3 ½ stars (out of four)
If you had something to hide – a secret, personal demons – to what length would you go to protect it? In Inception, the new mind-bending thriller from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, there’s a guy who keeps a vault inside an arctic fortress protected by soldiers armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. And those are just for his daddy issues.Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor.” He has the ability to enter people’s minds through their dreams and once inside, steal whatever secrets they may be hiding. For each theft, an “architect” develops a blueprint dream world, one that the dreamer fills in with personal details and populates with projections of people from his own memory. Much like a dream, not until waking up does the person realize it’s all an illusion, if he realizes at all. Whether Cobb is the developer of the technique or simply an independent contractor isn’t entirely clear in the film, but we know he’s the best at what he does.
A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a special job. He wants to convince a competitor’s son (Cillian Murphy) to make some ill-advised business decisions in the wake of his father’s death. In order to do this, Saito enlists Cobb and his men on an “inception” job, which you may have guessed from the change in prefix is the opposite of extraction. Rather than stealing something, he wants Cobb to plant an idea inside the young entrepreneur’s head and convince him that that idea is his own. To perform inception without the person realizing is a task many say is impossible, but Cobb takes on the job regardless because, well, he’s the best.
Filling out the rest of the team are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand man, Ellen Page as a promising young student who becomes the team’s new architect, and Tom Hardy as the brawns with brains of the operation. Michael Caine shows up too for a cameo as Cobb’s father, but this isn’t an actor’s movie. Everyone is fine for his or her part though, particularly DiCaprio who has a way of bringing emotional credibility to roles you wouldn’t think needed it.
The inception job proves to be rather complicated; there’s a dream within a dream within a dream and there’s more after that but what would be the point of explaining it all here? The team also runs into trouble when they find that their victim’s mind has been trained for this very moment. Apparently it’s possible to turn your subconscious into a sort of cerebral militia.
This is a film that demands a fair amount of mental energy if you want to keep everything straight but Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film in a digestible way, keeping its mysteries intriguing rather than frustrating. Late in the movie, when he cuts between three layers of consciousness within more than one person’s mind, we wonder how anyone could have thought The Matrix was difficult to follow. And yet we’re always entertained. There are the occasional lines of bland expository dialogue, but they’re necessary to clarify the complex plot.
Though the premise is high science fiction, the film is essentially a heist movie where the endgame is leaving something behind rather than burglary. Nolan understands this and even if you don’t follow every bit of scientific jargon, he gives us plenty of exciting sequences and moments of CGI wonder.
The film is also more thoughtful than most summer sci-fi or action flicks, meditating on the human consequences of experimenting with the dream world. These people spend as much time in dreams as they do the real world and they’re constantly suspicious that their mind is deceiving them, spinning tops and rolling loaded die to ensure that gravity is functioning as it should. The emotional side of the equation is also treated when haunting memories of Cobb’s wife jeopardize the mission. The film explores in some surprising ways how the mind handles feelings of guilt and denial.
Thoughtful and smart as it may be, Inception, like Nolan’s Batman films, is still a summer blockbuster. Just when we start wondering how the subconscious projections of a man who has probably never held a gun are able to fire submachine guns with impressive accuracy, something cool happens to distract us.
The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving you wanting to see the film again, but even without that there is enough here to warrant a second viewing. Christopher Nolan is the rare big-budget auteur that consistently delivers, reminding us that Hollywood hasn’t run out of original ideas. It just needs a few more people like Nolan to sneak in and plant those ideas.
- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/10
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