Inception – Movies of the Soul

What is Extracted? :: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” — John Milton, Paradise Lost. Well, the mind creates not just heaven and hell, but a lot of other things. As long as the minds are concerned, the physical existence of hell and heaven can take a heavy toll. If the mind keeps you burning, you shall feel the inferno, and if the mind is going through peace, hell is not coming down. Yes, going to paradise, inferno or purgatory in the physical manner is to be left for life after death, but for what happens on Earth, it is all about the mind. This is the same reason why two people might experience the exact same thing in different manner. Each person is unique and so is the mind in every man. Extracted takes us into the mind of one man, where there are memories which keep playing, and there is this another man who is trapped right in there with no chance for an escape. So what are his memories and how does it work? Does the man escape from that world?

What is it about? :: It follows Tom (Sasha Roiz), who invents a machine which can help a person to enter the mind of another man and read his memories, or rather walk around in it (rather like walking around the dreams of a particular person in Inception, but this being more of a scientific device which reacts to instructions and keeps the person who just entered the memory walk through them as he wants to, unaffected by that world and not influencing anything in the mind). Our scientist is a good man, and wishes to use this in treating trauma and for other medical purposes. But once again, government becomes the temporary villain as they make him enter the mind of a suspected killer of a woman, Anthony (Dominic Bogart) with promises of money which he needs as well as a little threatening. But then the system refuses to log him off the mind of that man and his body is left motionless with his mind trapped in the memories of the murderer with nobody having any idea how to get him out. He keeps wandering in the memories until he starts trying to communicate with the owner of the memories.

The defence of Extracted :: Even without the use of that much of a budget, they have made this one interesting. There is absolutely no need for special effects of the highest quality to make a science fiction movie (listen Krrish 3, you never needed those horrible special effects which is not even fit to be called special, if you ever had a good story supported by fine acting). The graphics are kept at a simple level and the story is given the importance it deserves. There is not even a real villain, even as they do get into the mind of someone who is the bad guy. The scene when the infiltrator and the owner of the memory meet each other inside the mind in a fine point. The atmosphere they have created is not really that of a special effects aided fantasy with strange happenings, as the mind itself becomes just another reality with only two of them and of course the computer. There is no external or internal factor affecting the same, and that adds to the simplicity of the movie and way in which it progresses. These people are smart indeed.

Claws of flaw :: The memories doesn’t have anything special, as this is the mind of a man who is into drugs and a lot of illegal activities. His world is simple and often lacks details as the computer is forced to fill those areas with certain kind of fillers which dominates a good part of his memory. That would make the special effect lovers sad, as there is nothing to feel awesome out of this world. There are ambiguities, that is for sure, but of a very small kind. There are moments which could have been made better, and there was more scope for this movie in the way the narrative progresses, and the manner in which the whole situation is being built up. The simplicity is often the movie’s enemy, as the impression it creates stay within certain limits. If you are expecting a special effects marvel like The Matrix, an incredibly awesome looking creation like Inception or something as serene and yet powerful like The Cell, you are going to be disappointed. This one is a movie of this world and not anything else. There is almost nothing to take you to the highest levels of fantasy with visual awesomeness.

Performers of the soul :: The performances are surprisingly good, and it is one of the highlights of a movie which has been rather unknown. Sasha Roiz has done a great work in the movie, and if anything matches or betters that, it should be the performance of Dominic Bogart. While the former is more of a flat character, the latter is as dynamic as he can get, and moves on to the realization about himself not before thinking and coming into his own conclusions. The two female leads are also very good with the limited screen presence that they have, but they do have quite the emotional stuff to go through. If there was more character development in the case of the characters other than the owner of the mind, this could have been a great field for performances. There is nothing extraordinary out there, as everything remains so simple and believable. There is nothing of exaggeration even in a science fiction movie of complicated ideas, as there is a high chance for the same as we have seen in many such movies. These characters are done in a simple manner and the acting works in the right manner, even as most of us might not know any of these actors or actresses.

