‘Inception’ Review
Since the beginning of the summer, audiences have been dreaming of the great blockbuster of 2010. But all they’ve been given was a nightmare of mediocre comedies, rehashes of TV and yet another stupid movie involving sparkly vampires. But thanks to director Christopher Nolan and an allstar cast, audiences have been awakened to a visionary masterpiece of a film. Simply put, Inception is the must see movie of the summer.
Plot Summary (Spoiler follow, review continues after picture)
The film opens with Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) lying unconscious on a beach. He is brought into a chamber and questioned by an elderly man, who speaks to him cryptically. The only things found on Cobb were a small spinning top and a gun.
Earlier, Cobb and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are talking to Saito (Ken Watanabe), offering their services as “extractors”. Extractors can enter people’s minds through dreams and retrieve valuable secrets. In fact, Saito is the duo’s target. However, a mysterious woman named Mal (Marion Cotillard) helps Saito disrupt the operation.
The rules of the dreams are explained: Dream worlds are mazes that contain the shared dreamers, all of whom are sleeping under the influence of drugs near each other. Objects in the dream world represent manifestations of the dreamers sub conscious, including other people called “projections” which will seek to drive out intruders. Individuals hurt in a dream experience pain, but death merely causes them to wake. Time is distorted in the dream world: five minutes in the real world translates to an hour in a dream. Things that happen to the person in the real world can effect the dream. For example, if a person gets wet, it will start to rain in the dream. To determine whether they are awake or dreaming, each dreamer carries a small artifact (like Cobb’s top) to test whether the rules of physics are correct.
Having failed to gain information from Saito, the team prepares to flee from the powerful clients who hired them. However, Saito intercepts the team. He was aware of their attempt to break into his mind and was in fact testing their skills for a mission of his own. Saito doesn’t want the team to take information from someone, he wants the team to plant an idea in someone’s mind, a process called inception. If the team is successful, Saito will use his connections to allow Cobb to return to the US, where his children are waiting.
Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), a “forger” capable of shifting his identity in a dream, Yusuf (Dileep Rao) a chemist capable of creating specialized drugs for the mission, and Ariadne (Ellen Page). Ariadne is a young student who will be the team’s “architect” creating the mazes which will become the dream worlds. As Ariadne trains inside Cobb’s mind, she learns of Cobb’s hidden past: Mal is a projection of Cobb’s deceased wife who continually haunts his dreams.
The inception target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the estranged son of Saito’s dying business rival. The team is hoping to seed Fischer’s mind with the idea to break up his father’s empire. To plant the idea, the team will create a three layered dream (a dream within a dream within a dream). However, due to the strong sedative used in the operation, the normal rules of death don’t apply. If a person is killed in this dream, they will be sent into the limbo state: a dream state where the time dilation is so pronounced that a person will seem to experience decades or centuries in a dream state, losing all touch with reality.
The first level of the dream is an urban cityscape. The team kidnaps Fischer, and Eames impersonates Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), Fischer’s godfather, pretending that the team wants information from Fischer. As the team gets into a firefight with Fischer’s projections and Saito is critically injured, they escape in a van and enter the second level. The second level is a posh hotel where Cobb convinces Fischer that Browning is assaulting his dreams to gain information. Convinced he can obtain information from Browning, Cobb tricks Fischer into entering the third level, a military base on a snowy mountain. Here Fischer must break into his own subconscious to discover the idea the team is planting.
As Arthur engages the level 2 projections in a shifting gravity fight and the team confronts an army on level 3, Fischer is killed by Cobb’s projection of Mal. With Fischer in limbo, and Saito succumbing to his wounds, the mission seems to have failed. Moreover, they are running out of time, as predetermined “kicks” (sudden jolts of movement which will wake the sleepers) are about to go off. However, Cobb and Ariadne go deeper to enter limbo and rescue Fischer.
Limbo is a crumbling futuristic city built by Cobb and Mal. Cobb and Mal had entered limbo and seemed to live there for decades within their own created world. However, Mal lost herself in limbo and refused to believe it was a dream. The reason that Cobb knew inception was possible was that he had performed it on Mal to convince her that the world they had built was not real. However, the idea spread like a cancer in Mal’s mind. Convinced that reality itself was a dream, she killed herself in an attempt to wake up and framed Cobb to force him to “join” her in the real world. Wanted for Mal’s murder, Cobb fled. He can’t go home to see his children and holds himself responsible for Mal’s death.
