The most difficult part of reviewing a film, particularly one of this nature, is expressing your opinions and providing sufficient detail, without exposing the complex underbelly of the narrative; it’s twists and turns. This becomes significantly difficult with this film, so forgive me if the review seems vague, as divulging more than a faint taste of the narrative will undermine this fabulously crafted film.
Let’s for a minute go very deeply down the rabbit hole of dreams. We all have them (well I speak for the majority); but we don’t all talk about our dreams, especially to a stranger. Think now about another universal experience but one which we all talk about a lot; the weather. Obviously dreams are very personal, whether you believe they are an expression of repressed desires or just random firings of our neurons and memories. Either way you wouldn’t want just anyone seeing your dreams, your fears, desires and importantly your secrets.
Inception takes us to a world where your dreams in sleep are not necessarily your own. Through a process that Nolan has called ‘extraction’ your dreams can be hijacked by those seeking to learn your secrets. Leo’s character in the movie, Cob, is a professional extractor, but now he is being offered a proposition that he can’t refuse. A prospective employer wants Cob to plant an idea in someone’s dream. Now this process, called inception, is a lot more complicated than uncovering someone’s secrets. And as we follow Leo’s character on his mission we get dragged deeper into an unusual and perverse world of the dream and begin to question the fragile divide between our perception of reality and the dream.
Firstly I would love to hear Freud’s take on this film. It is certainly a movie you will want to see with a good friend or partner so you can spend the remaining hours of the evening after the credits have rolled discussing the film. While Chuang is having difficulties figuring out if he is a butterfly dreaming he’s a man, or really the man, I wonder how he would cope with, ‘is the man in fact dreaming he is a butterfly, in which dream the butterfly is dreaming it is a man, who’s dreaming they’re a butterfly’ . . . and on it goes.
This film was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the master behind The Dark Night. Inception is somewhat of a magnum opus for Nolan, with all characters skillfully designed. Leonardo Dicaprio delivers a believable performance, as can be expected from previous performances in Shutter Island and Blood Diamond; and Marion Cotillard is chilling as the enigmatic Mal.
The CGI in this movie is tastefully restrained (I can imagine how easy it would be to over-do the computer graphics when designing a world where anything is possible). But the landscapes are still rich and imaginative, and justify spending the extra money to see it at the cinema.
I’ve had comments from some people who felt that the action elements of this film were a bit superfluous. I would normally be in agreement with a statement such as this; I usually am only thankful for loud action scenes in a movie when I want to open a chocolate packet without the crackling emanating throughout the cinema. Indeed they may not have all been entirely necessary to the story line, but essential to the climax of the story. Without the action pushing up the heart beat I feel this movie would become too much of a think piece without having the emotional impact that it had.
I loved this movie; I loved the way it made me think, incited discussion and opened my mind to new concepts. I give it 4.5 out of 5. It loses a half mark for a few small incongruences in the story, and the lengthy action scenes.
Wendy
