Inception Movie Review

 









Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy
Director: Christopher Nolan


‘Visually stunning Inception trips on its own cleverness, sacrificing character development in the pursuit of ingenuity. One can forgive its hubris and give it credit for being a thinking man's action movie.’








Synopsis: The Big Idea here is dream invasion. Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, specialist-for-hire in the art of “extracting” information from sleeping subjects. He and his crew hook themselves up with wires to the drugged targets and infiltrate their subconscious, as they’re caught doing in the opening bit with a Japanese businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe). Their job is to sneak about inside the palace of your mind like stealthy cat burglars of the id. Dropping us in mid-mission and giving only just enough to go on, it’s a nifty, show-don’t-tell introduction – one of the reasons why the tell-tell-tell policy from here on in feels overly didactic, like a yammering maths lecturer afraid he’s about to lose you.










In fairness, the labyrinths that open up when Cobb and his team attempt “inception” – that’s to say, the implanting of an idea in the mind rather than its theft – do require a hefty ball of twine to navigate. A dream team is assembled: newbie world-designer Ariadne (Ellen Page), identity forger Eames (Tom Hardy, a dry gift here), pharmacist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and Cobb’s regular point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Their target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy, precise and valuable), the son of an ailing energy tycoon (Pete Postlethwaite) whose business empire Saito wants broken up after his death.










Nolan has spun an elegantly cerebral story that is primal, compelling, and as visually disconcerting as it is completely captivating. He is having the time of his life in his own personal playground and, for all its heavy technical and narrative machinery, Inception remains one of his lightest films.




Nolan has a vast budget to play with, and play with it he does, folding Parisian streets back on themselves just because he can. The real novelty of the concept is the layering of dreams within dreams, yielding addictively vertiginous sequences of parallel action. The physics of each level get destabilised by what’s happening above: when Cobb is dunked in a bath to wake him up, a flash-flood hits him in his dream world.








When the movie builds up a head of steam, it’s dazzling and protean, and almost anything seems possible. But Nolan’s skill at basic action choreography hasn’t improved since Batman’s fisticuffs, and his attempts at puncturing an otherwise poker-faced exercise with the odd goofy gag feel forced. Marion Cotillard is scary and beautiful as the bitter shade in Leo’s mental basement, threatening to contort every mission into a Solaris-style marital guilt trip.












The film has a dark, sad emotional puzzle at its core, and the suspense of this held me as much as the planning of the ultimate caper. DiCaprio and Cotillard between them resonable grief.




In all honesty, Marion looked really hot, much unlike any other 34-year old French babe you see walking around huh?
But DiCaprio, in a frazzled and unhelpfully humourless performance, gives the impression he never got the boat off Shutter Island. The concept is cool and all, but think about how dreams really function for a second, and it teeters on the brink of wrongheadedness. Don’t we dream of sex, at all? Why are these mindscapes like sterile set pieces in a middling Bond movie? Inception’s not the deep wow we might have hoped for, just the big one we needed.








It is irritating for an hour, being so gloomily lit that you need fog lights, then it opens up into a marvellously inventive, somewhat silly but enjoyable heist movie, with a good cast doing things I doubt even they could explain.


The performances are excellent, but with this cast, that's not surprising. The lone weak spot seems to be Ellen Page, whose dry-wit delivery is wasted here. Even then, it's not a matter of her turning in a bad performance; it's just one that any actress could have done.







Inception features one of the best fight scenes of all-time. Take a moment to consider that: in the entire history of cinema, of every fight scene that has ever taken place, the one in this movie is among the best. Watching a fight without gravity is incredible. It’s not like in The Matrix where a character can defy gravity if they choose.

The fight scene in Inception has no gravity to defy and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the team’s point man, has to figure out how to achieve his objective while fending off projections. I can only hope that someday in the distant future, when people with free time are on a space station in zero-gravity, they will re-enact this scene. In the meantime, Nolan’s spectacular visual effects will have to suffice.

Nolan has planted the idea that his film is the most brilliant, original and smart film in years, and strangely everyone thinks they realized this on their own.

Enjoy.