Analyzing a scene

For my sixth blog post I am going to take a look at a scene in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.  This does a great job portraying the heist genre.  According to dcist.com, Nolan structures the film in classic heist fashion, as Cobb assembles a team to enter Fischer's head to pull off the seemingly impossible. Despite the sci-fi trappings, Nolan is a classicist through and through, from his insistence on film over digital, and the fact that he prefers to use as few computer-generated effects as possible, even in a film as fantastical as this. Insisting that effects be created practically rather than digitally makes the world of the film one that, like a dream, feels utterly real, no matter how surreal it gets.  

If you follow Christopher Nolan’s work, then you would know that he is a master at taking the impossible and putting his own spin on it to make it seem realistic.  In the film Inception the hallway fight scene as has come to be called really stands out as one of the best fight scenes in a long time. 

First I should set the scene up.  The main character Cobb and his team are trying to plant an idea or accomplish “inception” into the mind a man named Fischer.  In order to accomplish this his team must create three different levels of dreams so Fischer wakes up to believe that the idea the had was really his idea.  Fischer’s mind is trying to defend against the team and treats them as intruders in his different dreams.  The team sets the different levels up so that they would receive a “kick” to jolt them into the next level of their dream state.  So what makes this particular fight scene so special is the fact that in the movie it is supposed in zero gravity, which is difficult to portray, and it also is done without the use of CG special effects.

The hallway fight scene was shot using a very large rotating set the turned so that Gordan-Levitt had to maneuver his way the entire time.  The crew built a series of different hallway settings to make it look like there was zero gravity.  According to Ditzian, the scene ended up taking about Five-hundred crewmembers who were involved in the scene, which took a full three weeks to complete. In a World War I-era airship hangar just outside London.  Also the cinematographer for Inception Wally Pfister explained that "We run the fight scene for as long as the actors can pull it off," Pfister explained. "We begin with a camera that's not fixed to the set and shows a bit of the rotation, and then you quickly jump to where you're rotating with the set. It creates this bizarre, strange movement. It's an exhausting process for the actors” (Ditzian).

This fan blog believes that this scene was not only a very important scene is the film because of the drama that builds up to the next kick in the movie, but also the way that the film crew and the way that it was shot makes this scene all the more beautiful and realistic.

Works Cited

Ditzian, Eric. "'Inception' Hallway Scene: How Filmmakers Pulled It Off - MTV Movie News| MTV ." New Music Videos, Reality TV Shows, Celebrity News, Top Stories | MTV. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Dec. 2011. <http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1643947/inception-hallway-scene-how-filmmakers-pulled-it-off.jhtml>.

"Out of Frame: Inception: DCist." DCist: Washington DC News, Food, Arts & Events. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://dcist.com/2010/07/inception.php>.