It’s been a while since we updated here at BurnAllZombies: there have been a variety of reasons for that, but for the purposes of this review, let’s just say we’ve been asleep (we haven’t.)
At this stage, most of you have probably seen Inception and walked away thinking it was the movie of the year. Or maybe you’re just confused and calling the film crap because you didn’t understand it (it’s not; chances are, you just weren’t paying attention.)
There’s been a lot of discussion on other sites about the intention of Inception: what parts of the movie are dreams and what are reality; what the motivation for the various characters are; and just what the hell happens in the final scene. With a labyrinthine plot and some amazing set-pieces that may distract from the story, it’s hard to lose track of what’s going on in the film’s impressive running time. With that in mind (and the fact that the film’s been out for a while) be warned: there are spoilers below. That and, if you’re one of those people who wasn’t paying attention during the film (so thinks it was terrible) you might not like it when you’re proven wrong.
Inception itself is the purpose of the film, as well as the title, being the act of going into a dream and planting an idea: in a world where information can be extracted through dreams for industrial espionage, inception may just be a possibility, and Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), the best extractor in the business, is confident he can do the job. The mission is courtesy of Saito (Ken Watanabe) an industrialist who spies the impending death of Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite) as a chance to expand his own empire, and who promises Cobb a return to his family while clearing his name with the authorities.
Saito proposes that Cobb enter the dreams of Fischer’s son and heir Robert (Cillian Murphy) to plant the idea of selling his father’s company, a plan that involves bringing Robert into deep layers of dreams-within-dreams so the idea appears to be his own. For this, Cobb needs a team: his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger whose skills allow him to assume identities within the dream world; Yusuf (Dileep Rao) a doctor whose patented drugs allow the team access to the deepest dreams. The team is only completed with the recruitment of Ariadne (Ellen Page), a student of Cobb’s own mentor and father-in-law (Michael Caine) and who will be the architect of the dreams.
Despite a large cast more suited to an ensemble piece, characters other than Cobb are near-criminally two-dimensional, each defined more by their purpose than their personalities. That’s not to say that characters are wasted, but few of them have a purpose further than advancing the plot.
This is no bad thing, as it allows Cobb to come to the fore, with DiCaprio giving one of the great performances he’s known for, with the film’s strongest moments coming in the interactions between Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard.) Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy also effortlessly fulfil their roles, small as they may be.
While the characters appear to lack identity, the lines between them blur, which has been one major criticism of the film. But there’s the deal: the characters don’t need to be individuals. They’re part of a team overall, but as Inception progresses and plays more and more with the rules of reality, even the rules of dreaming that are set out early in the film, the characters begin to drift further into the background, even to the point where it feels like they may merely be facets of Cobb’s own personality.
Inception walks a fine line, often in danger of becoming a messy narrative, but it takes every care to explain any doubts as a dream. The film liberally blurs the line between reality and dreams, and the method characters use to tell the difference becomes integral to the plot, but for every part of the film that makes the dreams explicit, there remains an ambiguity to other scenes that leaves the audience in doubt. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s closing scene with a tantalising final shot.
Christopher Nolan’s direction keeps the film’s progress consistent, and although the film gets off to a slow start, it’s a necessary evil to set out the rules of the dream world, and of the film itself (also written by Nolan.) Impressively, for a film with such focus on dreaming and the special effects that are a result of this, Inception rarely delves into CGI effects except where absolutely necessary, and it’s these practical effects that provide some of the film’s greatest scenes (namely in one gravity-defying hallway fight featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)
Inception isn’t a perfect film: what film is? But it may also be the perfect combination between blockbuster and the thinking man’s thriller, between action and drama and between story and visual. And what more can you ask to get from a film.
Inception is in cinemas now.
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