company: Warner Bros.,
Legendary Pictures and Syncopy
year: 2010
runtime: 148′
director: Christopher Nolan
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao,
Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy,
Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard
writer: Christopher Nolan
cinematography: Wally Pfister
music: Hans Zimmer
Out in wide release now
If one were looking for proof positive that the Hollywood system is still capable of producing compelling, original work there could be no better example than Christopher Nolan’s refreshing piece of blockbuster filmmaking Inception, which has arrived just in time to save multiplexers from a seemingly endless parade of knock-offs, remakes, reboots and franchise sequels. Inception is a rarity among contemporary big budget fare – a science fiction thriller that deals in big ideas rather than laser blasts and catch phrases, with a strong emotional core to bind everything together.
The big science fiction concept at the heart Inception is a machine that allows its users to plug into the dreams of others, and around which arises a new kind of criminal, dream thieves who construct controlled dreamscapes that allow their targets’ subconscious to manifest in more or less predictable ways. The story follows the best of these, a fugitive named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who uses his personal proficiency with the technology to commit industrial espionage for high-end clientele.
Offering Cobb a different sort of job is the powerful and exorbitantly wealthy Saito (Ken Watanabe), who promises Cobb salvation from his past criminal charges as payment for the successful ‘inception’ of an idea into the mind of rival industrialist Fischer (Cillian Murphy).
Inception operates in a manner similar to other high-end heist pictures, with Cobb gathering together a team of talented associates for the big job. But in reversing the purpose of said heist and allowing it to play out in a dream framework, Nolan has crafted something unique unto himself. Not only is the purpose of the espionage to plant rather than extract information, but the spies are creating the location into which they are to break. Adding additional interest is the fact that the anti-heist is to take place simultaneously across multiple levels of dream space, with Cobb and his team operating through the nested dreams of their target.
Writer / director Nolan, exercising his usual affinity for irregular narrative structuring, presents the dream-caper that dominates Inception as a series of simultaneous deadline plot devices, each intrinsically linked to the other while operating within its own unique temporal limits (with minutes passing as hours or even days depending on how deeply the dream level is nested into the targets subconscious). What can seem clunky on paper is rendered quite elegantly on film, which utilizes the malleable physics of its primary setting to great effect. With Inception Nolan delivers some of the most visionary action sequences of his career, turning potentially pedestrian setups (an urban car chase, a hallway gunfight, etc.) on their heads one after another.
More enticing are fleeting moments in which Nolan is allowed to let his imagination fly, twisting familiar surroundings into something new entirely. An early segment showing new recruit Ariadne’s (Ellen Page) first attempt at dream construction has city-scapes folding in on themselves and familiar Parisian landmarks appearing out of an infinite mirror illusion, while a flashback to Cobb’s dream-life with wife Mal (Marion Cotllard) reveals massive cliffs rising and falling on the horizon in conjunction with the couple’s creation and destruction of sand castles. Nolan’s visual effects team is at top of their game throughout, crafting fantastical moments will stick with viewers long after the film has stopped rolling.
All the effects might a blockbuster budget can muster is for naught if a film has no heart, but Nolan’s decade-in-the-making script doesn’t disappoint. Taking center stage is Cobb, a typical troubled Nolan protagonist in a similar vein as those from Momento, Insomnia and even the director’s two Batman vehicles, but who manages to best the lot of them in terms of his relatability. The dream setting allows the audience to see how Cobb, grieving and guilt-ridden over the death of his wife some time before, is dealing (or not) with the emotional turmoil of his recent experience. To give away too much detail would be criminal for a film like this – suffice it to say that Nolan deals with the complexities of grieving with maturity and intelligence while preventing the narrative from being reduced to trite tear-jerking nonsense.
Inception will leave viewers with plenty to talk about after the show with its ruminations on the nature of reality, which is a vast improvement over the indifferent shrugs elicited by so much recent multiplex fare. Nolan has worked hard to ensure the narrative’s universal palatability without dumbing down the content or sacrificing pathos, and graduated to ace director status in the process. Inception is his most satisfying work to date, and comes highly recommended.
