Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Marion Cotillard
Ambitious and breathtaking, Inception is a blockbuster film that rewards intellectually whilst delivering action set-pieces that amaze in their scope and execution better than blockbuster films driven by spectacle.
Having initially come to the attention of cinemagoers with independent films such as Following and Memento, Christopher Nolan has since developed a reputation of being a skilled director of big budget blockbusters after being brought on to direct Batman Begins and the even more successful sequel The Dark Knight. Infusing those films with as much that was intellectually stimulating as they were adrenaline stimulating, Nolan has now turned to bringing Inception to the big screen, a film he has been developing since the early days of his directing career that has many of the cerebral aspects of his early works in terms of themes, ideas and execution but also Nolan has managed to secure a larger budget with which to realize them and produce a film that also succeeds as a summer blockbuster. Inception is an engaging and challenging film that also thrills and excites with its spectacle.
Cobb (DiCaprio) is an expert in the field of extraction, a complicated process where he and a team can enter the dreams of an individual and steal secret information by creating an artificial dream environment that convinces the dreamer that it is reality. Cobb is unable to return home to America to be reunited with his children due to a crime which he has been accused of committing. Cobb is approached by a former mark called Saito (Ken Watanabe), who wants to hire Cobb and his team to perform Inception, a difficult and risky process where an idea is planted into someone’s mind rather than taken which, in return, will see Cobb’s charges back home dropped. Cobb himself is unable to create dream worlds anymore due to his wife Mal (Cotillard) appearing in them and sometimes endangering Cobb and his jobs so Cobb recruits a new ‘architect’ named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to create a scenario where Cobb and his team delve deeper than they have before, a dream within a dream within a dream, which is the only way to successfully complete the mission but soon encounter problems, some created by Cobb’s own secrets, that threaten the lives of his team and the success of the mission.
The ambition of Inception is impressive. Nolan has created a film that has many layers of meaning. Inception delves into dreams and human consciousness and explores themes such as whether an emotional catharsis experienced in a dream is as valid as one experienced through actual experience; it explores ideas of life and death and life after death through the mind’s construction of dreams that feel real and where time can stretch out in various depths of dreaming as a metaphor for an afterlife (even the term Limbo is used in an interesting way); the film also explores filmmaking in a manner as Cobb’s team involves an architect, a forger, a financier, a mark and Cobb’s right hand man amongst others which parallel the roles of set designer/cinematographer, actor, studio, audience and produce with Cob as director with those same roles also working within the film’s framework of being a heist film. The plot is based around the conventions of the heist film which, while allowing Nolan to explore many other themes, also allows Nolan to produce a film that involves action and tension and which he can develop set pieces that amaze but with the spectacle working simultaneously as block buster action and also as visualizations of the dream state and of Nolan’s themes seen most effectively when the heist/job reaches it’s later stages and see three simultaneous action sequences occurring on three separate levels of the dream world and over three separate time frames including a zero-gravity fight scene that is one of the most impressive action sequences put on film.
Inception features a strong ensemble cast. Leonardo DiCaprio is impressive in a role where his character is struggling with own history involving dream worlds and secrets involving his wife that threaten to consume him and disturb his own grip on what is real and what is fantasy. It plays nicely against his performance in Scorsese’s Shutter Island where DiCaprio playing a character suffering similar problems but here DiCaprio’s role and performance is filled with more emotion. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets less to work with in terms of character but impresses as an action star getting the film’s key action sequence. Ellen Page is warm and sympathetic as Ariadne who is enamored with the idea of creating dream worlds but is also Cobb’s key sympathizer and conscience. Tom Hardy is charming and funny in the ‘actor’ role while Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Dileep Rao are solid in other supporting roles. Marion Cotillard is suitably threatening despite her appearance and Cillian Murphy delivers an impressive performance as the mark who the team are trying to infuse with a new outlook and experiences an emotional catharsis as a result that is truly believable.
Overall, Inception is an impressive film combining the spectacle of a block buster action film, the thrills of a heist movie yet featuring many layers of meaning over filmmaking, dreams, perceptions of reality and life and death that mean Inception engages on an intellectual level better than most block buster films. Audiences are just as likely to debate the film’s ideas and meaning as they discuss its action sequences. Fantastic.
Rating: 5/5
