Inception (Saturday, Jul 17, 2010) (77)

Inception is a complicated, but beautifully presented blockbuster that is a lot of fun to watch, but is a bit too clever and a bit too neat and tidy in the end. What we get is a very interesting puzzle-world where we follow three coincidental stories involving a group of people as they move between different layers of consciousness and dreams.

Dom Cobb (Leo Dicaprio) does what is called "extraction," where he is paid to go into people's dreams and steal things from deep inside their subconscious. He works with a team of people including an "architect" and a fixer. The architect designs the world that this "group dream" takes place in - the spaces and buildings of the world in the dream, so the extractor can interact with the subject in a more predictable dream space. The fixer is there to assist the extractor in anything he needs done inside the dream.

The dreamer subject would be unaware the extraction is occurring, but just think they're in a normal dream of their own. In order to go into the dream world, all the team members have to be sleeping and dreaming themselves - but, of course, this shared dream state is really their office... and it can get rather hairy.

As the extraction goes along, the subject gains more and more sense that the dream is not really their own. Their subconscious begins to put up boundaries so at some point all the people in the dream begin looking at the extractor and his team or actually fighting him (especially if that person has had training to guard against extraction - which rich and important people do). Ultimately the world of the dream, the world the architect has built, will begin to crumble, killing the people in the dream and waking them up (if you die in a dream, you wake up).

On top of this, sometimes the extraction requires going into a dream inside the dream, a meta-dream, for secrets that are hidden even deeper in one's brain. As the team goes to the second level the timing of the world slows down, so what is a minute in the real world, becomes five minutes in the first level of the dream, which becomes 25 minutes in the second level of the dream. The deeper dream level, the more unstable the architecture of that world is and more violent the people in the dream world become.

As the film opens, Cobb is working on an extraction from Saito (Ken Watanabe), a rich Japanese industrialist. On his team is his right-hand man and primary fixer, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Saito is testing their abilities and trying to find their weaknesses. It turns out he has a job for Cobb and his crew. He wants to make a business rival sell him the competing company. To do this, Cobb and his team must do the opposite of what they normally do. Rather than extracting an idea, they have to plant one - a process called inception.

Apparently this is something that extractors have worked but never achieved. It's the most powerful way of harnessing the power of dream control, but because of human psychology, it is very hard to do. Cobb and his team hire a new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page) who is a gifted American student in Paris. They hire a "forger," Eames (Tom Hardy), whose job it is to forge documents in the real world, but also create fake devices in deeper dream worlds. They also hire a chemist who can give them a strong tranquilizer so they can sleep deep enough to get down three levels of dreams (an extremely unstable level of the psyche), Yusuf (Dileep Rao).

Everything goes swimmingly until Cobb's now-deceased wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) haunts his subconscious and corrupts the dreams that he and the team share with the subject. As he tries to plant the idea of selling his company in the subconscious of billionaire Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), he and his team have to fight Fischer's own defenses as well as the roadblocks Cobb and Mal put in the way. One unlucky twist is that if you die in a dream while under significant sedation, rather than simply waking up you drop into a deep world of "limbo" where you can live for decades with no hope of returning.

This is clearly a complex world filled with a long list of rules and contingencies to those guidelines. Every time you think you have figured out what is going on, there is another bump that re-confuses you. This method of storytelling also feels like a bit of a gimmick - that you're never really comfortable and writer-director Christopher Nolan always has three thoughts ahead of you. It's beautiful in the way a finely woven tapestry is, but it's a bit overdone. I think we would have been fine with a bit of a less baroque narrative. I think much of the detail and embellishment is showy and beside the main point of the story. (I fully realize this is a stupid argument on my part - that the story is complex is what it is... but it felt a bit like gilding the lily...)

Ever since I saw this movie, I have been trying to figure out if it's a really slick and smart movie or if it's just a gimmicky puzzle where once you figure it out, the fun is lost and it becomes pedestrian. It is a lot of fun and seems "intellectual", but I don't know how worthwhile it is. I tend to think it's more of a game that becomes humdrum the more you think about it. I don't think Nolan is really "saying" anything. I think it might just be fun and it's my mistake for making more of it than that.