Soul exploration :: I wish to leave you with a few lines from a song in the Malayalam movie Memories: “Time flows like a river running wild, my mind’s swimming, swimming like a child, I watch the yesterdays go by, like moving patterns in the sky, memories never die”. The movie has a protagonist who is a drunkard living in the memories of his wife and daughter who were killed by a criminal, and he is as much caught in those memories as our hero here. Yes, that was an investigative thriller in which he gets out of them to solve a mystery, but here, we have a device and science fiction. We are all slaves to the past, and memories are all that he have, but when the memories are not ours, there comes the surprise, and just like Inception and The Cell, Extracted also sends someone into the mind of another person. I would recommend that song by the way, as its lines “I take a train into the past” and “Trapped in the desert of my mind” with the way in which it is sung and the scenes are shown in brilliant – it is that which comes to my mind when I watch this movie.

How it finishes :: Extracted is worth a watch if you liked Inception and The Cell, or may be even The Matrix. If there needs to be the reminder of another title, that would be Source Code. Be careful about expecting something spectacular, but expect something simple instead. I would compare this one more to The Cell rather than any other movie, and this is a lower budget version of such movies, taken in the right manner so that it can make an impression without too much quality. Its final plot twist is rather not that impressive, and the ending is adjusted than rather created with full power. It could have tried a little bit harder, and then it could have come up better. Whether you like it or not, we have to appreciate the efforts they have done to create so much out of a low budget movie without losing out. The movie proves that memory can be simple, and yet valuable, and there is no need for blue aliens or space station or inter-planetary travel to make a good science fiction movie. The ideas of The Matrix, Inception and The Cell can be further used, and none of them are finished. Even as budget matters, it is the attitude that matters more. In the end, there is that fine work which might not stay in our memories forever!

Release date: 10th March 2012
Running time: 85 minutes
Directed by: Nir Paniry
Starring: Sasha Roiz, Dominic Bogart, Jenny Mollen, Frank Ashmore, Nick Jameson, Richard Riehle, Sara Tomko, Brad Culver, Richard Riehle, Rodney Eastman, Augie Duke

@ Cemetery Watch
✠The Vampire Bat.

The Vampire Bat knew only one Django and was planning to give him knighthood for being such a wonderful coffin-dragger. It would have been an awesome feeling to have one’s own coffin. What about the awesome graves where he could have worked with the Ghost Rider with a stylish motor-bike or a horse-on-fire burning bright? This bat has always dreamt about those coffins, graves and wastelands along with ghost towns. But he could get none of them in this one. Still, there were those strange horses which were not really on fire. May be this new breed of horses could go to school and end up as smart toothless people. Well, they would still be highly vulnerable to being shot by the new Django who can shoot like a gun’s ghost in a human-spirit form who has come back to seek revenge. The number of vengeful spirits never seem to throw the Vampire Bat into that bloody abyss of nonstop boredom, as he had so much of those intolerant revenge stories that he could see only one side of this world which is full of evil and supposed-to-be-evil followed by glorified revenge full of blood and scattered body parts which might have brought the most evil vampire and the most stupid zombie into that Ring girl’s well of eternal shame.

What the Vampire Bat had was a Mango Icecream so that it could rhym with the movie, and that was indeed a success and would later prove to be an even better experience than the movie itself. The movie starts with the shots of several male slaves being chained and transported to work in a possible plantation which run on slave labour. Among the slaves is Django (Jamie Foxx), who has been sold away from his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) – a name which the Vampire Bat heard as many things other than this certain one. They encounter Doctor King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist and a bounty hunter in the shades of an abandoned area on the way. After getting rid of the trouble from the slave owners, Schultz offers Django his freedom and a reasonably good payment in exchange for helping him track a number of people whom he has been tracing as part of his hunt. After they find and hunt down the targets, Schultz continues with Django as they do the same work. During this period of time, Schultz trains Django in the art of bounty hunting and on using a gun with efficiency.

After collecting a number of bounties and surviving with ease, they go on to free Django’s wife Broomhilda, whose current owner is Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the charming and stylish, but cruel owner of a plantation in Mississippi. They come up with a certain plan to make a big offer for one of the slave fighters of Candie, who fights till death, a offer which he can’t refuse. This catches both the curiousity and attention of the slave owner and he immediately agrees. But the seemingly flawless plan which was so close to success is shattered as the expressions of the two lovers raise the suspicions of Candie’s loyal and senior slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) who finds out that Django and Broomhilda know each other very well and that the sale of the slave fighter is just a trick meant to hide another big plan which lies beneath. This is where all the fun ends, and the death of Schultz would leave the Vampire Bat with nobody to root for. From this, the age of boredom begins. There are stupid shootouts and ridiculous explosions, with the presence of “the people of the night cooling glasses” and “the strangest of the strange horses”. The nonsense would reach a new level and ends with a ridiculous smile.

