A "review" of Inception

Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't dream like I would, that much is for sure. I don't dream, but if I did it would probably be dreams of being a celebrity astronaut/racecar driver who sleeps with a rotating pantheon of big-titty supermodels with names like Anika and Svenska who are open to experimenting on a rotating bed made out of money, moonrocks, and racecar trophies. I sure as hell wouldn't be dreaming of talking to Juno outside of a cafe in Paris about mazes. Perhaps Leo doesn't know how to be imaginative like me.

Christopher Nolan knows how to make a good movie, and I found that his latest film Inception is a great example of his talent as an artist. He's made a film that is visually rich, textured, and delivers a complex storyline that never seems to drag or have an unnecessary scene tacked on somewhere.

As far as film goes, there are some movies so complex that they defy conventional logic. The Conversation comes to mind as a good example of a movie that, though suspenseful, becomes enigmatic and plodding by a series of pacing problems and unclear actions by unknown forces. In The Conversation, I suppose that was the point. The protagonist is a supreme surveillance expert beleaguered by other shadowy surveillance experts due to something he eavesdropped. He never fully understands who he has pissed off and thus you, the observer of his story, suffer along with him through his confusion and sense of helplessness.

In contrast, Inception has a sharp plot that tells you everything you need to know beforehand, so there is little chance that the core elements of the story will exclude you from following along. Simply put, Leonardo DiCaprio is a neuro-cybernetic thief who steals data from targets in their dreams for the purposes of corporate espionage. He has the tell-tale Aluminum Movie Briefcase that contains enough wires to hook five or six people up and share a singular dream.

Dream theft is all well and good until a job goes sour and Leo is forced into doing a little reverse theft on a corporate super-magnate played by Cillian "Old Creepy Eyes" Murphy. Leo warns everyone repeatedly that planting ideas instead of stealing them is possible but gravely dangerous. He states that it requires going deep down into a person's subconscious, which means following them around and sharing dreams inside of dreams. Thus the potential for confusion arises and the viewer is saddled with the responsibility of keeping all of these multiple concurrent traumwelten separate. Nolan here correctly assumes that this is an easy way to confuse people, and so takes great pains to make each dream world visually and viscerally distinct.

The rest of the story plays out like a more suspenseful, less kick-to-the-teethy version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dream worlds don't follow strict laws of physics, so as one dream changes, it affects the dreams held within it. Nolan's matroyshka doll of a plot would be a hopeless soup of arbitrary objectives without his crisp delineation of realities keeping things straight. In one dream there's a kidnapping. In another, it's a hotel caper. The third dream apparently takes place on the icy Russian tundra of the first Severnaya Complex level of GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 and more power to he who thought up that one. I fucking loved that sniper rifle when I was a kid.

While all of this surreality unfolds, there is a touching and tense subplot regarding Leo's dead wife that I can only guess was intended to be more M. Night Shyamalan than it turns out to be. Mrs. Leo keeps turning up in his dreams, usually as an antagonist, which no one can get him to open up about until feisty li'l Ellen Page shows up and finds out that he has never gotten over his wife's untimely death. If this sounds like I might be spoiling something for you, you need to go out and watch more movies. Towards the end of the film things have gone haywire again, and I was left wondering why anyone would bother to hire dream thieves to steal company secrets when it looks like it succeeds far less than 30 or 40 percent of the time. In the midst of the chaos, our heroes have determined that to wake up and save the day they must go into another level of dreamtime and confront Leo's dead wife. In a poignant and painful scene, Leo comes to terms with his wife's death and reveals the shocking twist that is so outrageous and original that you will only have figured it out a full thirty to forty minutes prior.

Inception is a solid story that plays both of its plots well and mixes them rather expertly. Though the potential for confusion was high the actual plot-spaghetti was kept to a minimum, and I stress that anyone who can't follow along with this movie should probably be sterilized by the government to protect our gene pool. There are some quality performances by Leo and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the special effects were appropriately surreal yet believable. This is a movie driven by characters trying to meet their conflicting goals, not by explosions. During a summer when Hollywood is cranking out as many 3D films as they possibly can, I appreciate the fact that Inception adheres to a 2D story where the special effects really own their short time upon the screen, convey the weird dreamscapes of the inner labyrinths of the human psyche, and then leave. As cities bend like clay and reality reshapes itself, the CGI that makes this happen delivers real emotional impact.

In a documentary long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, a young and not-quite-insane-yet George Lucas went on the record to state that a special effect that doesn't help express the story was a hollow thing. Decades later, the search for more money has driven him to pack tauntauns and space traffic into every last frame of all his works until every shot is so absolutely cluttered with computer-generated noise that you can almost forget that there is an accomplished actor like Natalie Portman or Samuel L. Jackson hidden in there somewhere stiffly talking about tariffs or blockades or something. Lucas puts special effects in his movies now for the sake of putting special effects in his movies. Nolan has not yet crossed over to the dark side in this regard. His CGI is direct, targeted, and specifically geared to explain something or make you feel a certain way. It accomplishes the contradictory goals of seeming plausible, and at the same time explaining to you the viewer that you are not experiencing a real thing. Even during an exciting car chase, Nolan can take a short break to drive a real freight train down the middle of a busy city street, just long enough to allow him to give a figuratively sly wink and say "Hey, this is all pretty fluid. So stay on your toes."

Some people may have a problem with the ending to Inception, but I honestly wouldn't have enjoyed it as much any other way. Leo handles his wife, the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun gets to do some sweet zero-G kung fu, and Ellen Page doesn't really domineer the screen like she seems to in most of her movies these days. It's a movie that requires some amount of viewer attention in order to stay on top of things, but it avoids the tired trap of circuitous plot advancement or that awful mystery movie trick of not revealing a critical piece of information until the last five minutes of the film. If anything, Inception hits you over the head with a clue-by-four just once too often, double-checking to make sure you are still following along and haven't gotten lost as to what's happening. It nearly gets to the point where I have to question if the producers didn't eventually reject the idea of naming the main character "Deady McWifey" just so you would be certain to know he was married and that now his wife is no longer living.

Given that most Americans mistake the Galapagos Islands as "Hawai'i" on a map these days, I can understand Nolan's directive to overstate the key plot points: dead wife, dreams within dreams. Underline it. I'd have been happy if Inception were a tad bit more obtuse and unapproachable, but I'm also the kind of guy who digs non-chronological storytelling by directors that are insulted by anyone who understands their films after one screening. It doesn't spell out too much too often, even if it does at times include a short summary like at the end of a chapter in a schoolbook. It's a good movie with a flawed and sympathetic antihero, a compelling bank heist dynamic, and it doesn't insult my intelligence. Think The Italian Job meets The Thirteenth Floor.