Choose A Movie You've Seen In The Past By Genre ✓ Solved

Film Genres Choose a movie that you have viewed in the past and can re-watch to complete the below worksheet. Answer the following questions regarding the movie. Refer to your course readings to support your answers. Fill in this sheet, save it, and submit it in the Assignments section for this week.

Film Genres Choose a movie that you have viewed in the past and can re-watch to complete the below worksheet. Answer the following questions regarding the movie. Refer to your course readings to support your answers. Fill in this sheet, save it, and submit it in the Assignments section for this week.

Part I: Examining Narrative

Answer each question in 50 to 75 words (400 words total minimum for the assignment).

Questions

- What is the title of the film you evaluated?

- Film titles must be properly formatted and cited. See 'Film Title and Citation Format' under Recommended Learning Activities in Week 1 for reference.

- 50 word minimum does not apply to this question.

- What is the story/plot of your film? Who are two primary characters? Provide a description of them.

- Discuss what you believe the audience’s expectations were for the film?

- What kind of sense of time does the film create?

- How does the film create a sense of space, or what kind of space is used in the film. Does it feel tight or cramped, open?

- How would you characterize the perspective of the film?

Part II: A Look at Genres

Answer each question in 50 to 75 words.

Questions

- In what primary genre does your film belong?

- What are the conventions of that genre?

- What other genres might appear as sub-genres in your film. Please explain

Paper For Above Instructions

Chosen film for this analysis: Inception (2010), directed by Christopher Nolan. This film situates a high-concept science fiction premise—the ability to enter and influence people’s dreams—within a tense, character-driven narrative that doubles as a heist thriller. Its core narrative structure relies on layered dreams that function as independent yet interlinked spaces, where rules of time, gravity, and memory bend to serve the story (Bordwell & Thompson, 2019; Genette, 1983).

The story centers on Dom Cobb, a skilled thief who enters dreams to steal secrets from the subconscious. He is recruited to perform inception—planting an idea in the mind of a target—rather than simply extracting one. Two primary characters that illuminate the narrative’s emotional and cognitive core are Cobb and Ariadne. Cobb, a grief-stricken extractor, is haunted by memories of his late wife, Mal, which intrude into dream layers and threaten the mission. Ariadne, the young architect who designs the dreamscapes, serves as the audience’s surrogate, translating abstract dream logic into tangible settings for the team. This dynamic aligns with narrative theories that emphasize focalization and the function of a guide character who introduces viewers to a stratified narrative world (Chatman, 1978; Bordwell, 1985).

Inception foregrounds audience expectations through a combination of high-concept science fiction, visually arresting set pieces, and a tightly controlled mystery about what is “real.” Viewers anticipate a puzzle-like plot with twists, but Nolan also invites emotional engagement through Cobb’s internal conflict and the moral ambiguity of dream manipulation. The film plays with the problem of reality versus illusion, a classic preoccupation in genre cinema, and sustains a sense of unresolved ambiguity that has sparked extensive post-viewing discussion (Bazin, 1967; Mulvey, 1975). The fusion of action-driven sequences with philosophical questions about identity and memory aligns with established film-narrative theories that emphasize layered storytelling and reflexive structures (Genette, 1980; Bordwell & Thompson, 2019).

Time is a central narrative mechanism in Inception. The film compresses time within dream layers: minutes inside a dream correspond to hours in the real world, and deeper dream levels produce even slower time passage. This temporal architecture creates tension and demands careful attention from the audience, who tracks parallel actions across multiple strata. Genette’s analyses of time and narrative provide a framework for understanding how depth of dream levels reorganizes causal sequences and pacing (Genette, 1983; Bordwell, 1985). The result is a cinematic experience in which time becomes a malleable, cinematic object rather than a fixed dimension (Chion, 1994).

Space in Inception is similarly malleable and plastic. The dreamscapes unfold as deliberately stylized environments—worlds where gravity can be manipulated, cities fold upon themselves, and hotel corridors bend in impossible ways. The physical logic of space is subordinate to the dream logic, a strategy that highlights cinematic spatial design as a narrative instrument. James Monaco’s guidance on reading film space and narrative helps explain how set design, camera movement, and choreography communicate the dream-world rules to the viewer (Monaco, 2009). Ariadne’s role as architect of the dream spaces makes space itself a narrative protagonist, shaping perception and action as much as any character (Mulvey, 1975).

Perspective in Inception is tightly controlled. The audience experiences the story largely through Cobb’s point of view, with occasional shifts to other team members that reveal procedural aspects of the mission. This focalization aligns with narrative theories that emphasize the viewer’s sense of identification with a central protagonist while still allowing for informed detours into other perspectives when the plot requires it (Chatman, 1978; Bordwell, 1985). The film’s score—dense, rhythmic, and spatially aware—works with editing and shot composition to reinforce the viewer’s immersion in the dream-realm and Cobb’s subjective experience (Chion, 1994).

In sum, Inception demonstrates how contemporary cinema can fuse genre conventions with formal innovations to produce a narrative that is simultaneously exhilarating and philosophically provocative. The film’s interplay of time, space, and perspective illustrates core tenets of film theory: layered narration, spatial design as narrative device, and subjectivity as a driver of meaning (Genette, 1980; Bordwell & Thompson, 2019; Bazin, 1967).

The film’s engagement with genre conventions—specifically science fiction, heist thriller, and psychological drama—exemplifies how genre concepts function in modern cinema. It adheres to the high-concept premise typical of science fiction while embracing the procedural rigor and action choreography of a heist film. The result is a hybrid that uses conventional expectations to explore non-conventional ideas about consciousness, memory, and reality (Neale, 2000; Monaco, 2009).

Inception also reveals the productive tension between genre expectations and audience interpretation. The dream framework invites speculation about the nature of reality that extends beyond straightforward plot resolution, a hallmark of sophisticated genre cinema that challenges viewers to examine their own perceptual boundaries (Bordwell & Thompson, 2019; Mulvey, 1975). The film thus functions as a text that is both entertaining and philosophically engaging, with its genre attributes leveraged to support a complex, layered narrative experience (Genette, 1983; Chatman, 1978).

References

• Bazin, A. (1967). What Is Cinema? University of California Press.
• Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2019). Film Art: An Introduction (11th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
• Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2019). Film Art: An Introduction (11th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
• Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press.
• Chion, M. (1994). Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press.
• Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell University Press.
• Genette, G. (1983). Time and Narrative. University of Chicago Press.
• Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 14–26.
• Monaco, J. (2009). How to Read a Film. Oxford University Press.
• Neale, S. (2000). Genre and Hollywood. Routledge.