I think the way Nolan handles exposition is one of the most remarkable things about this film. Part of his success, I think, is down to his inspired genre combination: SF/ heist movie.

Science fiction (mostly) requires a lot of exposition. And heist movies traditionally have a lot of explanatory scenes that are part of the fun. We don't sit fidgeting through scenes where the thieves explain the bank's alarm system, test their drilling equipment, and steal the necessary access codes - we lap them up. We love the action, the characters using their skills, the sheer cleverness of it all. They're a big part of what we came for.

Combine the two, and you can use the conventions of one genre to cover the weak points of the other - the fun-and-games of the heist conveys your exposition in an exciting, fun way.

If only we could find similar genre-bending combinations to patch the holes in every genre...!

You have to be really careful though. One of the worst examples of exposition as revelation happens in The Bourne Ultimatum.

It's the scene in which Noah Volson (David Strathairn) is on the phone with the CIA Director Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn). Noah voices informs Kramer that Bourne and Nicky Parson's are dead and tells Kramer's he's protected and it won't come back to him.

Kramer then says: "Just remember why we put Landy there. If Blackbriar goes south, we'll roll it up and hang it around her neck and start over."

While it's a revelation it's entirely for the audience, not for the characters. Both Kramer and Noah know this information, so it doesn't make any sense that Karmer would need to repeat it.

Because of this it comes off as a false and I cringe every time I hear it.

@Joshua: You bring up a critical point. I like to think of writing a story as being about two universes: There is the universe within which the characters exist. It is a closed loop environment. That is as far as the characters are concerned, everything that transpires within that universe is tied solely to what exists within that universe. Call that the Story Universe.

Then pull back and out of that universe to the writer's perspective where we look down on it, manipulate it, play around with it. That's the Writer's Universe.

As writers, we bounce back and forth between the two and so at times it's easy to lose our bearings.

A situation like you mention in Bourne is an example of that. When we write exposition, it's always targeted toward a reader. But it has to exist logically within the Story Universe. Exposition can not exist solely to speak to the reader, but rather must be grounded in the exigencies and needs of what is transpiring in the Story Universe.

A close kin to your example is the situation where a character tells another character the other character already knows. Sometimes that can work, as in the case where the first character wants to remind the second character of that information. But if it's just about creating a situation to communicate the information to the reader, that is inauthentic. The writer needs to come up with some other way of getting that information across.

It's interesting to note how often, in "Inception," that there are scenes in which several characters are standing around talking.

The movie poster and DVD cover shows the dream team standing, somewhat apart from each other, a visual suggestion of a sort of alienation that exists in a group of people who are connected through a shared dream (about as intimate as you can get).

There's something about this type of irony that provides an interesting tension even in what might otherwise be seen as exposition-heavy scenes.

The DVD extras have a clip in which Chris Nolan's writing process for this movie is described. He took ten years in which he would set it aside for a time and then come back to it and make changes. That, I think, is why it's so well crafted.

Re: "A close kin to your example is the situation where a character tells another character the other character already knows."

One of the best ways round this seems to be to use subtext to give a secondary meaning to the information. The best example I can think of offhand is in X-Men 2, where Magneto spends half a scene reminding Xavier how he tried and failed to help Stryker's mutant son.

Obviously Xavier knows all that; but Magneto isn't saying "Do you remember this?", he's saying "You screwed up, you caused this mess, and I'm going to hurt you by reminding you." So he has a perfectly good reason to introduce this information to the audience.

Of course, having Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan delivering your exposition certainly doesn't hurt!

I actually think Inception is an example of how exposition is handled poorly.

1) It explains things that the audience already understands.

2) It misses opportunities to "explain" exposition through visuals. It often tells us how things work in dreams and then immediately shows what they just talked about. Just show us it working, especially early on. We'll get it.

This also robs the audience of some of the fun of putting the pieces together themselves.

It's like we're being spoonfed everything.

