallies them I was half expecting them to look down and say 'Oh, we forgot there was earth here.'

#7 Boring Action Scenes- The words 'boring' and 'action scenes' should never be used together but they fit. I was looking at the bending and the fighting and I was thinking 'So?' I was trying very hard not to compare this shit fest to the wonderful series it was based on but at the end I couldn't help but compare the climaxes to each other. In the show Aang joins with the Ocean Spirit and destroys nearly the entire Fire Nation armada. In the movie, he just made a tidal wave to 'push' the fleet away. Even the fight scenes during New Moon made me excited and feel something other then 'when the hell is this movie going to end', mostly because I was rooting for Edward to get his ass kicked but I still felt something!

#8 What Waterbending Teaches Us- Acceptance, that we must accept our circumstances. WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF MESSAGE IS THAT?!! I get it in the context of accepting the past and moving on but it could also be put that you must accept your terrible circumstances and don't try to raise above them. I thought water was about flexibility, being able to adapt to your circumstances and turn them to your advantage. Guess that's just silly.

#9 How the Avatar is Found- Sorry but inconsistency really bugs me. In the beginning Iroh proves Aang's the avatar by setting water, a lit candle and a rock in front of him to see how they react. When Aang unconsciously bends them he's recognized as the avatar, Iroh also says they gave other airbenders this test. But later in the movie he says the monks determined he was the avatar because out of thousands of toys he picked the four that belonged to previous avatars. Why didn't the monks just use Iroh's technique? It seems to be more definitive

Conclusion? The movie sucked. The script was bad, the characters were boring, the action scenes were boring and the action scenes were boring. HOW CAN YOU MAKE ACTION SCENES BORING?!! But to be fair there were some good things too. The costumes were good, the sets looked nice, the special effects looked nice... and there was penis hairimg190.imageshack.us/img190/74…. But a movie that is aesthetically pleasing can't redeem one where everything else went wrong.

On a scale from one to ten, The Last Airbender gets a 2, horrible.

Words cannot properly described my aggravation at this point. People who know me will be very surprised by what I have to say: I HATE summer reading!

My english teacher is a true sadist. He has devised a work plan that could suck all the enjoyment of reading for even the most ardent reader. He could have handed me the best book in history and I'd still hate the thing at the end of the work. What is the root of the torture? Two words; dialectical journals.

Write a passage you find interesting on one side of a paper and on the other side comment on it. Repeat 8 times per chapter for the entire book and you're done. At first I thought it wouldn't be too bad, annotating To Kill a Mockingbird would probably be worse then this. But I was wrong, so very wrong. I'm about ready to quit after getting to page 48 of a 207 page book.

Please, could someone kill my english teacher? That would make me feel better.

This movie was everything I expected it to be, which isn’t good since a I hate the Twilight and all it stands for. It had every single failed corny line, every single disturbing statement and I thought it would. It was an all around failed movie.

The acting, for the most part, was bad. Robert Paterson looked like he was either stoned or constipated whenever he was on screen. Kristen Stewart was bland and emotionless the entire time, whenever she did manage to form some kind of expression it looked forced. Taylor Lautner, I'm sorry but you're acting wasn't the best either but compared to the other two he was great.

The plot was nonexistent, when the only real conflict appears in the last thirty minutes of a two and a half hour movie then there is no plot. And the dialogue... Well, I'll let just Edward take over.

‘You give me everything just by breathing.’

Or better yet.

‘You’re the only reason I have to live.’

God, I wanted to gag when he said that. These are quotes that were supposed to be romantic but failed utterly. Edward is 109 years old while Bella’s only 18. Why was he living those other 108 years he didn’t know her for? Obviously he had something to live for then so what happened to that? By the way, threatening to commit suicide if your girlfriend/boyfriend leaves you or dies is the sign of an unhealthy relationship, usually an abusive one. If you don’t believe me then click here www.ndvh.org/is-this-abuse/am-…

And their relationship is an abusive one. I could write an entire paper on this but I’ll stick to the examples in this movie. Edward makes all the decisions; Bella didn’t want to have a party and Edward threw one for her anyway, Edward alone made the decision to end their relationship and did it in an unusually cruel way too. He left Bella catatonic for months, as demonstrated by the painful rotating camera sequence with her curled into a ball. Not to mention those creepy emails to Alice.  As said above, he threatens to commit suicide. There might be more but these are the ones that I remember off the top of my head. Remember, even one sign of an abusive relationship is still too much.

Not that Bella’s a perfect angel. Bella whines constantly and needs a man. She fell to pieces when Edward left and when Jacob couldn’t be around she was the same. She was able to be with Edward no problem after she saw all those tourist be feed to the Volturi and heard their dying screams. She put herself in stupid, life threatening just so she could hear Edward’s pretty little voice berating her. Last I checked hearing voices was a sign of schizophrenia or other mental disease, one that usually gets people locked up in institutions.  

Now, I'm all for creative liberty and have no problem with people writing on touchy subjects like rape, racism or abusive relationships. However, it's one thing to write/show the things and quite another to portray them in a positive light. When Edward returns Bella takes him back, no questions asked and doesn't even have to earn her trust back. All because they have twu luv, soul mates don't do that kind of stuff. God forbid they actually have to do some real work to make their relationship a happy one.

Jacob once asked her what her problem was with aging and I wanted to give him a high five him. This girl is obsessed with age and looks, a nightmare for her is seeing herself seventy with wrinkles. You know Bella, there are worse things then being old and wrinkled. Like, oh I don’t know, having kidneys that don’t work? Not having use of your legs? Slowly dying because there’s a tumor the size of an orange in your brain? Going to Voltura for a vacation then being turned into vampire feed for the Volturi? I can keep going.

Every single time Bella and Edward kiss, it was like watching soft-core porn. There’s no such thing as a simple kiss on the cheek, noooo. They all have to be full blown making out.

Also, when Alice was driving to Voltura the sky was clear and she wasn’t sparkling. When its established that vampires sparkle in sunlight then they should sparkle in sunlight! If you have the nerve to completely castrate vampires and sprinkle glitter on them then at least be consistent god damnit! Trust me, I’m surprised I cared about them not sparkling too.

The werewolves looked kind of fake and cartoonish and the CG wolf fights were awkward at best. When they phased, it was like ‘poof! Instant fur.’ Not one of those transformations that looked painful or even remotely cool, just a puffball of fur appearing.

Here’s what pissed Jacob looks like. static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/F…

Here’s what a real pissed off wolf looks like. img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007…

There’s a little too much difference for me to think the CG team knew or even cared about what they were doing.

My final compliant would be the end. Let me get this straight Bella, you're willing to spend an eternity with Edward but the second marriage comes up you're suddenly speechless?! Anyone else think that's completely ridiculous or is it just me?

My favorite part of the movie was when Edward was being tortured by Jane and got his ass kicked by the Volturi. I really do hate him that much.

Really, all I can do is some up the movie in this sentence.

‘I have never meet someone more prone to life threatening idiocy.’

Thank you Alice.