Now, to be clear: Like Nolan’s The Dark Knight and its obviously rushed third act, I have some definite issues with the movie, which I will get into a moment. But, also like TDK, these issues don’t really detract from the actual viewing experience as it unfolds. So, if you want to consider the last few paragraphs here as mainly nitpicking to death an otherwise entertaining and more-clever-than-we-probably-deserve summer movie experience, you’re within your rights. The upshot is: You should definitely see it yourself and come to your own conclusions — Inception is worth the ten bucks and then some.
Inception was originally billed by Nolan back in 2009 as a “contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind,” and, short of The Romantic’s “Talking in Your Sleep,” that’s as simple a way of describing the plot as any. Here, Leonardo Di Caprio’s Dom Cobb is a corporate security specialist who — along with his right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, burnishing his cool) and his “Architect” (Lukas Haas, Team Brick assemble!) — spends his days hacking important intel from people’s heads by manipulating their dreams. This futuristic process is called “Extraction,” and Dom and his team are very, very good at it, but not so good that a job doesn’t get botched now and again…partly because Cobb happens to carry along some unwieldy subconscious baggage, in the form of the often-armed, always-disarming Mal (Marion Cotillard).
On the hook with a very powerful individual (Ken Watanabe) after one of these jobs gone awry, the Dream Team are presented with a counter-offer — one that, if successful, will mean Cobb gets the diplomatic immunity he desperately desires to go home and see his kids again: Plant an idea deep in the head of a corporate rival (Cillian Murphy) and hope it will germinate — a process known as “inception.” Now, this is a more complicated affair than the business-as-usual of extraction, because, apparently, people’s brains reject memes that they perceive as coming from somewhere else. (I take it Nolan has never met a Glenn Beck viewer.)
And so, as per men-on-a-mission movies from The Magnificent 7 to Ocean’s 11, Cobb goes out to recruit a bigger, better team for this heist — including a “forger” (Tom Hardy) to play-act the needed characters in the mark’s brain, a “chemist” (Dileep Rao) to handle the tricky sedation situation, and a more enterprising Architect (Ellen Page) to build a more labyrinthine mousetrap of a dream. But even as this expanded collection of expert psychonauts prepares for the Big Score, there’s still the matter of that alluring French skeleton in Cobb’s psychic closet. And the more the new Architect — Ariadne by name — unearths the secrets within Cobb’s troubled brow, the less she wants to spend any time sharing a dreamscape with these damaged goods…
The fact that Ellen Page’s character is un-self-consciously called Ariadne should give you a sense of how occasionally clunky Inception can be in the early-to-middle-going, when Nolan’s characters are forced to explain the basic rules of the game — extraction, inception, “projections” and “totems” and the like — in expository bursts. Now, on one hand, I’m guessing most fans of science fiction generally have a high tolerance for this sort of please-explain-your-terms speechifying anyway. (Otherwise, so many sci-fi tomes couldn’t start along the lines of: “While flipping idly through the Vidquik transmids from Cathedral space, Dren Garrit settled his XLV-Class Starfarer into a cruising altitude of 26 parsecrons over Koggoth,” etc. etc.)
That being said, some of the ground-rules here do seem rather arbitrary, others seem undeveloped (what was that business with the basement opium den?), and others seem to change as the story progresses. (Most obviously, the midpoint introduction of Limbo. Speaking of which, 1) Why would Murphy’s deepest dream at the end be set in the di Caprio-Cotillard version of Limbo? and 2) how did Leo and Saito get out of their dream at the end without a clap?) But the wall-of-text exposition scenes are one of my smaller quibbles with Inception. After all, the rules are the rules — so long as they’re followed once they’re established, I don’t have too much trouble with this sort of thing. (And as an aside, wasn’t it nice of Martin Scorsese to make the Limbo-set prequel of Inception, earlier this year?)
A bigger problem, to my mind, is that, for a movie about dreams, Inception seems a little too wary not to draw outside the lines. When I brought up the watchmaker metaphor at the beginning, it’s because, at times, this feels like a Bond movie conceived and written by Dr. Manhattan — brilliant in its complexity and ingenuity alright, but maybe just a little too perfect for human purposes, and even a bit…cold. (“I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.“) FWIW, and for whatever reason, I found the (m)Orpheus and Eurydice side of the story much more emotionally resonant than Cobb’s rather hackneyed quest to see his kids’ faces again. (I mean, c’mon now, really?)