Well, Django’s “D” is silent, as he himself mentions, but the movie is anything but that. There is lot of violence and I am pretty much confident that there is the presence of even more violence around as the Censor Board has surely tried hard to make this PG-13 and give it an 18+ Adult rating in India. Django Freeman is evil, not by choice but by circumstances. He has so much body count that would make Count Dracula and Lestat de Lioncourt retire and beg for mercy from a dead wood elf with no teeth. Meanwhile, Doctor King Schultz is of lesser evil, as he works with his white man’s guilt to save one man, and to save the man’s wife, he loses his life. Now, that should balance his life and make it rather neutral or a little aligned to the side of good. But Django is away from redemption. He chooses the path of revenge without remorse, and thus the path to hell and may be even compete for a hell-hot cup of tea from the hands of the devil. He is highly hostile to anyone of another race, the only exception being the man who saved and trained him; he is also hostile to one person of his race, the man who is loyal to the people of the other race. That brings such a huge equation of race into the situation – bombarded to be exact.

Jamie Foxx’s Django is a very good potrayal, even as the character is at no point likeable – he has done well to make it so. There lies his success of showing the forced evil. Christoph Waltz winning the Academy Award for the Best Supporting Actor would be no surprise to anybody who has watched the movie. His character rules the movie, with the witty dialogues, action and lots of fun. He provides some of the best lighter moments, and also does the serious side with an incredible amount of mastery. Leonardo DiCaprio comes up with the power of extreme evil which seems inherent in the character. He should still be remembered for his Inception and Shutter Island, but this one also comes up with a memory leaf. Samuel L. Jackson hasn’t really fallen behind, as his character makes a powerful impression. Kerry Washington also contributes in the expected way, making this a movie of performances rather than anything else. It is here, in the acting department where the movie scores the most, followed by the one-liners which creates a great first half only to be made powerless by the second part of the second half and the climax scenes.

As far as Quentin Tarantino is concerned, this is still inferior to Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. Those stand a few Petronas Towers higher than this one. But there is no shortage of blood and violence here too. One has to wonder if these movies should belong to a new bloody genre. There are too many killings and in many sequences, blood and gore has the upper hand and humanity becomes mere spectator in chaos and brutality. There is no sympathy or empathy throughout the movie, especially when the guns take over and spits hell like fire-breathing dragons. Still, its treatment of the racism and slavery could have been better if it was done in a more realistic fashion. Well, not all movies can be “the art”, and this is that moment when the grand wish was to focus more on creating that entertainer which could gross a lot rather than something which could have made humanity aware of the truth. But this shall make the waves, even as not in the way it should have, if thought about from a righteous side – a sad movie for humanity indeed, as even movies like Hostel and Saw knew what was good and evil. Well, one can say that Django Unchained is a true torture porn of the worst level.

The more important of the questions might be about which kind of audience this movie targets. They are surely not for the intellectuals nor for the faint-hearted. The next doubt would be if this is a story of the revenge of a certain race or the story of a pure hearted man of one race helping the man of another race and even facing death in that process. This is surely no respectful treatment of anything, but for the mindless fans with its weird style, glorified violence, senseless admiration and huge historical twists, this might be a treat. There might be disrespect (to which side – or to both?), and there might be too much easiness, but as far as I know, this is a little too much to take as a movie treating such a subject. Satire? May be a little bit, not that much – can we really separate the reality of tragedy to have that feeling? In simple words, one race shedding the blood of others and vice versa – colouring the walls with shades of red is not what I wished for; I would have agreed to the same on some other occasions, but not on this. The movie came to India kind of late, and I am not really unhappy about it, as watching this one late has had its advantages – to hear about it and disagree on many occasions. There is the first half which gave hope, and what follows is not of expectations, and therefore clear thumbs down for the second. Another thing – beware of a drag and length.

PS: My rating for this movie has come down a lot since writing this, but I am not bothering to bring it down just because I don’t want to think about this again. I wish that I had asked only to the right people before watching this movie!

Release date: 22nd March 2013 (India); 25th December 2012 (United States)
Running time: 165 minutes
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Michael Parks, Don Johnson