Good movies are hard to find these days. This is one of them. Don’t pass this one up! I don’t give glowing reviews to movies lightly, but this one is just good. It has everything – good story, good plot, good cast, great special effects and a great idea. If I had to sum it up in an elevator pitch I would probably describe it as a cross between Dreamscape, Waking Life, and the original Matrix (back before Wachowski brothers decided to squeeze every drop of substance out of it, by making two shallow, soulless sequels after they already said everything meaningful they had to say in the first film) with a pinch of Oceans 11 style ensemble cast teamwork. And it is good!
Go watch this movie now!
But then again, this makes perfect sense. I have yet to see a movie by Christopher Nolan that would disappoint me. The man is an institution!
This might be a minor spoiler, but do you remember our recursive matrix simulation discussion? The one where you enter a matrix like virtual reality simulation, then enter a simulation within that simulation and keep doing it until you lose track of how deep you are? That whole problem we discussed about faulty log out routine? Do you remember that?
Inception is basically that in a movie format, but instead of virtual reality we use dreams. It’s a movie about shared lucid dreaming and it pushes that concept much further than Dreamscape did by allowing for nesting: stuff like dreaming within a dream. It is like Nolan crawled into my brain and cherry picked the stuff that I have been fascinated with over the last few years: the recursive simulation problem, the concept of reality itself, lucid dreaming states, Ellen Page, etc. If you enjoy some of the more contemplative, SF themed musings on this blog, I can almost guarantee you will enjoy this film!
Oh, and if someone tells you the movie is hard to follow, do not listen to them. Unless you have the attention span of a coked up hamster, you will have no problems keeping up. The story is almost perfectly linear and very consistent. It is nowhere near the crazy-awesome backwards storytelling Nolan showed us in Memento. What inception has is vertical depth. At some points in the movie the action is simultaneously taking place in several separate realities: the real world, the original dream, a dream within that dream and the dream within the second dream. This, I guess could be confusing – unless you paid attention when the stuff was explained in which case it is not.
Let me try to summarize the plot in such a way that does not spoil anything. Leonardo DiCaprio leads a small criminal group that specializes in corporate espionage and information theft. They go about their business in a very peculiar way – by entering people’s dreams (using military grade hardware and psychoactive drugs to facilitate the process) and fishing out their deepest secrets from within their subconscious mind. This usually involves group effort in designing highly controlled dream environments, deception and classic con-artist gambits that when combined can prompt the victim to willingly reveal their secrets. Their latest assignment however is much more difficult as it involves planting an idea in the victims mind rather than extracting it. This requires going deep into the victims mind – entering dream, within a dream, within a dream. And then things go horribly wrong in many different and suspenseful and entertaining ways. To say anything more would probably spoil too much.
Inception is in my honest opinion the best movie you will see this summer. It is a movie that is not afraid to do do recursion. It is a movie that is not afraid to ask questions such as “how do you know if you are awake?” and “how do I know if I’m not in someones dream right now?” and then come up with practical solutions that the characters can use to test it. Is it perfect? No, but it is damn near close to it. It does have few plot-hole like moments that made me scratch my head – for example (SPOILER?) why does the Hoth dream level have gravity while the hotel has none? But you know what? I had a blast while watching it and I just don’t feel like dwelling on these little things. This is what happens when a movie is generally good – you tend to ignore the minor flaws. They get drowned out by everything else that’s awesome. On the other hand, if you make a shitty movie the plot holes and inconsistencies become the only things that are notable and worth mentioning about it.
Go see this movie while they are still playing it in theaters. It will be money well spent.
A friend of mine did a humongous write-up detailing the plot and sci-fi elements.
Me, I thought it was a great way to spend a few hours, although not much food for thought was accrued. (It didn’t help that the ending question was predictable half an hour into the movie, as soon as they introduced the totems.)
This was indeed a great movie!
Looking at your old recursive matrix discussion, I find it funny that I made this comment: “With the poor design decisions we currently see everywhere, I’m sure the exit routine would be `kill yourself'”. In Inception, being killed is indeed the `exit routine’ for dreams, which is central to parts of the plotline. Are you sure Nolan doesn’t pick his ideas from your blog? :)
*Spoilers*
It is a great movie. However, to give Nolan something for Inception 2 :): Perhaps it would be interesting to make the lower levels a little more absurd and strange? I think the deeper you go, the more odd subconscious stuff should leak into the dream and make it less predictable and harder to navigate for the intruders. In Inception, all the levels are very concrete and rigid, and the only thing hunting them are guards with guns.
