Blogorium Review: Inception

The trick one runs into when reviewing a movie like Christopher Nolan's Inception is how not to spoil the film for people who haven't seen it yet. Trust me when I say it's better not knowing much about Inception heading into the theatre, because even if someone gives you a rough outline of the film, it's still not going to adequately prepare you for the meticulously constructed narrative and its many twists and turns.

So I've decided instead to simply share a few thoughts I had about Inception after watching the film and sampling other reviews online. Personally speaking, I really enjoyed Inception and was quite pleased that despite all appearances, Nolan's screenplay avoids most of the obvious "twists" inherent to every heist / con-artist film.

And make no mistake, that's exactly what Inception is; while it's true that the film plays in the realm of science fiction and skirts around neo-noir frequently, the film is structured around a Michael Mann / David Mamet-esque "one last job" backbone. Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a specialist in breaking into other people's minds and stealing their ideas. When a con involving businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) goes wrong, Cobb is given an offer he can't refuse: do one job for Saito, and his "most wanted" status in the U.S. will be cleared away, allowing him to return to his children.

Nolan wisely places a film that involves dreams within dreams, shifting time continuum's, unreliable subconscious tics, and flexible rules of physics into a basic structure. Even if you aren't following the rules of how someone enters dreams, cons the "mark", or steals information (or plants information), you still have a basic idea of what's at stake. Cobb assembles his team: a forger (Bronson's Tom Hardy), a chemist (Drag Me to Hell's Dileep Rao), an architect (Whip It's Ellen Page), and his right hand man (Brick's Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to help break into Robert Fischer, Jr (Sunshine's Cillian Murphy)'s mind. If you're paying attention, all of the rules are in place to explain what role each person plays and how they fit into the con / heist, but I think what's keeping audiences in seats is that you can follow the story without the tech speak.

In order to preserve as much of the mystery of the film as possible, I'm not going to say anything about Mal (Marion Cotillard). Plenty of reviews will give you a bare bones explanation of who she is and what role in Cobb's life she plays, but the less you know about Mal, the better. I will say there's a sneaky bit of intertextuality on the part of Nolan involving a music cue and La vie en rose, but that's not really a spoiler. It's just sly.

At this point I'm going to deviate away from the film until I know more of you have seen it, because there's no point discussing the beginning and the end (and the ramifications of both on the story) if you haven't seen the film. I will instead focus on a few thoughts that can be shared without blowing any of the major plot points:

- It's very hard to watch Inception and not think of Shutter Island, and not just because of Leonardo DiCaprio. Both films begin with a very similar music cue, have an attachment to water, feature an unreliable protagonist (okay, that might be a spoiler for both films), and toy with the audience's notion of what is a dream and what isn't. That Nolan and Scorsese do so in a way that one film is reminiscent of the other (I dare you to watch the opening of Inception and not think of the first five minutes of Shutter Island) is not a knock on Inception, it is merely a strange synchronicity between two films I greatly enjoyed this year.

- I've been trying hard to find faults or something that doesn't quite sit right about Inception, and because so much of the film works, it's tricky. I don't really want to discuss Mal much, which is the only points of resistance I really came up against, so I'll focus on critiques I found elsewhere...

The bulk of the negative reviews online have to do with the fact that while Inception is about dreams, the film itself is very mechanical and logical, and hence not "dreamlike" enough. To this I must say that the critique is fair: Inception is not reflective of a "dreamlike" state in the way that Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire or Linklater's Waking Life are. That's fair. Characters don't shift in appearance or are magically substituted for another (save for one carefully explained bit of trickery on the part of Hardy's Eames), and for a movie about levels of the subconscious, Inception maintains a logic structure that is inconsistent with dreams.

So yes, to that degree, the film is more of a labyrinth or a puzzle box than a reflection of an illogical dreamworld. For that, I suggest you look elsewhere. What I will say is that Inception is so well constructed as a heist / con movie that the dream infiltration and rules surrounding it are almost incidental. Yes, it will make you debate what was a dream and what wasn't, but you're not going to come away from the dreams thinking about A Nightmare on Elm Street. You will see things in the film that haven't been tried on the scale or scope of other "dream" movies, and despite the fact that I know most of them had to be CG in one way or the other, the Cap'n was successfully tricked into believing what I was seeing.

The mistake is, I think, assuming that this is actually a movie about dreams. Go in expecting that and it's entirely possible to feel cheated, to think that Inception (like Memento) is more about the technique than the story. Yes, that's the "hook" for Inception, the gimmick it rests its hat on, and it allows for some pretty amazing set pieces (the hotel sequence with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur stands out), but in spite of that Inception is a character-based film about doing anything possible to hold on to the past. In that respect, you're going to hear a lot in classrooms about how Inception is neo-noir, and it's not an unfair point to make. The film does have many of the basic tropes: a fear of the future / obsession with the past, a femme-fatale, smoke (though not nearly to the degree of some noirs), and a reliance on water imagery.

That being said, the tropes being used are all taken in different directions at one point or the other, just as the tropes of the con / heist film (and really, if you want modern precursors to Inception, take a look at Heat or Heist) are turned on their ear. I was pleased that certain things I expected to happen didn't involving characters that almost always serve the same purpose, and part of my appreciation for Inception comes from that fact that Christopher Nolan took one of the most reliable types of genre pictures and consistently found ways to keep it interesting and fresh.

I'm looking forward to watching Inception again, as the film really begs for a second or third viewing - not because of any particular twist, but because there are layers to the plot that are only clear once you've seen it play out. Seemingly incidental elements merit closer inspection, and I'm slightly amazed two and a half hours go by so quickly. Inception's box office success this weekend does mean that every now and then the average moviegoer will flock to see something even if they don't follow it completely. That may be the best thing I can say about the film without spoiling anything.