What do I mean by “too perfect”? Well, I tend to find my dreams both more innocuous and more flat-out-bizarre than anything going on in Inception. Like, I don’t really tend to dream that I’m an extra in In Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I tend to dream I’m at work in my cubicle, except my old kitchen is attached, and I have on blue facepaint and Berkeley‘s there, only he’s wearing an Abe Lincoln stovepipe hat, and my co-workers are trying to feed him a talking goldfish but I think that’s a bad idea, and Elvis Costello and Ray Davies are in the corner doing a mean cover of “Waterloo Sunset,” except it sounds more like Lady Gaga and it’s way too long for a 3-minute speech anyway… (Freudians and Jungians stand down. I just made this example up, and has nothing to do with my real dreams…as far as you know.)
The point being, dreams, even or especially the throwaway ones, are usually weird. But the Bondian vignettes in Inception just seem like video game levels to me. (Level I: Grand Theft Auto, Level 2: The Matrix, Level 3: Modern Warfare 2.) This relative aridness of Nolan’s Dreaming is compounded by the generic thug baddies all about — I don’t know about you, but I kinda think some of my dream projections would have super-powers or really scary reptile fangs or something — and by the fact that Nolan goes out of his way to explain every single thing about these dreamscapes, to the point where the actual ragged, twisted-pretzel logic of dreaming gets lost in the shuffle.
One of the bravura sequences in the film (also referenced heavily in the trailers and in my anticipatory post, so not a huge spoiler) is @hitRECordjoe‘s Matrix-y solo mission in the gravity-free hotel. And, yet, there’s a very specific story reason why JGL is floating around here. A cool story reason, to be sure, and the way different dreamworlds overlap with snap-into-place logical precision is one of the more satisfying aspects of the film. But, in dreams, does everything really have to have a reason? Shouldn’t he just be able to float, like, when he wants to, or just because he is?
Again, don’t get me wrong — I know much of the back-half of this post is my leveling fanboy complaints towards an intelligent, well-realized, and very fun summer movie. I enjoyed myself quite a bit during Inception, and I’ll very likely see it again. Still, like any number of dreams, both the movie’s logic and its captivating power do look a little more threadbare upon reflection after the fact. Twas a good dream, but a dream nonetheless.
I’d really like to have this one on my list to see — and your review has given me some good ammunition to go forward.
As good a review as you wrote, I am shocked — just shocked! — that you made it all the way through without referencing the 1984 Dennis Quaid flick “Dreamscape” (though you did use the word:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087175/
(indeed, Inception looks… better, to say the least)
Keep up the good work, Kevin!
Heh, I definitely thought about it. (And when I mentioned that my dream-projections might have reptile fangs, I had in mind a vision of the Big Bad from Dreamscape (also the Big Bad from The Warriors.)
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The lack of bizarre didn’t bother me. The extractors were not joining in on someone’s random-neurons-are-firing dream; their goal was to establish a highly-controlled environment with sedation and an architect who literally constructed the levels with the idea (most of the time) that the subject should NOT realize something was off. I liked that Nolan went a truth serum/’we are such stuff as dreams are made on’ route, rather than a Tim Burton-esque dreams are so kooky! acid trip route.
I thought the basement part successfully introduced both the long-acting sedative and the idea that dreamspace is addicting and after a while you can’t dream normally (to foreshadow Leo’s abuse).
The name Ariadne only rankled for a second and then Ellen Page was so meh that it became one of the character’s redeeming qualities. Besides, it’s the future – who knows what hipsters will be naming their kids.
As to why they were in Leo’s limbo, I thought that since there was no specific architect for limbo, that everyone who is connected via the sedation machine (on whatever level) would share their limbo spaces, and Leo was just the only one to have ‘constructed’ anything in his limbo yet. Anyway, Leo assumed that Saito was around and findable in the limbo circa the Mal showdown so they were all in the same place, even though third-level Fischer and Saito had died (and been there for a bit?) and Ariadne and Leo got there by machine. But when first-level dream Leo drowns (?), his second/third/limbo selves get kicked (a la the bathtub submersion out of Saito’s collapsing dream-within-a-dream) and he resets in limbo (instead of waking up because he is still sedated) a whole lot of fourth-level time after first-level Saito died. And Saito has had enough time to make the shared limbo his own.
As to how they both got out of limbo without a kick, they waited out the sedation? Saito shot Leo, which kicked him either to the airplane or ‘heaven’? How exactly are they still in each others’ minds if they wake up disconnected from the machine? But my main confusion after a first viewing is what was the deal with the train? They grew old together in limbo waiting for the sedation to run out for fifty years but young Mal does something of import by killing herself on the train tracks? Despite your qualms, I could’ve used a little more Basil Exposition about the stakes associated with descending levels.
And my nitpick is much more nitpicky than yours: they hear the music down levels in real-time. The 5 seconds of anti-gravity in the first-level affects the second level for twenty minutes but somebody listens to 5 seconds of Piaf on the first level and it remains 5 seconds of Piaf on the second level?