Coming to grips with his guilt, Cobb rejects the Mal projection, and it attacks him. Ariadne shoots Mal and she dies in Cobb’s arms. She rescues Fischer, who wakes on level 3 to come to meet with a projection of his own father which plants the team’s idea. However, Cobb remains in limbo to rescue Saito.
Returning to the opening scene, Cobb speaks with the elderly man (Saito, who has spent many decades in limbo) and tells him that the world is not real and that they need to leave. The kicks in the three levels activate, waking the team up in each respective level.
Cobb and the team wake in the real world. Saito picks up a phone and honors their arrangement. Cobb enters the US and is reunited with his children. Cobb spins the top to test reality, but the children distract him. The top slows and begins to wobble, but the screen cuts to black before it falls.
For a movie to be great, rather than merely good, a lot of different aspects have to blend together seamlessly. The look and sound of the film have to perfectly complement and enhance the actions of the characters, which must, in turn, be wound together flawlessly to create a compelling narrative. Perhaps drawing inspiration from a three level dream, Christopher Nolan demonstrates that he can expertly navigate each level of the creative process. The film’s neo-noir look imbues the film with both elegance and sinister overtones. Much as he did in The Dark Knight, Nolan also shows that he is a master of suspense. Viewers will find themselves genuinely tense at times when little is happening on the screen but a subtle tingle from the soundtrack creeps up their spines. The film is scary without relying on shock and its action scenes are powerful without relying on excessive pyrotechnics or jerky camera effects. In particular, the altering gravity fight scenes are the coolest innovations in fighting since the Matrix introduced us to bullet-time.
The cast, of course, makes this movie shine. DiCaprio was a perfect pick for the role of Cobb, exhibiting throughout the piece a mixture of cool and panic. If that sounds like a contradiction, it perfectly conveys the performance. Cobb is a character desperately trying to control his own guilt and madness. Driven to bitterness by reality, he desperately tries to recreate according to his desires. This masterful performance by DiCaprio is perfectly complemented by Page’s Ariadne, who has come a long way since the unfunny indie concert that was Juno. Her character displays enough brilliance and naiveté to be a charming link to reality rather than an annoying young genius that can instantly solve intractable problems. However, the unsung performance of this film has to be Cotillard’s Mal. Seamlessly shifting from tender warmth to icy resolve to burning fury, Mal is the perfect embodiment of love, fear and hatred. Her outright insanity is a perfect means of bringing Cobb’s emotions out from under his calm demeanor. Murphy’s emotional performance, while less integral to the film, is also solid, as are the great performances from the rest of the team. Each character feels layered, complex and has a role to play without devolving into a caricature.
Some have questioned why the rules of the dream world and their philosophical implications were not more fully explored throughout the film. However, focusing on these misses the point of the film. As the Matrix sequels aptly demonstrated, philosophizing can ruin a film when it is clumsily beaten into the audience’s head. Using visuals to create fantastic realities in the dream world would do little to enhance the film, while getting bogged down in the rules would put it in danger of forcing a deus ex machina. Rather, the dream world represents a setting that is itself fascinating while presenting the perfect arena to explore Cobb’s own attempts to put his own reality back together. This is perfectly appropriate: the setting allows the characters to explore fascinating concepts without driving the plot in and of itself. That Nolan was able to display simultaneous events in three different settings, all of which interact in distinctly unconventional ways, without getting the viewer lost, is also a tribute to his ability as a director.
Thus, while Inception is not a revolutionary film in that it doesn’t redefine the techniques of film making, it is an excellent example of a provocative story built around a set of dynamic characters. Without becoming dragged down in its own complexity, it presents complex ideas to the audience centered in a highly relatable story of madness in the face of loss. Without that brilliance swirling at its base, the film would turn about aimlessly. But firmly anchored, Inception spins a wondrous tale of the darker reaches of the mind.
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surely among the top movies around. Inception is great.
I guess I’m going to go and watch Inception once more. I really enjoyed it.