Countdown to Inception, Part VII: Inception
Inception
Having watched and reviewed all of Christopher Nolan’s feature length work prior to Inception (his seventh film), I must confess that I feel far more qualified to offer my thoughts on this movie than I would have a mere week ago. This whole project has given me a fair amount of both insight into the man’s work and perspective as to how it should be valued and weighed against its contemporaries. And while I can’t honestly say that I care very much for his take on Batman or the gambit at the end of The Prestige, Nolan’s entire body of work has been impressive. He is almost certainly one of the most gifted filmmakers at this level in the industry today, and I’m pleased to report that Inception continues his sterling career with what I would consider to be his best work since Memento, a film which brought him to our attention ten years ago.
For all of the mystery in which Nolan’s most recent project has been shrouded, between vague action packed trailers and disorienting posters, it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that Inception is a rather straightforward and simple affair (at least when it comes to Nolan). Anyone familiar with his non-Batman films shouldn’t need to be told that the opening sequence is not to be disregarded, and Inception is no different. Such films begin where they will soon come to end, which I mean less as a spoiler and more of a piece of advice. In fact the entire film, for all its uncharacteristic simplicity, still requires the sort of investment from an audience that renders them unable to take their eyes of the screen. It’s not exactly dense, but there’s a certain quickness and assumed level of comprehension to it, which means that a person taking a quick washroom break and expecting to be in the loop when they return is not an option.
Inception is straightforward yet elaborate, and complicated without being confusing. It may sound like a bit of a paradox, but really, I assure you it’s nothing by which to be intimidated. The plot is simple enough, dealing with a group of people as they prepare for and execute a daring cerebral heist. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a character likely so named and characterised to evoke shades of the man from Nolan’s feature debut) assembles a team of thieves of the subconscious to plant an insidious thought in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a powerful energy company. Cobb’s employer, a man named Saito (Ken Watanabe), is a rival to the Fischer energy empire, and is aiming to capitalize on the situation by subconsciously convincing the young Fischer to abandon his trade, leaving himself with a monopoly. In return, Cobb will be able to return home.
Really, it’s in the presentation where things begin to get interesting. In lieu of any twists and turns, such as the betrayals or double crossings one might reasonably expect from the man behind Following and The Prestige, Inception spends far more time establishing the film’s context and infrastructure than fleshing out its players. Any surprises are ones of revelation or sequential trickery, not necessarily of character motivation hitherto unbeknownst. Unfortunately, this leaves the dialogue rather dry and the players somewhat plain and uninteresting. Characters speak mostly in exposition, with far more effort being put into explaining the rules of the dream as opposed to giving us a reason to care for the dreamers. Only Cobb gets a well rounded treatment involving a suicidally depressed wife (Marion Cotillard), now deceased, haunting his dreams as a shade.
As for people like the architect (Ellen Page), the forger (Tm Hardy), and the chemist (Dileep Rao), questions like who they are, where they came from, and how they stumbled into the world of subconscious espionage take a backseat to making sure that Nolan’s construction appears as compelling and legitimate as possible. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with sacrificing fully developed characters for a fully developed world. Truth be told, some characters, such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s point man and Tom Hardy’s forger, are so gussied up in their meticulous mannerisms and outfits that they don’t need depth to be any more affecting. The fact that they’re all well portrayed certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
Unfortunately, Nolan’s construction isn’t flawless. The world of dreams, according to him, is made with half of the mind devoted to building and populating the dream manually and the other half to propagating it automatically. Cerebral extractors or inceptors move between the cracks in the two part process, infiltrating and redesigning the landscape to suit their needs at the risk of drawing the attention of the mind’s projections, which are hostile to everything for which it isn’t responsible. What this essentially means is that Nolan frees himself of accountability for everything in the dream world that seems unreasonable.
The major points, such as the stability of the dreamworld depending on the peace of the subject, work well enough, but there’s one particular nuance that will surely threaten to break some illusions. You see, a subject is never able to recall exactly how they end up at their current position in a dream, which means that all dreams are entered in medias res. While the question of where dreamworlds end and begin, even when they stack upon each other, is handled by making dreamscapes nicely varied from each other, the position, outfitting, and equipment of the thieves from one dream to the next just seemed terribly convenient. True, the architect does design the dreams with immaculate detail and precision, and part of dreaming is the ability to manipulate everything at a whim. Yet such a fact gives the impression of cheap convenience more often than not, despite the sound logic suspension of disbelief grants. Aside from this quibble, I also have to wonder about the reasoning that lets Cobb infect the subconscious of others with the hostile projection of his dead wife, since her meddling also felt a bit too contrived as well.