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I quite enjoyed the movie, and generally agree with Teresa about why the non-weirdness of the dreams felt ok. My issue was with 1st-level van accident/2nd-level hotel fight: wouldn’t the rolling of the van have had the same effect on the inner ear as falling, thus providing a pre-mature kick? Given that both the van roll and the hotel fight were unnecessary to their respective parts of the story, it felt pointless. Very cool, but very pointless.
Also, I assumed that Dom and Saito remained stuck in limbo at the end, and that everything that happened after Dom woke up on the plane was something he constructed in limbo. Perhaps I’m a pessimist?
SPOILER thread, at this point.
SPOILERS, I say.
Yes, indeed, SPOILERS.
Kat, I was thinking the same thing. How would falling backwards off the bridge in the van, 1st level, be any different from Tom Hardy knocking JGL out of his chair several times over in the mission-planning montage? That’s a pretty big hole alright.
Regarding the end, I’m usually just as pessimistic. (In fact, that’s the ending I prefer to Minority Report — that the last 20 minutes, with its convenient tie-ups, are all a dream Tom Cruise is having in the Tim Blake Nelson-run prison.) But, the last image notwithstanding, here it seemed to me like they must’ve gotten out — I’m not sure why. (And if he didn’t get out but is happy in the dream, I guess that could be considered a happy ending too, since I’ve tended to figure that Sam Lowry “got away,” in his own way, at the end of Brazil.)
Tess, now that you mention it, I see what you’re saying with the controlled dream-state. Start doing dreamy things (folding Paris, blowing up fruit stands) and the projection natives get restless. (It’s entirely possibly, tho’, that they just don’t much like Ellen Page.)
That still seems to me like a rather arbitrary rule, tho. And weird things happen all the time in dreams that, at the time, seem to make perfect sense, so just having something strange happen wouldn’t necessarily blow the cover, I wouldn’t think — and doesn’t, when trains start going through downtown. (Speaking of which, if the mark has enough psychic power to call in thuggy projection reinforcements, and Leo keeps seeing Mal and the kids — and maybe even the train was his idea — you’d think there’d be more psychic seepage in general from all of the dreamers.)
The young-old thing didn’t bother me, because that’s the sort of dream-logic type of thing that I thought the movie was missing. By the train part, Leo and Mal were both old and young at the same time, a la 2001. Heck, they could’ve been big blue Avatars if they wanted – To my mind, it’d be a bummer to be stuck in limbo for decades with someone who only wants to make their old house — but I guess you could partly ascribe that to Mal willingly forgetting she was dreaming.
As for the Piaf thing…um…well…Mal was Edith Piaf in the meta-movie-dreaming fifth level below the specific limbo of Inception, and in the sixth level below that, Piaf brought to mind for Leo the end of Saving Private Ryan and thus WWII, which kicked him to level 5 and his liberating Auschwitz in Shutter Island…yeah, I got nothing. You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. Non, je ne regrette rien.
And, while we’re bringing out our quibbles, I’ve got another: How/why would Saito — and everyone else, for that matter — know that the mission was a success when they woke up? You could argue that fifty years to think on it, a la Picard in that ST:TNG episode I brought up in my Up review, has led Saito to just forget about it and do the right thing anyway. But Saito “died” and went to limbo before Fischer had his “Daddy kept my pinwheel!” good cry — he has no idea how things played out at Ice Station Zebra.
And, for that matter, the team has no assurances that Fischer will now act on his random dream and break up the company. He could be just like, “Hmmm, gotta lay off the airport food before these 10 hour flights.” I mean, how many random dream epiphanies do you act on in a given month? It would seem to me like the Dream Team rolled out the “Mission Accomplished” banner way too early.
Um, yeah, SPOILERS.
“But, the last image notwithstanding, here it seemed to me like they must’ve gotten out — I’m not sure why.” Thinking about it later, after I posted my comment, I realized that this is part of the reason I think they didn’t make it out of limbo. Remember when DOM told Ariadne that one way to know you are in a dream is to think about how you got there — if you can’t remember how you got to where you are, it’s probably a dream. So how did Dom and Saito get out of limbo and wake up on the airplane? We don’t know — and more importantly, I think they probably don’t know, which supports the idea that they are still in limbo.
I really liked this movie. The fact that I’m still thinking about it days later and felt compelled to come back here and continue this conversation is amazing — I haven’t been this interested in a movie for quite some time.
In terms of other good links, Kat, I found these interesting: Cinematical’s six interpretations and five plotholes, and the Vulture interview with Dileep Rao.