Inception - Review

Inception  - ****

Christopher Nolan's latest film comes on the heels of his--nay, one of cinema's biggest--movies. Namely, The Dark Knight, where he shaped a tale of human mind coping with various maze-like twists and turns as we delved deeper and deeper into the psyches of the movie's irresistable force (the Joker's chaos) and the movie's immovable object (Batman's justice). This time, Inception puts us literally into the maze of the mind.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the world's best extractor: someone who can enter a mark's dream reality to expose hidden secrets, both literal and metaphorical. After proving his skill to Saito, a wealthy Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe), Cobb assembles his team, including his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), forger Eames (Tom Hardy), chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao), and architect Ariadne (Ellen Page). But this job goes beyond what they can normally do. Not extraction of information, but inception. That is, the implanting of an idea in someone's head in such a way that they think that they thought of it. Think about it: how many ideas have started with the phrase "It came to me in a dream?"

Ariadne, the architect, is an especially important character. She works as the audience's guide throughout the world of Inception: being shown what's possible, how dreams work, and even being shown that a dream's reality is not limited by physics, but by imagination and feeling. The very word "paradox" comes to mind (like the Penrose stairs).

Inception creates a complex web (I'm getting tired of it being referred to as a maze, even though it really is one), but unlike most movies centred around the idea of dreaming and false reality, never loses sight of the whole web. We are never lost in the world of the dream, even though we know there are levels and layers of it all. In fact, the movie ironically is paradoxically complex in its simplicity.

Part of the plot is also the death of Cobb's wife, Mal (Marion Cotilliard). To call her part of a sub-plot would be short-sighted, considering she becomes a very intricate and important piece of the puzzle. While that sounds like a spoiler, I can assure you that (to use another maze metaphor) even if you can see where the movie begins and where the movie ends, navigating the web is the important part.

If I have one complaint about the movie, it's that it felt a little long. There are action scenes that I did get engrossed in, but there's only so much that you can do when you realize that the attackers are nothing more than the brain's version of an immune system fighting off an invading virus. Still, the action isn't hard to follow, and Nolan's style of what I like to call "not stopping to breathe" editing is not distracting (not that it ever really is).

Nonetheless, Inception gives us just enough to chew on at the end. It doesn't feel heavy-handed like other movies do when they make you question "Oh, was that a dream? Well, what about that?" but gives us just enough to wonder. There are a lot of subtle interactions that I'm sure will give me more on a second viewing.