Perhaps you’ll forgive me for letting my queries get the better of me, but if nothing else, such musings should attest to the power of Inception to be thought provoking. Even though I found the film to be far shallower than its trailers and adverts eschewing reality led me to consider initially, it is still artful enough that there will almost surely be some merit to a second (or even third) viewing. If nothing else, it’s certainly one of those rare films that gives the impression of being as gratifying and rewarding for as far as it’ll be allowed to be. It’s intelligent enough to demand scrutiny and clever enough that it’ll probably hold up to most of it.
When it comes to the somewhat more base level of living up to its expectations as a popcorn blockbuster, there too Inception succeeds triumphantly. There is ample gunplay, brawling, some tense scenes with a knife, and even a good old-fashioned car chase. In fact there’s a particular sequence in which Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) fights two men in the hallway of a hotel as the orientation rotates and changes, which is a scene nothing short of breathtaking. Buildings crumble, gravity and time are manipulated, paradoxes are formed, and all of this happens to the beats of some truly stellar camerawork. Wally Pfister, a stalwart collaborator with Nolan since Memento, knows how to frame some stunning sequences for all their worth, and finally gives Nolan the same action director pedigree as Favreau, Spielberg, or even Cameron. Even the thundering score of Hans Zimmer, perhaps his most iconic work since The Pirates of the Caribbean, keeps driving Inception forward with an intensity that on its own would demand the IMAX experience.
Inception masquerades as a thinking man’s science fiction blockbuster, a film that demands every iota of an audience’s cognitive will to decipher. In actuality, this isn’t quite the case. Whatever cryptic nature exists is a result of Nolan’s peculiar architecture, which is rather appropriate for a movie ostensibly about building dreams. Held against Nolan’s rather sterling filmography, which includes the film school study of Memento and the neo-noir gem that is Following, Inception is certainly a more straightforward affair. Against the adaptation driven summer season where the likes of Transformers, Twilight, and the Marvel comic book flavour of the year clamour for dominance, Inception is intellectually untouchable. In the end, perhaps Inception will end up regarded as a cinematic experiment used to gauge whether or not audiences are willing to invest in more cerebral blockbuster fare. I sincerely hope they are, since I wouldn’t mind seeing similar such dreams in a post-superhero blockbuster landscape.
Glad to see you enjoyed this as much as I did! We just got back from seeing it today. I think I actually agree with you wholeheartedly on this one, believe it or not.
My impression of the supposed intellectual complexity of the film seems to have come largely from what other critics wrote about it beforehand. If you’ll forgive me for indulging in a bit of film snobbery, I think it’s a reflection on just how badly crafted mainstream movies seem to have gotten in recent years. Inception is not as complex as people have made it out to be. It is, however, incredibly well-crafted and engaging. The “rules” of how the dreams work in the movie are solid, and actually make sense. I find the film holds up very well to intellectual scrutiny, despite not actually being that intellectual.
On that note, I wanted to address your two minor quibbles. If the dream itself is actually built by the Architect, then wouldn’t the character’s outfitting and weapons would be part of that construction? If so, obviously they would always have the “dream machine” with them. Furthermore, even if they didn’t have something that they needed because they didn’t think of it, well…it’s a dream. They can just will it into existence, right? Recall the moment during the firefight in the warehouse on the first “level” where Arthur is shooting at some Mind Defense Force goons and Eames, the Forger, tells him he has “no imagination” before pulling out a grenade launcher. I know, I know; that’s a total “Get Out Of Jail Free” card/deus ex machina/magical plot McGuffin/whatever you want to call it, but bear with me for a moment.
If this is the case, then the obvious question would be why don’t they just warp reality to get what they need? Well, because Nolan specifically establishes earlier that you can’t meddle with the dream of the subject too much, or the dream becomes unstable. The subject rejects the dream or the alterations because their mind recognizes that something else is messing with it, i.e. the white blood cell metaphor. It makes sense that you could do this even less with the mind of someone like Fischer because they’ve been specifically trained to defend against this type of intrusion. I actually really like this explanation because it’s basically the mind analog to white blood cells in your body’s immune system. It makes perfect sense for your mind to work the same way, and to be able to train your mind to be more effective at it. So they can get the tools and weapons that they need, but they can’t just snap their fingers and make the whole world change. This is a clever way to make sure we can have that lovely tension without having an obvious easy out that is never used.
As for Cobb’s wife, that’s because of the whole “shared consciousness” thing. While they’re in this shared dream, everybody is basically bringing their own mind into the mix, even though one person (the Subject) is actually “hosting” the dream, for lack of a better word. Remember Cobb’s speech about how an idea is like a virus, and it grows after it’s planted? Cobb’s idea was that he was responsible for the death of his wife, and he has big time guilt over that. This basically grew into a jealous version of his wife in his subconscious that wanted to make sure he stayed there, and tries to sabotage their jobs. The subconscious is basically acting separately. The idea seems to be that Cobb’s (or anyone else’s) emotional baggage comes with them when they enter the dream world, and if it’s heavy enough to make them emotionally unstable, it can cause some serious damage.
