Even before the summer started, perhaps no other major Hollywood release created more anticipation than Inception, a potential sci-fi blockbuster about a team of cerebral thieves who break into people’s dreams and steal their deepest, most lucrative secrets. With Leonardo DiCaprio on board and writer and director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) at the helm, this was the sort of movie that box-office dreams are made of.
Chock-full of surreal settings, mind-bending special effects and roller-coaster action, Inception definitely won’t put you to sleep. But like most dreams, you’re likely to forget about it in the morning.
You never know which way is up (or out) in this mega-budget fantasy spectacular, which might even leave Freud scratching his head. Nolan’s fractured plot conjures up dreams within dreams within dreams, giving audiences the slightly nauseous feeling of being trapped inside artist M.C. Escher’s impossible, Mobius-strip staircases. Too glib for his own good, Nolan rarely provides as much as a handrail.
Double-espresso intense, DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, a troubled dream weaver haunted by memories of his wife (Marion Cotillard). A high-tech Ulysses in exile, Cobb just wants to go home and live with his two kids. To do that, like many a Hollywood crook before him, he’ll have to pull one last job. Hired by a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe), Cobb and his impossible-dream team must get into the head of a wealthy heir (Cillian Murphy) and manipulate him into breaking up his father’s energy empire. To fully buy into Cobb’s madcap pseudo-scientific methods, you’ll have to more than suspend disbelief: You’ll have to expel it entirely.
The uncanny affinity between dreams and the cinema seems to be on Nolan’s mind, at least at Inception’s intriguing beginning. (How ironic that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1899, only four years after France’s Lumiere brothers first screened motion pictures.) Like movies, dreams have a logic and reality all their own, create fabulous worlds and can magically whisk the dreamer from place to place and time to time. Desperate to keep his wife’s memory alive, Cobb artificially clings to his own dreams and memories of her. Yet her presence is so strong, at times sinister, she stubbornly pops up at the most inconvenient times while he’s on his illicit dream jobs.
With its slew of exotic locations from Morocco to Tokyo and the trippy special effects, this production must have been a nightmare to shoot. It also must have been Nolan’s dream to whip up a Matrix-like box-office phenomenon. Ever since Memento, his memorable 2000 breakthrough, the British director has all too readily merged into Hollywood’s fast lane, passing up novel, low-budget substance for mass-market pulp. His recent comment to Entertainment Weekly that “it’s not a film that confuses people” still has me scratching my head. In fact, that’s all Inception does, especially when he tacks on a predictable twist that’s far from rousing.
Anyone not daydreaming will notice how often the characters are forced to explain the plot, primarily because the spectacularly overblown action can’t. Cobb and his crew constantly invent and reinvent the rules for their fantastic voyages into the unconscious, tossing out so much arcane jargon (“the kick,” “limbo”) that you’ll feel like you’re in a Scientology psychology class.
So after all the resounding sound and fury that struck me like a James Bond movie on L.S.D., you may be forced to wonder, as one character does, “Whose subconscious are we going into, exactly?” If you think Nolan really has a good answer, well, dream on.
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Read more by Thomas Delapa:
That’s Amore: A Review of I Am Love
Can We Talk? A Review of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Thomas is a film studies instructor and critic currently living in Denver. He has written on film, theater and the arts for such publications as the Chicago Tribune, Westword (Denver), Boulder Weekly and the Pulitzer newspapers (Chicago). He has curated film programs at the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art-Denver, and has taught undergraduate film at the University of Colorado, the University of Denver, Regis University and the Colorado Film School. In 2006, he received first- and second-place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Colorado chapter, for Arts and Entertainment Criticism. He also has been film critic for such NPR affiliates as WBEZ-FM in Chicago and KUVO-FM in Denver. His past work in the film and television field includes positions at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Public Broadcasting Service in New York City and Charles Fries Productions in Los Angeles. His two Master’s degrees are from New York University (Cinema Studies) and the University of Chicago (Social Sciences). You can follow his film blog, Deeper Into Movies, at http://deepintomovies.blogspot.com/ and on Facebook.
Thomas, while I respect your point of view, I think you are selling the audience short. If you browse most user reviews, they do not often identify the movie as confusing. I think this film works because of how many levels it hits. For some it is just a visually stunning film with intense action set pieces. For others it can be far deeper. Viewers do not just question wether the totem will stop spinning, but also if it matters whether it does or not . It is hard to disregard movies that engage viewers on that level.
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Finished viewing the film this afternoon kinda drifted off earlier. I was expecting more because people hyped it up too much.
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Christopher Nolan is the picture who picture.Inception is an excellent.expecting for over. I wish to say you the truth, it was worthy the waiting.recognize
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Christopher Nolan is the theatre director who movie.super.film. I wish to say you the true statement, it was worth the wait., will blow my mind
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I agree with the author that Inception was disappointing. However, I didn’t find the film confusing – actually I kind of wished it were more so. It seemed like a half-hearted attempt to create something really original and stunning. A few other reviewers (including A.O. Scott, I believe) this and I totally agree – considering this movie is about the subconscious it doesn’t take enough chances. It defines its world too much, sets very clear boundaries, and really wasn’t hard to follow at all. I guess the last movie that addressed the subconscious that really impressed me was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mnd. Now, it lacked the special affects and the locations of Inception, but it was the story and the structure that left me contemplating the nature of humanity afterwards. Also, the concept of Inception felt somewhat cheapened by the explosions and chase scenes. For me, this was a blockbuster version of what could have been a really intriguing exploration of psychology. I wish another director would make the meaningful, poetic, and empathetic version.
Also, I don’t think Leo is a very good actor!
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Thanks for the comment, Victoria. I agree that Spotless Mind was riskier, more creative film in similar territory. Despite an intriguing start and some striking visuals, I think Inception self-consciously settles for the summertime spectacular “thrill ride,” stuffed with all those chase scenes you mention. In one of its main conceits, the dreams are pictured as fabulously complete, full-color, 3-D representations of the world, and they announce their ends with the catastrophic toppling of buildings and mountainsides. Not in my dreams, anyway… DiCaprio can be a good actor, for instance The Aviator or even Titanic. But in Inception he’s brittle and overwrought, which also was a big bump in Revolutionary Road.
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We can’t wait to see this flick this weekend. Thanks the info.
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