Missed opportunities for ecorealism in Inception?
Currently enjoying a 9.2/10 rating among fans at Internet Movie Database (#3 among all films rated), Christopher Nolan’s Inception continues to storm the summer box office. Yet while the film centers around the effort to convince the heir to the world’s largest energy conglomerate to break up his father’s monopoly, the film fails to explore this motif at any length. While Nolan’s attention to realism is drawing rave reviews, as it did for The Dark Knight (2008), the film misses a number of opportunities to engage in ecorealism – the representation of real world socio-ecological concerns within fictional narrative. I found this aspect of the film somewhat surprising given Leonardo DiCaprio’s green credentials (for example producing and narrating the documentary 11th Hour) and the fact that he convinced Warner Bros. to install solar panels to provide some of the power required to run the film set. More on that effort by Michael d’Estries for Forbes.com.
Perhaps we need a mash-up with Titanic to get to ecorealism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upZMMVLdDmU&feature=player_embedded.