3) It then violates its own rules. This means that all the exposition you watched earlier is irrelevant. And new exposition is needed to justify this violation.

"Hey, I know we spent the first half of this movie telling you that you can't die in dreams and explaining it like your were mildly retarded, but we take it back. You can die in dreams."

"We obviously had to do this because otherwise there'd be no stakes. But we know you'll justify that to people who say it was simply a poor choice to begin with by telling them they're just too stupid to understand how deep and complex this story is."

@ debbiemoon

"We don't sit fidgeting through scenes where the thieves explain the bank's alarm system, test their drilling equipment, and steal the necessary access codes - we lap them up."

I disagree.

I find them boring. It's also why they are generally at the beginning of a film. They're only there to show us what is supposed to happen, so that the plot can deviate from it. The deviation, things going wrong, is the part of the heist movies we lap up.

Oh shit! The drill broke! The guy who was supposed to cut the alarm was shot! The bank manager changed the codes! The police are closing in!

And in fact, many heist movies don't even have this "setup" element. POINT BREAK for instance just shows a successful bank robbery. As does THE TOWN. We now know what the rules are and what to expect. They didn't need to explain anything.

James, did I miss something? Is there someone who states you can't die in a dream in "Inception?" The rules as I understand them from the movie are that if you die in a dream, you wake up, unless you are so heavily drugged that you can't wake up. If you die in a dream while you are heavily sedated, then you go to limbo.

I actually did not see any breaking of the rules that were established in the beginning. I'm wondering if you became confused because of the fear that the characters had of being stuck in limbo.

I recall that there was a generational divide in the movie audience, and that the major following of "Inception" is a younger audience. "Inception" itself is a bit like a game for which you have to know the rules. For instance, the gravity shifts for the first level of dreaming affect the next level down, more profoundly than the third level of dreaming. A song played at full speed on the first level down, is heard almost as a symphonic piece with heavy bass on the next level, and becomes like a Tibetan chant on the third level down, because of the time.

Funny, when I was delirious with fever, my perceptions of music were distorted in a similar fashion.

I hope this'll be mentioned later in the week, but the criticism that there are no stakes apart from limbo ( one I've heard before) misses a major plot point:

Arguably setting up the goal and stakes is a function of exposition, and they are beautifully focused in an almost throwaway line around the hour mark -

As Cobb boards the plane at the start of the job, he notes that when the plane lands he's either going to be exonerated and reunited with his kids, or will go to jail for murdering his wife and will likely never see his kids again.

Perhaps the fact that the line was kinda throwaway is what left so many people feeling 'so what'.

@James: Exposition is a moving target in that some people have lower / higher treshholds re it. My bottom line is this: Was I entertained? Even if there is a ton of exposition in the movie, such as Inception, if I found the experience entertaining, then I will conclude the filmmakers did a good job handling the exposition.

Clearly you did not have that experience.

File under one person's ceiling is another person's floor.

The point of my post is to note how screenwriters can use a specific narrative device -- revelation -- as a way of dressing up exposition so that it becomes entertaining.

That is solid takeaway no matter what one may think about Nolan's success or failure with Inception.

@Robin: That's a really good point. I've seen the movie perhaps 4 times and in all honesty, that line never stuck with me. Perhaps that's because I understood fully Cobb's dilemma and didn't need the line, or the line was, as you say, delivered as a kind of throwaway (likely because Nolan didn't want to hammer it home in an on the nose way). But yes, Cobb is stuck in a moment of true existential crisis in the sense that once he committed himself to his plan, his life was going to change unalterably -- one very much for the worse, one very much for the better.

I think that Nolan, along with the actors, did a great job of the scene where the plan touches down.

Cobb and Saito speak volumes to each other, in just moments, without saying a word. And then, Saito starts a call on his cell phone. Success.

I recall Scott's mention of communication-in-silence in a much different movie, "Big Night," where the two brothers make up, the morning after a bad fight, in complete silence.