Let's start this off by saying what Inception is not. It is not an M. Night Shyamalan-style movie with "a twist." If you go in expecting this, and then come out wondering what the big deal was, I think you missed the point -- you are basically told the form of the plot in the first half hour of the movie. Inception is not trying to shock you with the cheap thrill of a twist, it's telling a compelling story with amazing visuals and an intelligent, unique premise, with some awesome action scenes weaved in there to boot. Inception is not going to blow your mind like say, Primer, but you aren't likely to forget it half an hour after you leave the theater either.
The basic plot of the movie is relatively straightforward. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, the leader of a team of "dream thieves" that infiltrate the dreams of targets to steal their innermost secrets from their subconscious -- this is "extraction." A Japanese businessman, played by Ken Watanabe, hires him to crack into the mind of a competitor, played by Cillian Murphy, and plant the idea in his mind to break up his father's company -- this is "inception" and it is supposedly impossible, according to Cobb's right hand man Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The bulk of the movie takes place in dreamspace of one sort or another, where reality is what you make of it. The way this works gives you some amazing visuals (like the city folding in on itself you can see in the trailers), but the way the "outer world" affects the dreamspace is also really well done, translating reality (like getting dunked in a bathtub) into a fantasy (the building you're in getting destroyed in a flood). Most visually inspired scenes are created through this effect; it reminded me a lot of The Matrix in terms of visual spectacle (and considering the premise, perhaps that's not surprising).
In order to plant the idea in the target's mind, without his subconscious rejecting it as someone else's idea, Cobb's team must drill down deep enough to obscure the genesis of the idea. In essence, they must create a triple-layered dream -- a dream within a dream within a dream. This is what creates some of the best visuals of the movie and allows, as my friend Mike at 1000 Monkeys describes, a Return of the Jedi-style intercutting of action scenes, only each scene is on a different level of the dream and therefore slowed down -- dreamtime is a twentieth as fast as real time, and the effect is compounded -- so what takes only ten seconds in the outer world is over three minutes in the next layer, and so on.
Stitched into this fairly straightforward heist plot is a more personal story for Cobb, whose dead wife haunts his dreams and complicates the whole process. Again, if you're looking for a twist here, you are looking in the wrong place -- but the drama of Cobb's struggle with his own demons is compelling, and is tightly interwoven with the rest of the movie.
Inception is a movie that really fires on all cylinders for me. DiCaprio leads an excellent cast of actors, including Nolan veterans Watanabe, Murphy, and Michael Caine, who appears in a small part. It's hard for me to believe I dismissed DiCaprio after he did Titanic; he may be one of the best actors working these days. And if, as rumor has it, Inception was a sort of audition for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be the Riddler in the next Nolanverse Batman movie, he certainly nails it. After seeing him in Brick and (500) Days of Summer I'm hardly surprised, but his Arthur in this movie is a smart, skilled second to Cobb, and his action scenes are great to watch. Ellen Page, who plays the newest member of the team and is sort of DiCaprio's protege, is sort of the audience stand-in, being the person that gets the "rules" of dreaming explained to her, and does a good job of showing the growing awareness of the new experience without being simply Ms. Exposition. Tom Hardy and Dileep Rao, who I don't think I've seen in anything else and round out Cobb's crew, don't get a huge amount to do, but do well with what they get. Even the bit actors in this movie were good -- a very un-Major League Tom Berenger plays Murphy's "uncle" and one of my favorite character actors, Pete Postlethwaite, plays Murphy's dying father.
The writing is smart and never seems to drag, even when the characters need to give the necessary exposition; Mike complains that the dialogue seemed repetitive, and I never really got that sense. The character do remind each other of the urgency of the situation at times, but it didn't seem like it was out of place (and helped to reinforce the urgency of the situation to the audience too, obviously). I thought Nolan did a good job of showing the concepts the characters were talking about through various visual cues, which made it easy to follow what was going on pretty much all the time.
Hans Zimmer's soundtrack also deserves special mention. I've always really liked his soundtracks, even though they aren't as distinctive as say, Vangelis' Blade Runner score; he definitely has a more generic style that isn't likely to blow your mind even if you really like it. However, what he did in Inception is pretty cool, and you can read about it in this article; he's basically taken the main theme from music the "thieves" use to warn each other that they are running out of time and slowed it down to use as the theme for his soundtrack, and it works great. The music really helps to drive the action and keep it flowing during the climax of the movie. You can sample it at this website, if you want to get a taste of it.
