Inception Review

I’ve always had huge plans for this blog, and one of those plans was to eventually escape the relative mediocrity of constant posts about music and eventually move to other forms of media, including film, television, literature and maybe even video games, if there’s one I really want to write about.  Last night, I saw Christopher Nolan’s latest movie,  Inception, at the midnight showing near my home.  While on the way to the theater, I thought to myself, “If this movie is as good as I think and hope it will be, I’ll write a review about it for my blog.”  And thus, here we are.  (If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t worry – this review contains no spoilers.  If you want to know nothing at all, however, there are some minor details about the movies premise that you should know if you saw the trailer or read an article or review about the movie.  Also, if you’re going to comment on this post with spoilers, please say so at the top of your comment).

Inception, at first glance, is a big budget action film.  There’s gunfire, explosions, special effects, and fight scenes – which, set in the infinite world of the dream (accessed by some sort of machine who’s origins are unknown), are so mind-bendingly unique compared to other films that looking away for a second and looking back would probably be disorienting.  The computer-generated effects, according to Nolan, were kept to a minimum.  When they were used, however, they looked fantastic.  At one point, Ariadne, played by Ellen Page, causes the dreamscape to fold in on top of itself.  In other movies, this might end up looking contrived or a little too unrealistic, but Nolan and his crew (with the help of a rather large budget) did a great job making the effects look spot on.

The film wouldn’t be the amazing work of art it is without it’s emotional core.  The explosions and excitement are fine, but paired up with yet another fantastic performance by Leonardo DiCaprio, the movie is catapulted to another level of greatness.  DiCaprio plays the movie’s tortured protagonist, Dom Cobb, who is an “extractor” – he goes into people’s dreams and finds their secrets to use against them.  He needs to do one more job to go back home and see his children.  However, Cobb keeps stumbling across his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), in dreams, as a manifestation of his own subconscious.  She generally sabotages his attempts to extract information, making it hard for him to do his job.  Dom and Mal’s relationship is central to the movie’s emotional depth, but it also has bearing on the main plot of the film. (you’ll see when you watch it).

The supporting cast, consisting of Page, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Tom Hardy, among others, are played excellently, although I can’t help thinking that they were a little underdeveloped in Nolan’s screenplay (which was really my only gripe with the film).  Gordon-Levitt, who plays Arthur, “the point man,” is particularly great in his role, and he’s part of quite a few action sequences and moments that had audiences at the midnight showing applauding or laughing.  Ellen Page was surprisingly excellent, at least to me – I had only seen her in Juno before this film (some “movie critic” I am) and was worried about how she would fit in, but she did a fantastic job.  She was the “voice of reason” in the movie (a character like Hurley from Lost) – the character who was as uninformed as the audience was about the entire dream sharing process, and who asks the questions the audience wants answered.  It’s a role that fits her quite well.

In the end, despite all the great action and emotion, what makes Inception so great is that it dares to ask questions and be deeper than just a summer blockbuster.  The film promotes conversation in a way that I haven’t heard walking out of mainstream flick…well, ever.  If you could be constantly inserted into a dreamlike state and remember it clearly, could you tell the difference between dreaming and reality?  Would you really know which was which?  “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”