WARNING: spoilers below, free flowing from my subconscious
It’s almost impossible for me not to like Inception, the sixth full-length feature film from director Christopher Nolan. His tastes for complex narratives and imaginative scenarios are a natural draw, and the the premise of Inception is in many ways so much grander than all his previous works.
As audiences have learnt from the trailers and posters, Inception is about the manipulation of dreams. The central character, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), specializes in stealing secrets from targets (“the mark”) through their dreams. For reasons later revealed, he cannot return to his family in the States because of criminal charges; his latest client, Saito (Ken Watanabe) promises to resolve this predicament if Cobb completes the mission – the caveat being, this mission is not about extraction (stealing secrets), but inception: planting an idea in the mark’s mind.
The film spends the first hour or so going through its complex rules of the game, as Cobb assembles an ensemble cast to support him: Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the architect, the person responsible for crafting the virtual world that the team and the mark will dream into; Eames (Tom Hardy) is the forger, and specializes in impersonating others to manipulate the mark; Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is the chemist, the person providing the drugs that allow the team to build multiple layers of dreams (dreams within dreams). And of course, there’s the dependable Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is the point man, always right by Cobb’s side. The mark is Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the inheritor of a vast energy empire. Saito’s idea is to let Fischer willingly dismantle his father’s empire, hence the inception.
What really complicates things is the ever-presence of Cobb’s wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), in the dreams. The alternative narrative is therefore Cobb’s complex past, how his wife died, and why she is living in his subconscious. Mal threatens to sabotage Cobb’s plans, which as viewers can guess leads to an eventual confrontation during the film’s climactical moments.
Much like its layers of dreams, Inception shines on multiple layers. At the very foundation, the film’s imaginative premise (dreams can be shared, and therefore manipulated; numerous laws govern the dream world, e.g. what happens when you die, or how you can wake up, and how perception of time changes) opens up the space for wildly creative scenarios – the most typical example of this is the triple narratives that develop in parallel during the “dream within a dream within a dream” act. The montage jumps freely from one dream layer to another, while at the same time pumping up the intensity of the action, which forces the viewer to scramble to keep up with the pace.
At the next layer, the film’s semi-open ending leaves multiple interpretations available. It’s early days yet, but I have already formed three or four distinctively different versions of “what really happened”, thanks to some lively discussion on IMDB and elsewhere. I’m quite sure that in the near future movie fans will be intensely debating Inception in a manner similar to the discussions around The Matrix (how many Matrix solutions were there, back in the day?). Based on what the viewer judged to be “dream” and “reality”, it is very possible to build elaborate and contrary explanations to the plot. Without seeing the film a second time, I have to say that many of the theories currently floated seem plausible.
At its most meta layer, Inception is brilliant in its exploration of consciousness and perception of reality. Just as The Matrix did over a decade ago, Inception challenges viewers to ponder on their perception of reality. Who is to say we are not living in an elaborate virtual world, whereas our physical beings are occupying a completely different world (or in the case of The Matrix, being used as batteries for the computer)? In Inception, the characters had personalized “totems” that helped them distinguish dream from reality – a small personal item that only the person knows about and carries around at all times, so that it is difficult to be manipulated and can serve as a “reality check” in the literal sense. But as the viewers find out during the open ending, these totems can be deceptive. Inception‘s discussion of the blurry line between dream and reality echoes some of the most basic metaphysical questions that mankind has pondered since time inmemorial – “what is being”? Does the world exist independent of the mind, or dependent on the mind?
As you can probably see, I’m clearly in love with this film. Perhaps Inception‘s greatest strength is its accessibility. It can be enjoyed as a mind-bending action thriller, where you take most of what was said by the characters as true, and perhaps just ponder a little bit on the ending. Or, you can dive in at the deep end and explore the endless possibilities of what it “really meant” – most of which I’m sure goes beyond Christopher Nolan’s original thinking, but the fact that it is open to interpretation is exactly the beauty of the construction. A film that will develop a rabid cult following and will be talked about for many years to come.
10/10
Recent Comments