Movie Review: Inception
What would you do if you could live inside your dreams?
Would you come and go as you please, shifting from one reality to the next?
Or, would you stay in your dreams, making them your new reality…?
Christopher Nolan’s Inception toys with some of these ideas along with a few more. The film – whose script took ten years to write – must have been written and rewritten more than a few times. It follows a maze within a maze, tells a story within a story, and ultimately does a pretty good job of holding the attention of the audience while also thoroughly confusing the unfortunate few who blink.
That any change in Nolan’s script would create a ripple effect, wrinkling the whole fabric of the story is illustrated from the start of the film. It’s the kind of movie that has to be seen from start to finish, without missing any crucial pieces. It’s the type of film that needs to be watched – and then watched immediately again – to absorb the full impact of the events and make sure you didn’t miss anything. Inception is a puzzle, albeit an enjoyable one, that can’t be pieced together without every little preceding detail being taken into account.
The movie opens with Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) shown face down in the shallow water of a rocky beach. Dizzy, spitting, disoriented, he seems to slowly become more lucid but then fades off again. Next he’s shown being detained in an Asian-styled building. Haggard but determined the action begins with him.
The audience soon finds out that Cobb is a man with unique talents – and a unique occupation. He is a corporate man, but certainly no average one at that. He steals ideas. Not copyright infringement or that sort of thing. No, he infiltrates the minds of men to pluck thoughts right from their heads.
Explaining the man further brings us front and center with the film’s plot. Cobb works with a few other uniquely talented individuals whose sole job is to steal ideas. It’s no ordinary process though. It involves slipping into a dream state on both the part of the thief and the victim. From there, any measure of imaginable events can take place (perhaps even more than in “real” life). While anything can (and does) happen in this dream state, in a way, it is much safer than doing business in the real world. This is because you can’t die in your dreams. You can fight others and they can fight back, but, at least in this particular situation, the worst case scenario is that one wakes up too soon, before completing his mission. Along with actually being in the dream state and infiltrating someone’s mind there is the whole issue of entering the dream and getting your target to do it as well. While this never seemed to be much of an issue in the film, it’s just what you would expect. Using stealth and cunning Cobb and his team accost their targets and cleverly sedate them, let their minds wander, and then enter into the dream state themselves.
Nolan’s juggling act becomes all the more difficult when the film makes its first turn down an unexpected road and stays there, humming along at breakneck speed. The plot twist comes in the form of a new challenge for Cobb and his team. This is where the good old fashioned corporate espionage element is introduced and it does seem to add to the film. What would have otherwise been a purely “Matrix” style flick suddenly gets a little “James Bond” style sophistication. Viewers who may have been dumbfounded by the complexity of events prior to this suddenly are jolted awake to the fact that the plot, while being turned on its head, may be more simple than expected.
The plot being “turned on its head” is a reference to what happens after Cobb and his men take a high paying (and also high risk) contract offered to them by a greedy exec looking to stifle his competition. The problem is that the job is entirely antithetical to anything the team has ever done. With this job the man wants them not to steal an idea from someone else but to plant an idea in his competitors head (hence Inception) While much of Cobb’s team is doubtful about the feasibility of this new mission, Cobb himself insists that it can be done. Having been blamed for his wife’s death back in the States, he knows that (for various complicated reasons) if he can compete this last job he can return home, see his children, and leave the hybrid dream/reality world he has come to know.
This is when Cobb actually assembles his team. He brings along his current partner Arthur (Joseph Gorden-Levitt), digs up one of his older associates Eames (Tom Hardy), as well as an expert chemist and a new architect. Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the young architect Cobb discovers and hires because of her brilliant ability to create spaces or, more specifically, mazes. Cobb tutors Ariadne in the art of dream infiltration, controlling and navigating your own dreams to be exact. This comes in handy as a helpful device for the audience as well, who, up to this point in the movie was likely quite confused about the intricacies of dream travel (not to mention where reality ends and dreams start) It’s during their dream sessions, touring their own minds, in an alternate reality that many of film’s special effects come into full view. Cities being turned on their heads, buildings exploding into miniscule pieces in slow motion – these are just a few of the superb effects that heighten the intensity of the film.
Inception reaches its climax with all of the “dream team” deeply entrenched in a several layers of a dream. In order to plant the idea (and complete their objective) they, it turns out, have had to enter not just one but two and then three levels of dreams in order to fully implant the thought into their target. With the risks being higher in this mission (apparently when several layers deep in a dream you can die – or come close enough) the team rushes to complete their objective in the allotted time.
It is at the height of the action that Cobb’s personal demons really come out. (to fully explain them would give too much away but suffice it to say his personal drama puts everyone at risk) The issues that Cobb (and the rest of the team) dealt with since the beginning of the story are displayed in vivid contrast and are left to fester until the very end of the film, where the audience gets their questions answered. There are, at the same time, some seemingly unresolved issues but it’s likely that Nolan wants the audience to believe that this could arise from either confusion on the part of the viewer of an ending that is open to interpretation.
Of course, Nolan hasn’t clarified…
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