Inception: Review
I struggled mightily with this review. Not in a conceptual sense of what I wanted to say, but whether or not I wanted to say anything at all before anyone has seen the movie. If you need a review that details the plot so that you feel confident in sacrificing $10 and 2 hours of your life please read Roger Ebert’s tome on his response to Inception. If you, like me, enjoy being surprised and whisked away on mind-bending journeys through thought, while appreciating minute stylistic touches that give you a tingly feeling in your gut, then please continue.
Inception, Christopher Nolan’s original film after wrapping up ‘The Dark Knight’, is like test driving a brand new luxury sports car. There is a general idea of how it is going to handle, how long you’re going to be driving, and the overall ‘feel’ of the ride. However once you get behind the wheel and hear the engine come to life, you forget what you were doing and enjoy the hell out of it. Along the way you notice the feel of the leather on your finger tips, the shine of the chrome on the control knobs, and the tingly feeling in the back of your chest as you push the car as far as you feel comfortable slicing through the air at 90mph.
The film literally starts with a roar and doesn’t let go. To describe the plot loosely, Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, an Extractor (one of the best), who with his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), manipulates dreams in order to “extract” corporate secrets from his targets. As one could imagine, this job has it’s difficulties within the dream world and without, as Dom’s clients are usually very powerful and very dangerous. The plot takes a quick turn to a very basic yet paradoxical idea, “If you can steal an idea from a dream, why can’t you infiltrate the mind and leave an idea there?”
Similar to a Car Salesman using his magic to help you take out a 2nd mortgage so you can purchase your dream car, the movie quickly plants the idea, creates a structure, explains the rules, and from that point forward lets you go. There is quite a bit of hand-holding with the audience to implant some of the heady ideas that are the focus of the film. An Ariadne (Ellen Page), a talented young architect that is recruited to help the extractors with their task, is just enough of a familiar yet fresh-faced presence to ask the right questions from the right people for the audience to not feel lost. Literally the second she asks the final question to close the loop on any doubts about the structure of the world we’re in, we’re pulled onto an empty highway and told to hit the gas as hard as we can.
As the film deftly progresses headlong at 100 mph to the finale, it’s the little touches that stood out to me the most. The fantastic costume design throughout (everyone’s in a $10,000+ suit), the near constant smolder from Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Robert’s (Cillian Murphy) insanely large clear blue eyes that convey both a sense of wonder and curiosity driving him forward, and the ability of the cast and crew to effectively introduce set pieces that illustrate heady metaphysical concepts while making your heart burst out your chest and dig your fingernails into hard rubber of the cinema seat. The film rachets up the intensity and emotion for the second half to such a degree that by the time the credits roll you forget that you’ve been clenching like a fighter pilot in a barrel roll, or a car buyer finishing a test drive, so that when the soreness in your legs has subsided a few hours later, after mulling over the minute touches on top everything else you’ve been asked to ingest, the only thing you can think is, “When can we go again?”
Inception is a film experience like no other this summer and Christopher Nolan is quickly placing himself in that rare canon of directors who have the Midas Touch when it comes to casting, directing, and his personal strong suit, pacing. His fist-to-fist action is still a touch messy, and the first half of the film might not take hold for some (very, very, few) but outside of those minor complaints (similar to complaining about the height of the rearview mirror, or the locations of the volume knob, to beat this ridiculous car analogy to death), this is the movie to see this summer.
Casey’s Final Take: Inception = (Michael Clayton + The Matrix) (Ocean’s 11)
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