Is Inception going to change the way you think about movies and blow your mind? No, it's not. Is it a great movie? Yes, and it's well worth seeing on the big screen for its visuals, unless you happen to have a 60-inch TV to watch it on when it comes out in Blu-Ray. I suspect it will end up being the best movie I see this year; it was definitely better than Iron Man 2, and the only other movie I'm super-psyched about seeing in a theater this year is Tron: Legacy, which, while it looks like it will be a lot of fun, will have a hard time topping this.
The basic plot of the movie is relatively straightforward. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, the leader of a team of "dream thieves" that infiltrate the dreams of targets to steal their innermost secrets from their subconscious -- this is "extraction." A Japanese businessman, played by Ken Watanabe, hires him to crack into the mind of a competitor, played by Cillian Murphy, and plant the idea in his mind to break up his father's company -- this is "inception" and it is supposedly impossible, according to Cobb's right hand man Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The bulk of the movie takes place in dreamspace of one sort or another, where reality is what you make of it. The way this works gives you some amazing visuals (like the city folding in on itself you can see in the trailers), but the way the "outer world" affects the dreamspace is also really well done, translating reality (like getting dunked in a bathtub) into a fantasy (the building you're in getting destroyed in a flood). Most visually inspired scenes are created through this effect; it reminded me a lot of The Matrix in terms of visual spectacle (and considering the premise, perhaps that's not surprising).
In order to plant the idea in the target's mind, without his subconscious rejecting it as someone else's idea, Cobb's team must drill down deep enough to obscure the genesis of the idea. In essence, they must create a triple-layered dream -- a dream within a dream within a dream. This is what creates some of the best visuals of the movie and allows, as my friend Mike at 1000 Monkeys describes, a Return of the Jedi-style intercutting of action scenes, only each scene is on a different level of the dream and therefore slowed down -- dreamtime is a twentieth as fast as real time, and the effect is compounded -- so what takes only ten seconds in the outer world is over three minutes in the next layer, and so on.
Stitched into this fairly straightforward heist plot is a more personal story for Cobb, whose dead wife haunts his dreams and complicates the whole process. Again, if you're looking for a twist here, you are looking in the wrong place -- but the drama of Cobb's struggle with his own demons is compelling, and is tightly interwoven with the rest of the movie.
Inception is a movie that really fires on all cylinders for me. DiCaprio leads an excellent cast of actors, including Nolan veterans Watanabe, Murphy, and Michael Caine, who appears in a small part. It's hard for me to believe I dismissed DiCaprio after he did Titanic; he may be one of the best actors working these days. And if, as rumor has it, Inception was a sort of audition for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be the Riddler in the next Nolanverse Batman movie, he certainly nails it. After seeing him in Brick and (500) Days of Summer I'm hardly surprised, but his Arthur in this movie is a smart, skilled second to Cobb, and his action scenes are great to watch. Ellen Page, who plays the newest member of the team and is sort of DiCaprio's protege, is sort of the audience stand-in, being the person that gets the "rules" of dreaming explained to her, and does a good job of showing the growing awareness of the new experience without being simply Ms. Exposition. Tom Hardy and Dileep Rao, who I don't think I've seen in anything else and round out Cobb's crew, don't get a huge amount to do, but do well with what they get. Even the bit actors in this movie were good -- a very un-Major League Tom Berenger plays Murphy's "uncle" and one of my favorite character actors, Pete Postlethwaite, plays Murphy's dying father.
The writing is smart and never seems to drag, even when the characters need to give the necessary exposition; Mike complains that the dialogue seemed repetitive, and I never really got that sense. The character do remind each other of the urgency of the situation at times, but it didn't seem like it was out of place (and helped to reinforce the urgency of the situation to the audience too, obviously). I thought Nolan did a good job of showing the concepts the characters were talking about through various visual cues, which made it easy to follow what was going on pretty much all the time.
Hans Zimmer's soundtrack also deserves special mention. I've always really liked his soundtracks, even though they aren't as distinctive as say, Vangelis' Blade Runner score; he definitely has a more generic style that isn't likely to blow your mind even if you really like it. However, what he did in Inception is pretty cool, and you can read about it in this article; he's basically taken the main theme from music the "thieves" use to warn each other that they are running out of time and slowed it down to use as the theme for his soundtrack, and it works great. The music really helps to drive the action and keep it flowing during the climax of the movie. You can sample it at this website, if you want to get a taste of it.
Is Inception going to change the way you think about movies and blow your mind? No, it's not. Is it a great movie? Yes, and it's well worth seeing on the big screen for its visuals, unless you happen to have a 60-inch TV to watch it on when it comes out in Blu-Ray. I suspect it will end up being the best movie I see this year; it was definitely better than Iron Man 2, and the only other movie I'm super-psyched about seeing in a theater this year is Tron: Legacy, which, while it looks like it will be a lot of fun, will have a hard time topping this.
Leave a comment