INCEPTION

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Before seeing this movie, I hadn’t even realized just how much my movie-enjoying experience of the past few years had been shaped by Christopher Nolan; now I understand. Nolan has directed 9 films thus far in his relatively short career and an astonishing 5 of them have reached the IMDB.com “Top 250” list for highest rated films. To top it all off, he also wrote the screenplays for all five.

For me, he is reaching the rarified air that few directors have achieved for me. I remember seeing the first trailer for the first Transformers movie and thinking that some studio executives were sorely misguided by giving that film the green light. Then I saw that the executive producer (not director, but still involved) was Steven Spielberg. I decided, based on his reputation, to give the movie an open-minded chance. I am now a big fan of both movies, own both, and will one day own the third. Christopher Nolan is very close to reaching that level for me. This is a list of the five movies I mentioned previously and their respective ranks amongst the top rated movies on the Internet Movie DataBase (imdb.com).

Inception – 4th
Dark Knight – 11th
Memento – 29th
Prestige – 72nd
Batman Begins – 107th

In short, this is a truly excellent list of movies to come from one director. As much as I would love to gush about the character development and the shot in the arm he gave the Batman franchise or the mindtrip that is Memento, this post is all (well, mostly) about his most recent addition to the list. Inception has thus far received an average rating of 9.0/10 amongst over 175,000 voters and is bested only by The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, and the Godfather Part II.

PLOT (WITH AS FEW SPOILERS AS POSSIBLE)

At some point in the distant (or near, we don’t really know) future, we have the ability to enter the dreams of other people who can either be aware or unaware that they are dreaming. While there may be many legitimate uses for this technology, I can only assume that it was a very short period of time before some realized its potential for illegal uses.

For example, our story starts with the protagonist Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) attempting to commit corporate espionage. In essence, they attempt to break into the subject’s mind, gaining very valuable information from a very powerful and wealthy industrialist without him even knowing that anything was taken.

Something ends up going wrong and the team more or less gets caught by the industrialist who brings them an interesting proposal. Since the company that hired them would probably be out to kill them, they could either take their chances or they could accept his proposition. Inception. Normally all they would do is extract information while the subject was in their dream state but what this man wanted was for Cobb and his team to plant an idea within the mind of his chief competitor, who was on the brink of inheriting an energy conglomerate that could basically rules the world’s energy market. The tricky part was summed up perfectly by Arthur, played wonderfully by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Cobb: What do you want?
Saito (Wealthy Industrialist): Inception. Is it possible?
Arthur: Of course not.
Saito: If you can steal an idea, why can’t you plant one there instead?
Arthur: Okay, this is me, planting an idea in your mind. I say; don’t think about elephants. What are you thinking about?
Saito: Elephants.
Arthur: Right, but it’s not your idea. The dreamer can always remember the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.

However, they take the job because Cobb says it can be done since, according to him, it has been done before. What follows is twisting and turning through multiple dreams (and dreams within dreams within dreams) in an attempt to plant their seed while attempting to stay grounded in reality. The problem that they all encounter through the course of this job is summed up by the simplest and most difficult question: what is real?

RATING
PG-13 FOR SEQUENCES OF VIOLENCE AND ACTION THROUGHOUT

That rating blurb really says it all. This is one of those movies that regardless of age, you need to know your children before letting them watch it. The violence is moderate and very tastefully done (not unlike Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, also from Christopher Nolan) but it is present. The most disturbing part to me is throughout the movie, the quickest way for them to wake up from a “dream infiltration” if you will, is to die. Once they die in the dream, their real world body will wake up.

In Inception, this concept leads to several blatantly intentional killings of both friends and selves since their goal is to wake up from the dream. I don’t think that movies and television and video games are responsible for the behavior of individuals but that doesn’t mean that they can’t plant the seed of an idea… and in this case, I felt the need to warn.

AUDIENCE
CHILDREN – 2

The story, much like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, is a bit on the dark side. While I think there are parts that children would enjoy (such as the Matrix type dream environment where buildings and cities can be built and destroyed much like a child playing in a sandbox) there are also parts that could cause problems for children. However, this movie does have a built in defense if you find yourself in the movie theater with your child and find yourself regretting the decision; the vast majority of the movie takes place within dreams. In more ways than one, it’s not real. However, use caution.

YOUNG MALE – 7
YOUNG FEMALE – 5

The themes of this movie don’t appeal to teenagers the way they do to adults in my opinion, hence the lower rating. This is still an action movie with very good special effects but the last time I checked, those are the qualities that young women look for in a movie.

ADULT MALE – 9
ADULT FEMALE – 9

I know, if I’m going to go all the way to saying that this movie appeals universally to men and women at a very high level, why not just go one step further and give both of these categories a “10”? Well, my answer to that question occurs right before the screen goes black and the credits start to roll at the end of the movie. Unfortunately for you if you haven’t seen this movie, I made a pact with myself not to say what happens. Go watch the movie.

What really struck me about this movie is the enormous power that the subconscious mind has and what can happen if that power is misused or allowed to run amok. It also makes me wonder and marvel at what the human brain might someday be capable of.