The film is really great on a technical level. The look of the work is very smart, sexy and refined. Nolan works well with frequent collaborator, cinematographer Wally Pfister. The colors are generally subdued and frequently gray, brown and blue. This works well in a film about dreams(I can't remember the last time I had a dream in vivid color). The score by Hans Zimmer is really powerful and impressive. There are all sorts of non-musical themes that come along throughout, more sounds and noises than pure music. It's reminiscent of Michael Giacchino's score for the Lost television show or Philip Glass' brilliant score for Godfrey Reggio's Koaanisqatsi.

The costumes, sets and interiors are also sumptuous and felt particularly tangible and realistic. Every room was beautifully designed and every costume looked great (like James Bond, it's pretty awesome to get in a gunfight in a suit).I read one reviewer who wrote that its good that everyone has a unique costume - because it's not like the bad guys would go shopping together or have a bad-guy uniform. I agree with this.

Some of the CGI special effects were less crisp and clean than I would have hoped for. In one particular scene when Cobb is explaining "architecture" to Ariadne, he shows how things can explode. Sadly the exploding fruit and flower stands just looked like cartoons, shocking me back into my seat in the movie theater. I wish Nolan had used real effects with real explosions or redesigned this sequence differently.

(One weird thing is that the sound mix seemed off to me as the dialogue in many scenes was much too quiet compared with other sound effects and music. This made for a difficult experience, where I had to struggle to hear what the actors were saying. I don't ever recall this happening before. It's not a naturalistic use of low sound like in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I think it's just a mistake. For a while I thought it was a problem with my theater, but then I heard similar complaints from friends.)

One frustrating thing for me about the presentation is that even understanding how the time is decompressed the deeper you go into the dream world (which explains why you can have a really vivid dream, even though you're only asleep for a moment), there is not a consistent ratio of time from one dream level to another once they get into the inception phase of the story. According to the rules, there should be a lot more time in the second dream level than the first - and an even greater amount of time in the third level. Instead all the story-times seem to function co-incidentally with all the stories climaxing at the exact same moment. This was disorienting and a bit annoying. Don't give me a rule and then make an exception right away - and then not explain the exception.

There are a ton of detail questions left unanswered, and not to create mystery and intrigue, but just because Nolan seemed to not get to these issues. Most of these things don't matter too much (for instance: who is the company that Cobb works for and are there other companies who do this too?), but one thing that frustrated me is that Fischer seems to know a lot about extraction because he has been trained to fight it off in his dreams. Meanwhile, Ariadne has never heard of it and needs it explained to her (and to us). If extraction is so widespread in this world to the point that there are specific defenses against it, everyone should know about it. This exposes Ariadne as a clumsy cypher and a device for Nolan to move the story along. She really serves no other purpose than to poke and prod and ask questions. I think such information could have been presented better.

This film leaves me with a lot to think about, but almost all of what I’m considering relates to the narrative or the chronology of the story rather than the meaning behind those situations. There’s just not that much about why characters do things; it’s much more about what they are doing. This is ultimately is a rather shallow sandbox.

I'm pretty sure this is just a very clever and fresh heist movie and nothing more. Nolan clearly gives us a few small tidbits to use to spin off a whole other story and explanation of our own, but I don't think that's necessary. I think it's enough to read the film exactly as it is given: A rather Matrix-y action film that begins to question the borders between dreams and reality, but doesn't have an answer to that question.

I think it doesn't really go near anything Freudian or anything deep in terms of dream interpretation (which is amazing considering it's literally about dreams). I don't think it really takes a serious look at any deep issues, but just presents little slices of depth and moves on... for more spectacle. Perhaps a bit less polish and a bit more gritty realism would have been nice - but I guess that is simply not what this film is.

Stars: 2.5 of 4