About the gravity thing; could it be as simple as the loss of gravity is just something that Arthur (the guy left on the hotel level) expects to happen, and since he is more or less alone there, it does happen? On the snow level Fischer (the main dreamer) is probably the one directing most of what happens, and he certainly has no expectations of gravity loss.
*Major spoilers*
What I have more trouble with is how they get Fischer out of Limbo. They make it look like falling in Limbo wakes you up to the level where you died, but this fits very badly with how the other ‘kicks’ work.
@ Tino:
(spoiler!)
You have to remember that each “dream layer” is dreamt (?) by a different person – there’s an Illustrated Guide.
And the levels are rigid because they’re all designed by the Architect (Page).
What bothered me is the deal with the projections: aren’t they supposed to be created by that dream’s dreamer, and attack others? That’s what happened when DiCapprio was showing the shared dreams to Page: the projections didn’t attack him, because he was the dreamer.
But then, the projections in dream-1 (Van) shouldn’t attack the Yusuf, nor should they attack Arthur in the Hotel, nor Eames in the snow, because they’re the dreamers in those cases.
————-
I think the movie was most interesting in the whole dreams concept, with the concept of different times, the kicks, etc; in the plot itself, I found Memento to be a better movie, with a less predictable storyline and with a more interesting psychological view.
And Guy Pierce does a better job than DiCaprio, imho.
Tino wrote:
Good point. The other explanation I read somewhere was that the gravity effects are only noticeable in the dream layer currently underneath the current one and they don’t transfer lower. So only the shifts in gravity originating from the current layer will be felt lower. That’s why Arthur can still deliver the “kick”.
IceBrain wrote:
Hmmm… I’m guessing that since the rich guy (what was his name?) was “trained” his subconsciousness was able to inject projections into any dream. I mean, that’s what you would want if you were paying for the training. It would be next to useless if the training only militarized the projections in your own dream, since extraction teams almost always used one of their members as a dreamer, no?
It’s a really great film! I saw Inception this past weekend and I’ve been waiting for you to write this review, since its right up your alley. It was inevitable. I’m actually considering giving the film a second go soon.
Definitely the best film of the year thus far. Just didn’t like being left hanging at the end!
@ Rob:
Really?
I thought that last scene was incredibly well written. Were you not intently focussing on the totem, constantly changing your opinion about what it ought to do while eagerly awaiting the outcome? And when the screen suddenly went blank, were you not glad that they didn’t resort to the “whole world is a dream” cliche, but left it to you?
It was a fine crescendo that…..
I have to admit that I did not read your review before seeing the movie (to avoid any possible spoilers) – just read it now, returning from seeing that masterpiece of a SciFiThriller.
That was a great movie and a nice review here
The Dreamscape similarities are the reason it was on my RedBox list instead of my theater list, well I have to admit that Leo being in it bumped it down a few notches as well. The only time I haven’t wanted to see his character die a horrible death was in Blood Diamond. Reading people’s reviews who seem to have good taste in most of the movies they like I may have to bump it up and see it earlier.
I liked the movie and of course came to see your review later. Nice one! ;) The movie has some resemblance with “The Thirteenth Floor” which also (a little SPOILER) has this recursive concept.
But I agree with IceBrain: The plot itself is predictable and would be otherwise uninteresting if it wasn’t for the whole ‘dream within the dream’ concept. I also agree that DiCaprio does not deliver a good performance here.
I think that Christopher Nolan somehow managed to get a barely passable performance out of DiCrapio. This is honestly the first movie with him that didn’t make me want to punch him in the face (then again I didn’t watch Blood Diamond so maybe he actually got slightly better in the recent years).
Then again its possible that I didn’t find him as grating as usual because the atmosphere and the writing was just top notch in this movie.
Or maybe I was just too distracted by Ellen Page to pay attention to Leo’s acting. ;P
Excellent point, Page certainly distracts us from the performance of DiCaprio.