Metroid: Other M impressions/ Inception thoughts

    This post is more of my thoughts on Metroid: Other M and the movie Inception than anything else. I finally just saw Inception (took me long enough,) and thought it was brilliant. But before I get into that, let me talk about Metroid: Other M first.

    I can't really call myself a Metroid veteran; I've only played the Metroid Prime 1-3 and bits of Metroid and Super Metroid. Despite that, I have plenty of respect for the series and plan on playing through all the games at some point. Metroid: Other M came out two days ago (as of this writing) and I've managed to play several hours of it so far. My first impressions: it doesn't really live up to the "Prime" games or "Super Metroid". Is it bad? Frick no, it's still pretty good. It's certainly not deserving of the word "worst" in my impressions/half review, but I will say it's the least good Metroid game I've played.

    The gameplay is solid enough, but having your suit powers authorized by the general rather than upgraded doesn't really feel like a Metroid game. The story is pretty good so far, but the feeling of being isolated like in the first "Metroid Prime" and all the classic side-scrollers is completely gone here. In the older games, Samus was pretty much alone on a strange planet, where as in this game you're in constant communication with an ex-former officer. That's not to say you won't experience isolation later on, but so far the game doesn't feel as Metroid-ish as the other Metroid games I've played. I'd still recommend it to Metroid fans, but series newcomers would be better off starting with either Super Metroid or one of the Metroid Prime titles.

    Now for my thoughts on Inception (massive spoilers alert!) I thought the movie was very well done overall. Its ending has spawned discussions all over the internet (I've done my best to avoid those so far). Was DiCaprio's character still dreaming? Was he awake? Is he stuck in limbo? Did anything in the movie actually happen? Well, I personally came up with four basic ideas of what could have happened at the end of the movie, and this is without reading any thoughts online. You can argue against my points all you want, in fact I welcome it.

1. He's awake at the end of the movie. This is the easiest ending to follow as it's the face value ending. He finally meets his kids again after several years. As much as the spinning top doesn't stop before the camera cuts away, it started to wobble.

2. He's still dreaming at the end of the movie, which is another obvious choice. The spinning top had been spinning for quite a while before the camera cut, and a top that's weighted on one side probably wouldn't spin that perfectly for long (depends on how heavily weighted it is.) How is he dreaming though? Is he in limbo, or has he just not awoken yet. After he convinces Saito (the Asian crime boss) to return to the real world, we never see them actually return. Maybe they escaped off-camera, or maybe DiCaprio just thinks they escaped. Nobody speaks a word afterward, and when he arrives at home his kids are doing the exact same thing he keeps seeing them do in his dreams. It's also a little odd that Saito is in the same building as the start of the movie when that was actually DiCaprio's dream at the start and not Saito's (that's explained at the beginning of the film.)

Now I'm getting into the real heavy stuff.

3. He's been stuck in limbo the entire movie. I'm taking some of the film's own quotes here and turning them on it's back. When DiCaprio is first showing Ellen Page's character the dream world, he asks her if she remembers how they got there. We never see anything between the last time DiCaprio saw his kids and the beginning of the film, hmm. Besides that, there are some rather odd circumstances throughout the film. When he's being chased in that one city for example, one of DiCaprio's pursuers shouts something like "This is real life, you die here you stay dead." I don't remember the exact quote, but why would someone actually say that? Maybe that's his sub-conscious trying to keep him in limbo or something? There was also the moment where he had to squeeze between two buildings that kept getting closer and closer together. Who would want to build these buildings that close? Wouldn't it be hard to finish constructing or painting?
    Moving on, why would his wife book two opposing hotel rooms just to jump off the ledge? More importantly, and I'm going by my memory here, but I don't remember seeing any other lights on in either building. I also remember the streets being pretty empty and the buildings being really close together despite being really nice hotels, pretty strange for a big city, right? I'm not sure how to explain it, but the vision of his kids also seems off to me. Maybe DiCaprio's wife was right all along, and escaped back to the real world herself. Now I know that most of these arguments can be attributed to the storytelling or directing itself, but with the points the movie makes you could argue either way.

And finally, my final thought on the ending.

4. The majority of the movie was a murder investigation. This possibility borrows much from number 3. The chase scene between the two buildings, we never see DiCaprio's journey from his possible arrest up to the movie's beginning. Maybe everyone he gathered up for the mission was in on this investigation, including Robert Fischer (the man Saito wanted DiCaprio to plant the inception into.) His mental image of his children are always exactly the same, so maybe that's an actual memory. We never really see or hear from DiCaprio's former employers after the movies introduction, unless that one chase scene in the town counts.

(end spoilers)

    That's the beauty of a movie like this; it brings in so many neat concepts and leaves you with an ambiguous ending. The fact that I was able to think up these ideas shows how imaginative this film really is. To anyone that hasn't seen this movie, I strongly recommend that you do. This is a day 1 Blu-Ray purchase for me.

Anyway, that's my post for today, I hope you enjoyed it.