Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard,
Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Runtime: 150 mins
Genre: Action/Thriller/Drama
Country: USA
In the Hollywood arena of summer blockbusters, Christopher Nolan's Inception sticks out like a sore thumb. No, let me paraphrase that. A formidable, towering monolith amongst clunky, weightless pretenders throwing up whatever cinematic sputum onscreen -
whether it be blowing some shit up, recycling ideas after another, spewing out remakes upon sequels upon formulas upon plot conventions upon infinite boredom, ad infinitum, ad nauseum - all designed to cash in some multi-million mega-bucks revenues in exchange for your brain. For all the mainstream film industry's capabilities, it's a blast of sobering fresh air when a film emerges out of the studio machine, deliberately engineered to engage people's minds and seduce that think-tank organ between your ears that is left vegetated by
a great many dastardly dumb, unimaginative, underwhelming Hollywood mass fodder. Inception, then, is a warm welcome.
To delineate Nolan's "brainbuster" would be a bugger, as it's a film that defies almost any linear categorisation. At its very core, Inception is a psychological heist thriller with a gang of corporate mind invaders, tactically investigating deep into the main target's subconscious. Imagine The Thomas Crown Affair meets Nolan's very own Memento, but on post-Casino Royale steroids. But to reduce Inception as derivative would be foolish, as this is very much Nolan's territory. Exploration of the human mind, the fragility of memory, fears and perception have always occupied Nolan's films: the reverse recollection of Memento, a tale about a copper's short-term memory loss told backwards; the smokes and mirrors of The Prestige, blurring the lines between magic trick and deceit; and the breathtaking scope of his Batman's revision, achieving full-tilt in the superlative The Dark Knight, transcending the superhero genre into a psychological, ontological lockdown between the forces of good and evil. It seems, at the moment, there's barely a Hollywood director working today that could rival the scope of Nolan's mind-bending canon. He creates adult dramas with an action-thriller scale, and forces us to think. And Inception is a testament to that, perhaps his most complex, labyrinthine, brain-frying work yet.
Influenced by much of Stanley Kubrick's scientific, quasi-religious psychobabble, David Lynch's overlapping, dream narrative, and Sigmund Freud's theory on dreams, Inception conceives layers upon layers of dreams, where the protagonists plumb the depths of secrets and motivations. Thwarted, haunted professional dream invader Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio in a thoroughly engaging performance) is assigned to plant an idea, hence the significance of the title "inception", into the subconscious of the heir to a multi-national corporate empire. Nolan cleverly sets up the plot kinetics and rationalities of the film's conceit at the onset, where Cobb goes through a dream-within-a-dream test. What follows is a riveting, albeit exposition-loaded, heist flick, where Cobb gathers a bunch of dream invaders, but where in a common heist thriller a group robs a bank or steals an artefact, this innovatively turns the "heist" around its head, executing "inception" rather than "extraction". No matter how ludicrous that may sounds, Inception works perfectly under its own logic and mindscape.
And when its logic fully grabs hold, it's awe-inspiring. Inception might not be Great Art, but it's one hell of a jaw-dropper. There is a stunningly explained sequence where Cobb shows novice yet brilliant student architect Ariadne, appropriately named after the Greek goddess who guides Theseus out of Minotaur's labyrinth, the Parisian metropolis unfolding on top of itself, defying physics and gravity. Dreams can be controlled, as explained, but it is also a place where anything goes. The film's gnawingly tense third act is perhaps the greatest action sequence you'll ever see this year, oozing with technical authority, which the entire Nolan team has tirelessly edited to tight-wire, cut-throat precision. It elaborately stretches over to four dream layers, as the invaders try to solve Cillian Murphy's Fischer's Daddy issues - Dileep Rao's Yusuf dodging mercenaries in Fischer's militarised subconscious, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur fighting henchmen in zero-gravity corridors, Tom Hardy's Eames attacking an Arctic wasteland - all at the same time, Cobb facing the guilt of his enigmatic dead wife (Marion Cotillard as the emotional fulcrum of the film), who keeps on haunting Cobbs dreams, destroying each one of his scheme like an avenging angel. Cobb's guilt complex are played throughout as memory lapses, like Memento, visions that intermittently punctuates every emotional resonance in the film.
Technicalities aside, the running-time flies through like a zip line. It takes all amounts of imagination to engage audience attention in almost three hours, and Inception achieves this remarkably. And it also takes an actor like Leonardo DiCaprio, underrated and under-appreciated in his last stretch of filmography, to immerse us into this breakneck journey, in a performance so unfussy and persuasive. His flawed, guilt-ridden Cobb is a empathic hero, wrestling with his memory and painful grief, locked up away in a safe only the most valuable assets can uncover. There are nuances in DiCaprio's acting that effortlessly convincing, moments of fleeting pain and tragedy crossing his expressions, suppressed by a man trying to do his job in a dream state where one can get lost in an eternal limbo. As Cobb emerges, he basks in a personal epiphany. Meanwhile, we emerge out of Inception enthralled out of our wits.
A delirious, dazzlingly inventive, multi-layered mind-trip. Inception seems like Christopher Nolan ambitiously reaching for Kubrickian heights of consummate filmmaking and Lynchian labyrinthine "a-dream-wrapped-up-in-a-dream-within-a-dream" storytelling, interweaving the visceral with the cerebral. It is complex but not confusing, intricate but not infuriating, clever but not smug about it. What is more, this is one summer blockbuster that doesn't treat its audience like a horde of brainless zombies, and that is in itself an achievement.
