Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Inception (2010)

What if M. C. Escher, Timothy Leary and David Duke got together and made a Hollywood tent pole?

This one has amazing computer graphics along with great acting performances, especially by Elliot Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard. Unfortunately, there was extreme racial bias in the composition of the cast with no black characters in this large cast besides bit parts.

In this film everyone had a dream except black people.

There were just two bit parts with black characters. One was a man interfering with the main protagonist and yelling at him in a foreign language, the other one was a stuntman who fought against a protagonist and was killed in an unusual manner, followed by another protagonist who laughed and said, “Did you see that?” (And the producers chose to have an actor of Indian ethnicity, Dileep Rao, deliver that offensive line.) Other than background, those were the only black people I saw in this two and half hour long movie.

Another huge issue I have with the film is the promotion and glorification of drug use. The film was produced right after Obama took office, when there was a massive, subversive campaign to encourage drug use in the US, along with a huge increase in racism, among many other efforts to undermine society during his administration.

Because of the racism in this 21st-century film, I don’t recommend watching it.

(short, fair use clip from the film, no spoiler)

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The closed captioning is small and hard to see, it says...

Right. So, what happens when we die?

We drop into limbo. Are you serious?

Limbo?! Unconstructed dream space.

(The last CC sentence was not spoken in this clip, it's for the next spoken line in the scene, which was cut off in this clip).

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