Inception

“Inception is a film easier to admire than to fully grasp or be moved by.”

Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan

This review contains some mild spoilers.

Inception delivers dazzling special effects and an all-star cast, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise, a premise which requires so much explanation that it failed to engage me emotionally and keep me entertained. Despite its 148-minute running time, which should allow for ample time to balance the narrative, it left me frustrated not only with in its own confusion but with its lack of imagination.

Buñuel created dream sequences in his masterpieces Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) effectively without a studio budget of a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollars. Free from the need to give us car chases and gun battles, his work had an intensity lacking in Inception.

Buñuel was a surrealist and Nolan is a literal-minded man. Nolan gives us dreams within dreams within dreams while staging mind-numbing action within different levels of dreaming. The set pieces are extremely ambitious but pretty routine when taken apart. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explains his art as “a chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed,” but where are those things that never existed? Cobb and Nolan aren’t constructing things that never existed, instead their adventures are like various action movies bundled together. Buildings explode or collapse, anonymous henchmen shoot at the dream makers – “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger” – cue the grenade launcher. When was the last time I had a dream that seemed like an action movie? Never. Both dreams and movies provide an alternate reality full of unpredictably and the potential for imagination is endless but Nolan doesn’t seem to take advantage of this freedom.

Nolan is working on so many levels of representation at once that he has to provide the film with its own instruction manual just to explain what’s happening. In the Dark Knight Nolan could embellish the Batman legend in the most outrageous and visceral ways and never lose his audience because they were already familiar with the character and story. In Inception Nolan convolutes the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams depriving us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it. The sights are breathtaking and the effects truly special, but it’s hard to feel for the characters when nothing feels real. Inception feels very much like an excuse for special-effects wizardry. Even in The Dark Knight we are awarded a heartbreaking scene involving a character’s death, a scene which is the emotional crux of the film. The stakes were high in The Dark Knight. Batman had to save not only himself but his loved ones and Gotham city. What exactly is at stake here? Inception looks pretty on the outside but is lacks any soul or inner beauty. The film does have a romance between a widower and the memory of his dead wife, but it’s a bit hard to get much of an emotional response from a memory. The characters are mostly anonymous, the tone flat and impersonal and Nolan fails in making a great, untethered dream movie. Inception doesn’t deserve the praise of being hailed as a masterpiece on the order of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Still Inception isn’t a bad movie, because it does have many great things going for it. Editor Lee Smith has cut together a story that travels across six countries and just as many layers of human consciousness in ways so ostentatious that it showcases his mastery at parallel editing. Nolan and Smith rapidly communicate the idea that in a dream, you can fall asleep and have another dream, in which you can fall asleep and have another dream—except time works differently at different depths. A minute in one dream may be ten minutes in another dream, etc. Confusing on paper, but the beauty is how they effectively and consistently build the pacing of the film. Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score is brilliant – the perfect, thundering backdrop to all the chaos that unfolds, and Wally Pfister, another repeat Nolan collaborator, does magic behind the camera, conjuring a sleek look for shadowy doings leaving the pic a neo-noir feel.

Inception’s outer shell is a paranoid corporate thriller and a one-last-job heist movie, but Inception plays on an entirely different plane, reminiscent of the work of Charlie Kaufman, The Wachowski brothers and Phillip K. Dick – but failing to engage us emotionally. The title refers to attempts not to steal an idea but to plant one – and plant it so deeply in someone’s subconscious that he believes it to be his own, an idea better explored in a superior and more compelling movie, Dark City.

The dream – or nightmare – is a staple of classic movie story telling. After all, even as manipulative as the device is, it’s still a proven way to jolt an audience. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan understood this bit of cinematic psychology when he concocted the central idea behind Inception. If only he explored its endless possibilities without feeling the need to deliver another shoot-em-up action pic stocked with improbable shootouts and tire-screeching chase scenes, Inception might have had this critic raving.

I am confident that in the following twelve months the theologians of pop culture, will analyze the over-articulate structure of Inception but I can almost guarantee that with time, Inception, unlike The Dark Knight or Dark City, will lose its appeal. Inception is a film easier to admire than to fully grasp or be moved by.

Ricky D