BEFORE: OK, so I've REALLY been looking forward to this one - I've been building up to it all week long. And linking's a snap since Dakota Fanning from "Push" was also in "Hide and Seek" with Robert De Niro, who was in "This Boy's Life" with Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "The Aviator").
THE PLOT: In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job to date.
AFTER: This film blew me away, visually and mentally, but also sort of burned me out. This film is (overly?) long at about two and a half hours, and with all the technical details about the dreamspace, that adds up to a LOT to take in. Plus I had to go into the city and work for a few hours today, typing up/editing a book, which is mentally draining also - so I'd like to write just a little bit, not the huge essay that this film probably deserves.
Like "Push", which featured different classes of people with psychic powers (Sniffs, bleeders, pushers), this film shows a team of specialists, each with a different job, who work together to enter a shared dream-space (though it apparently is just one person's dream, one of many contradictions in the film). To do this (nearly?) impossible task, the team needs to have an architect, a chemist, a forger, etc. - and I assume each person plays a vital role, even if I didn't quite understand what each one is.
The goal here is to have the team enter a businessman's dream, and through the power of suggestion and some role-playing, plant an idea which he will then believe to be his own. And this idea would have multi-million dollar consequences for his competitor (seen as the victim of the film's opening gambit, but he turns around and hires the team for his own job).
DiCaprio selects the team and leads the team, but he's a man with secrets in his past, and a man who's spent too much time living in the dream-world himself - time passes more quickly in the dreamworld, apparently - to the point where the team might actually be in danger from the characters in his subconscious spilling over into their mark's dreams.
To me, dreams are a place where just about anything can happen, and I would have imagined that the film would take advantage of this fact, and it does - but it also bogs down the dream-space with a hundred or so "rules" about what can be done and what can't be done, which is maddening since all of this is theoretical or impossible anyway. Why hogtie the fantasy world with a bunch of negativity, man? And why make everything about ten times as complicated as it needs to be?
Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of cool stuff here, not only the visual effects but the concepts, too. A dream within a dream? How about a dream within a dream within a dream? Who knew that when you're in a dream you could go to sleep and end up in another person's dream? We all "know" that if you die in your dream, you wake up (wait, or is it that you die?) but what happens if you die in your dream within another dream? That's just the START of where this film starts to mess with your head.
Audiences probably would have been satisfied with seeing the team go to one dreamworld, but no, the film takes you three levels down. And time moves differently the further in they go. And then there's limbo, don't get me started about limbo...
I'm a huge fan of director Christopher Nolan's other work, not just the Batman films, but also "Memento" and "The Prestige" - so even though there were things about this film that confused me, I should probably not start to criticize until I've seen it at least one more time.
I will say that I don't recommend dozing off during this one - not only will you wake up and not know what the frick is going on, there's the chance that you'll get sucked into someone else's dream.
After all, what is a movie, but a shared dream? It takes a team of specialized people to put it together, a director, producer, art director, cameraman, etc. and of course you can have a movie-within-a-movie - so maybe this film is all some kind of allegory for the filmmaking process?
Also starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in "A River Runs Through It"), Ellen Page (last seen way back in "Juno"), Ken Watanabe (last seen in "The Last Samurai"), Tom Hardy (last seen in "Black Hawk Down"), Cillian Murphy (last seen in "The Dark Knight"), Marion Cotillard (last seen in "Public Enemies"), Tom Berenger (last seen in "Born on the Fourth of July"), Pete Postelthwaite (last seen in "Clash of the Titans"), Michael Caine (last seen in "The Cider House Rules"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "The Darwin Awards").
RATING: 7 out of 10 blueprints
EDIT: I came to work Monday and mentioned I had finally seen this film, and learned that the office (staffed by film people) was split down the middle on "Inception". Some regarded it as a stunning, complex masterpiece, and some as a self-indulgent, confusing nightmare. So which is it? Maybe it's both? I can sort of make a case for either argument...
(rubs hands together eagerly)
ReplyDelete"Inception" has a basic handicap: it's a classic heist movie (master criminal assembles his skeptical team for one last massive score involving a target that everybody thinks is impossible) but the elements around that story are so unique that the whole audience has to attend an hour of boot camp before they're prepared to see the actual movie.
If you can't forgive that, you won't like "Inception." That's a valid criticism. "Casablanca" could have started with 20 minutes of information about how Vichy France operated and laying out all of the "rules" for getting someone safely out of the country. They didn't. They trimmed and streamlined the story to reduce all of that to the barest minimum.
I saw "Inception" in a theater and have never seen it on home video. That might be an important thing. You have a level of focus in a theater that you can never have in your house, where you can look at the walls and you might dip into email for just a second. I feel like I earned my Inception Learner's Permit and was duly licensed to watch the real part of the show. I didn't feel like I was lost.
The rules are, in fact, integral to the story. You have to throw challenges in front of characters. If not, why not write "Break Up Your Father's Multinational Corporation" on a pill, make the guy swallow it, and declare him Incepted?
I'm in the "this is a great movie" camp. All great movies are more about character than events. The big theme of this one is the corrosive power of regret and remorse, and the need for a personal sense of redemption.
I was actually quite touched by the gravity of Robert's story arc. In a lesser movie, the process that the son of the industrialist goes through would have been a throwaway, in service of Cobb's story. But no, Robert gets a lovely second little movie of his own, and a beautiful moment of closure with his father. It's only in dreams, but dreams can linger.
On and on and on. Huge applause for the ending. I can accept that Nolan left it up to the audience to decide what had really happened to Cobb. If he'd made the top fall over, I would have been thrilled but if he'd kept it rock-steady for an unnatural amount of time I would have left that theater angry.