GORE – 10

To clarify, a rating of 10 here doesn’t mean that this movie is full of gore. On the contrary, what this rating signifies is that that violence in the film was very tastefully done and added to the overall movie-going experience as well as the story.

There are numerous shootouts throughout the movie as, according to the film, if a person is taught to fight off people attempting to penetrate their dreams, their subconscious projections of people in the dream world will actually fight off the infiltrators. The deeper you go into the subconscious, the more zealously the subject’s mind will defend itself. Therefore, we go from hired gunmen from what looks like a private security firm in one level to a veritable army of military personnel in the next level.

There are also a few hand-to-hand combat scenes which I will mention later that were choreographed amazingly.

ROMANCE – 7

There is a romantic subplot… of sorts. I hate to be tantalizingly vague, but if I open the can of worms that is this relationship, I’ll end up explaining every little complexity and give away three quarters of the movie while I’m at it. Sorry.

(NOTE: originally my rating for “Romance” was a 5 but after thinking about how much this subplot contributes to the overall plot, I decided to upgrade this rating to a 7.)

DIALOGUE – 7

This movie didn’t have a ton of awesome one-liners. In fact, I had to think long and hard before coming up with the quote which started off this post. However, the dialogue gets some bonus points for the way that it managed to keep the viewer up to speed without explaining everything all at once where the viewer can forget things.

In the story, one member of the team for the inception job is completely new to the concept of breaking into peoples’ dreams. Therefore, she actually has a similar level of knowledge to the audience. When the more experienced people start talking about something they have encountered or heard of before (such as limbo) Ariadne (played by Ellen Page) will ask what they’re talking about. In that way, the audience is able to stay up to speed with what’s going on without forgetting key plot devices.

SPECIAL EFFECTS – 10

The best thing that I can say about the special effects in this movie is they were not overdone. It would have been simple to allow the dream world to become much like the Matrix, where anything is possible and the characters begin molding the world to their liking, toppling building and erecting new ones very similar to a child in a sandbox. However, the special effects were used to orient the viewer, not necessarily to dazzle the viewer.

For instance, when you are in a dream, your body in the dream world is bound by the laws of physics in the real world. There is one scene where Arthur is in a dream but his body is actually asleep in the back of a van in the midst of a high speed chase (don’t ask, go watch the movie). Therefore, when the van takes a hard turn and begins to drift through it in the real world, the hotel that Arthur is in begins to pitch about as if it was undergoing that same maneuver.

The single most amazing scene of the movie was right around the same point. Arthur has to fight off one of the subject’s subconscious defense personnel… right when the van he’s sleeping in careens off the road and starts to roll.

What follows is a truly incredible fight scene where gravity shifts every fraction of a second and the fight goes from the floor to one wall to the ceiling to the other wall and then they have to hold on as “down” becomes down the hallway and they have to catch themselves from falling down the hallway.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I’m fairly sure that what I just wrote makes no sense. I have two suggestions; one, go see the movie. Two, read Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game. The battle room in that novel has a similar lack of normalness when it comes to the laws of physics.

STORY – 10

I must admit that I can draw a lot of parallels between this movie and Memento. In a nutshell, the question that the characters keep asking themselves is ‘is this real?’ in an attempt to keep the difference between the dream world and the real world straight in their minds. The fact that you as the viewer have to keep asking yourself the same question means that this story succeeded on all counts.

ACTING – 8

For whatever reason, I don’t think this was one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s strongest roles. However, I’ve become a huge fan of his and he was still very good. The supporting cast was also tremendous, as it featured four Academy Award nominees (Tom Berenger, Pete Postlethwaite, Ken Watanabe, and Ellen Page) and two Academy Award winners (Michael Caine and Marion Cotillard).

Most importantly, Christopher Nolan wrote the playbook (screenplay) and then the cast went out and executed it perfectly. That will be the only sports metaphor of this post.

INTANGIBLES – 12

Yes, I know, I set a scale from 0-10 and then I throw out a rating of 12. Well, it’s my rating system so I can break the rules whenever I want. Without the little kicker at the end, the intangible rating for this movie would have been good, perhaps an 8. Any movie that makes the viewer question reality deserves some extra points. As for those last four points…

Go see the movie already!

TOTAL POINTS – 96/120
ADJUSTED – 80/100

A quick comment on my scoring system before I lose your attention until the next posting that you read. If you take time to peruse my system and its results, you’ll notice that it is skewed towards movies that have a broad audience base. For instance, in the five audience categories, the Godfather (quite possibly my favorite movie) scores just 29/50, since it isn’t terribly appealing for women and I don’t at all recommend it for children. On the flipside, WALL-E was rated at 45/50.

Inception struggled in the audience ratings again because I don’t think it’s a good movie for younger people (it received 32 of the possible 50 points). However, when you take audience out of the picture, Inception scored the second highest number of points of any movie that I’ve rated so far (second to Schindler’s List). Admittedly, I haven’t rated too many movies using this system yet, but for those of you who know me, it should say a lot when WALL-E received 58/70 points, the Godfather received 61/70, and Inception received 64/70.

Yes, it was that good.





GO SEE IT ALREADY!