That’s basically what I mean by well constructed, as opposed to intellectually complex. It’s popcorn, but it’s delicious, very well made popcorn.
I hope this movie is a success, and early indicators seem to be looking good. I too hope that studios look at this as proof that audiences want a higher standard from their summer blockbuster fare.
I actually arrived at the same explanations and conclusions to my complaints regarding what I said in the review as I was writing it, believe it or not. I just left it in so that I could convey the fact that the film was indeed thought provoking to a certain extent, and also so that I could give the review a bit more substance and meat.
Anyway, I think the reason that certain details were temporarily lost on me is that, aside from Ariadne building and manipulating dreamscapes in her initial training with Cobb, we never see ostensibly deliberate manipulations of Fischer’s dreamscape by the thieves all that often. All that comes to mind at the moment is Arthur’s stairwell paradox during his fight scene, Ariadne’s air vent that crossed the entire snowbound complex, and all that business with Mal.
Perhaps I was too caught up in waiting for the thieves to enter “The Construct” before entering a new dream. So while I wholeheartedly recommend a Christopher Nolan marathon, don’t throw The Matrix into the mix.
As for why the shared consciousness business was also temporarily lost, I think it’s because Fischer’s worlds were so very clearly his own that it felt like the thieves had such little impact and influence over it. Granted, the whole point is subtle manipulation unbeknown to the projections and the architect building the dream to cater exactly to the subject, but I feel that the subtlety was so good that it bordered on being downright convenient.
Really, arguing against the logic of a dream seems like a losing battle, especially when the logic comes off as remarkably solid. Without aiming to excuse myself for glossing over certain details that would’ve solved some plot questions for me, I think that most would agree that Nolan’s dreams come with a considerable number of rules to keep track of. Kudos to him for making dense dream logic largely intelligible and coherent, but there’s still quite a bit to take in when watching the movie.
Yeah, I agree about the intellect of the movie. Yes, it was refreshingly bright, but I was slightly disappointed because I went in thinking it would go to the point of being intellectually challenging or philosophical. It’s still a great movie, and I agree that it’s just being marketed as a “brainy” flick because there’s so much stupid crap out lately.
I feel like I need to sleep on it before I can say how much I actually liked the movie. How long do you usually wait between waiting movies and writing reviews?
*watching movies
It depends on what I’m doing after the movie, how much there is worth talking about, and generally whether or not I can bothered.
For most of the countdown, I wrote the reviews immediately after watching the movies since all I really had to do was close my media player and open a document. I wrote the review for Inception nine hours after watching it because I had to go to work right afterwards. For Kick-Ass, I wrote the review two days later. For Knight and Day, it was two weeks.
I had a boring day at work which gave me plenty of time to digest Inception. This also gave me ample time to think of snappy lines and thoughts to include in the review, which is something I like to do when I’m walking or taking the TTC home afterwards.
So in a perfect world, I would write the review immediately. In my world, it’s whenever I feel like it/whenever I can get around to it.
Hoo boy. Well for a supposedly not very intellectual movie, I sure find myself thinking about this a lot lately.
I was enjoying reading other interpretations of what happened and listening to people arguing over the (I think) deliberately ambiguous ending. But then I read one theory that seems to hold water, though I need some additional viewings to confirm this for myself.
The theory basically revolves around Cobb’s wedding ring. Apparently, whenever he’s in a dream, he’s wearing the ring. When it’s reality, he’s not. The theory goes that in reality, he accepted her death and took off the ring. But in his mind, he clung to her and thus still wears the ring. The one exception to this is the flashback sequence where Mal kills herself, because she’s still alive at that point, so he would be wearing the ring.
Now, when he wakes up on the plane, everyone is surprised and smiling and it seems dreamlike, but he wakes up in the exact spot where he went to sleep. If he had woken up already at home, or on his way home, then it would be a red flag. You never remember exactly how you go there in a dream (in the movie anyway), but when they wake up, everybody knows exactly how they got there. That’s why they’re all smiling at each other; because the mission was a success. In addition, you can see no ring on his hand when he’s going through customs giving the guard his passport.
The other part is his totem, the top. He’s wearing his wedding ring in every scene where it spins endlessly. Whenever it falls over, it first wobbles a little, then goes into a hard wobble before finally toppling over completely. Whenever it spins endlessly, it just continues to spin. Right before the camera cuts in the final scene, it goes into a hard wobble as if it’s going to fall over, not correct itself.
However, the fact that Nolan cuts away is still significant. By doing so, he plants a small seed of doubt in your mind. That seed grows into either doubt about the ending, or reaffirmation that it is reality, depending on the person. The movie essentially performs inception on the audience.
Like I said, I need to see this film again and watch for these things, but so far this seems to be the most credible theory I’ve heard so far. And it appears that this film is slightly deeper than I thought it was.
THIS is the reason people decide to disable their comments.