Watch This Instead Review of Inception

Hi! This is Mike from Thesubstream.com and this is an episode of Watch This Instead of
the weekend, the 16th of July 2010. And, what I'm going to do is tell you what to watch
this weekend. Instead of watching Christopher Nolan’s Inception, I have to, that’s what
the idea behind this show is I tell you what to go watch instead of something else.

Instead of, in this case, Inception, which I'm telling you for some reason to watch
something else even though Inception is a really good incredibly high-budget sleek piece
of intelligence sci-fi filmmaking, which you should actually absolutely go see. But, if you
don’t want to brave the crowds, if you're heading up to the cabin with kids, if you just
can't make it to the theatre, if you got air-conditioning in your basement, you want to rent
DVDs or Blu-ray for your Blu-ray player, I'm going to let you know what you can watch
instead to approximately at least some part of that Inception experience that you should
go to the theaters and have, at some point, if not this weekend.

And, one of the coolest things about this film, one of the best elements in the film that a
lot of people aren’t talking about, would you going to say why because they're busy
talking about the fact that they cost millions and millions of dollars. It is Christopher
Nolan who’s directed it and the last one that he directed was the Joker Batman Movie.
The fact that it’s got an incredibly talented, incredibly handsome casts, it’s got crazy
visuals, it’s got a bunch of crazy practical special effects like zero gravity people floating
around in the hallway. It’s got crazy script and dreamland and catharsis and subconscious
and Armand White doesn’t like it, some people are talking about that.

But, what people aren’t really talking about the fact that it is a really, really, really good
score. And, I'm not somebody that normally notices this kind of thing because I'm almost
tone deaf but it -- all the way through Inception, that was the thing that I kept noticing is
the quality of the score, which is by a guy named Hans Zimmer. Like a lot of Zimmer
scores, including the one with which he established his bonafide, his score for a ringman
in the mid 80s.

Zimmer’s score is mostly electronic rather than orchestral. It uses a bunch of these really
dark, ominous, evangelic-y, swooping sins which seems kind of weird up next to this big
$200 million behemoth of a movie, there’s actually really kind of effective, even though
it’s small and not bombastic and orchestral with kettle drums and everything else, just
some simple lines. And if you're somebody that’s thinking in making your own movie,
this is something that’s relatively achievable.

I'm not saying that you can go do what’s Zimmer doing because Zimmer is a kind of
generation talent or almost. But, you can get access to synths to score your friend’s movie
whereas you may not be able, for some reason. Bad luck, I guess, to get our access to the
L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra for a weekend in one of those big special rooms that you
see on DVD special features with the big screen in the movie where they play.

So, what should you watch instead? My favorite and one of his absolute best scores is the
score for Tony Scott’s 1995 or 1996 submarine movie Crimson Tide. A kind of forgotten
the thing, I don’t know if people are sick of Denzel or sick of Jean Hackman although I
do know how do you get sick of Jean Hackman or just sick of submarine movies at that
point. But, it’s a really, really good movie with a really, really, really good Zimmer score
that he won a Grammy for. And like his scores, Rainman and Inception, it’s a lot of
electronic with a lot of really cool synths and drum beats that you could achieve in theory
if you had a rack and equipment and bunch of people playing violins.

So, go watch that instead of Inception, which you should still watch.