Geek Life

Just when I thought everyone had forgotten how to make movies, that it was all downhill from here, out comes a miracle of a movie called Inception. Some people call brainless movies “theme park rides”, but it’s been a very long time since I felt so exhilarated coming out of a theater. I felt like I just went for a run while thinking of a great screenplay idea. I couldn’t stand still.

Inception is director Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated follow-up to The Dark Knight. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, the world’s best “Extractor”, someone who breaks into people’s dreams and steals their ideas and their secrets. He is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe), an extremely powerful Japanese businessman, to do the exact opposite. He needs Cobb to break into subconscious of the mark (Cillian Murphy), and leave a new idea behind. This is much, much harder (more than one character insists it is impossible), and is called, you guessed it, “Inception”.

"I haven't felt this way about an action sequence since I saw the first Matrix film."

For most of the opening section of the team, Cobb assembles his team. Ellen Page plays Ariadne, the “Architect”, who designs and manipulates the dreams, always making sure that the subject will never realize they’re dreaming. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, Cobb’s right hand man. Tom Hardy impersonates people the subject knows within the dream. And Dileep Rao (who you may remember from Drag Me to Hell) does the chemical work that enables them to share dreams in the first place. The movie also stars Michael Caine, Tom Berenger, and, most memorably, Marion Cotillard as Cobb’s deceased wife. He can’t quite keep her out of the dreams, where she continuously appears to take vengeance upon him, a physical manifestation of his crushing guilt.

The final, long stretch of the movie is the “heist” itself, in which the crew goes into their mark’s dream, and then another dream within that dream, and then another dream within that… The film is two and a half hours long, and it has more exposition to get through than almost any other movie I can think of. Yet it maintains such a sense of momentum, of building tension, that even the dialogue scenes leave you out of breath. Nolan sets up an extremely complex set of rules in the first part of the film and then spends the rest of the movie deliciously playing with them. This may be the longest movie I’ve ever seen not to have an ounce of fat on it.

No movie with this big a budget has ever given its audience this much credit, either. Action takes place on several different levels of the dream simultaneously, and all the different levels interact with each other and ramp up the tension, leading inexorably to the spectacular climax. For example, we learn that the further you go under, the slower time passes. In the time it takes a van holding the team to flip on one level of the dream, Joseph Gordon Levitt has time for an entire fight in a hotel hallway on a deeper level. To make matters more complicated, as the van flips, gravity changes in the hotel, leading to a spectacular action sequence that takes place as the hallway slowly seems to rotate. I haven’t felt this way about an action sequence, by the way, since I saw the first Matrix film. All of this is explained only once, very quickly, and then you’re expected to figure it out on your own… and yet it all hangs together very well.

The key to this movie, really, is that even the scenes that are simply a couple of characters talking to each other have an strong sense of momentum. Part of the key to this is that, because of the way the story works, character development and action sequences in Inception are the same thing.  How Cobb feels about his wife or the way the subject, Fischer, feels about his father have real, immediate, life or death consequences in the dream world. So whether one character survives their fire-fight on one level may be directly affected by the emotional catharsis of another character on a different level.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page step into the unknown in "Inception".

The film also just looks simply spectacular. Nolan filmed on location with his usual Cinematographer, Wally Pfister, in locations around the world, including the U.S., Paris, Alberta, Japan, and Morocco. The score by Hans Zimmer is a major force in driving the movie forward, ever forward. And while there aren’t a lot of opportunities for showy acting, the cast are all excellent in their roles.

However, I do get this feeling that some people aren’t going to like Inception (and given its level of hype these people will probably ending up hating it). When you get down to it, this is basically an epic-length heist movie, and one in which it’s very easy to get lost, at that. The criticism can also be made that the dreams here don’t necessarily feel like real dreams (though it’s worth pointing out that everyone involved is essentially on drugs for most of the movie). There isn’t much absurdity in these dreams, or sex, for that matter. Nolan set out to make a movie with a very distinct feel and there most likely was not room for too much of the blatantly weird.

The feelings in the theater I attended, though, were not at all negative. There was a palpable exhalation as soon as the credits rolled, and one girl near me exclaimed “Oh my God, Oh my God, OH MY GOD!” If you want movies that are exciting, intellectually stimulating, and character-centric, you will love this movie. I think it’s the best film Christopher Nolan has made to date, combining the best bits of Memento and The Dark Knight with an added mastery of his craft. And I would go so far as to say that if you see one movie this summer, you should see Inception.

Popularity: 66% [?]