- Location: Cinemark Egyptian 24
- Christopher Nolan's Inception is one of the more creative variations on the heist film I've ever seen. It feels strange to write that since the film was advertised mostly as a science fiction piece, but any fan of the genre would recognize the telltale signs. Take the specialized crew, for example. They have catchy titles like the Extractor (Leonardo Di Caprio), the Point Man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the Architect (Ellen Page), the Forger (Tom Hardy), the Chemist (Dileep Rao), and the Tourist (Ken Watanabe). Their usual goal would be to break in and steal from a "mark", but for this one special job they have to leave something behind instead. More challenging still is the fact that they have to break in without this particular Mark (Cillian Murphy) even knowing that they did. This sounds vaguely like the plot of every heist film, from The Asphalt Jungle to Ocean's 11, but there's one new ingredient: Dreams.
- Instead of breaking into a bank or a vault to steal money or jewels, this crew deals in dreams. It turns out that there's this (mercifully unexplained) device that allows certain unscrupulous but enterprising individuals to create detailed dreamworlds for their unsuspecting victims. In those dreams, a clever extractor can grab business secrets or whatever else the mark's subconscious may be hiding in the vaults of their mind. Think of it as intellectual property theft in a very literal sense. Fortunately for the thieves (and, for that matter, the audience), these worlds seem to their inhabitants to be quite real and are thus a far cry from the warped dreamscapes of say, Salvador Dali or David Lynch. In fact, the slightest bit of strangeness can tip off the mark that something is amiss, which in turn activates a sort of subconscious security system that usually takes the form of thugs with guns. There are myriad other details far too numerous to list here, but this is the basic construct that enables Nolan to do whatever he wants with the settings and action.
- What Nolan wants turns out to be very complicated. According to Cobb (the aforementioned extractor played by Di Caprio), the only way to plant an idea in someone's mind involves an entire sequence of dreams-within-dreams. Everything has to be planned precisely, although they're helped by the fact that time is expanded multiplicatively in each additional dream layer. At times, the effect is what I imagine it would be like to watch four or five films simultaneously, all at different speeds. One takes place in a rainy cityscape, another in a sleek hotel, and still another in a snowy fortress. The ultimate dream is set in a bleak, half-dilapidated limbo world that Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) once occupied. But recall that these are all dreams and that some of them can be recurring. Despite the fact that Mal has been long-dead in the real world (or is it just the top level?), she tends to show up and make trouble whenever Cobb is around. As a result, Cobb and company must contend with a stray femme fatale in addition to a multitude of armed mercenaries.
- So how to evaluate Inception? It's a very creative film, quite capably made, and generally very enjoyable. Nolan is quickly becoming a master of great locations, both real and CGI, and he has collected an immensely talented stable of actors around him. Furthermore, the director/writer has succeeded, as he did with his groundbreaking film Memento, in telling a story that really hadn't been told before, even if Inception did happily take its cues from heist and spy-action cinema. All of that said, I think the film suffers a bit from its own decade-long inception. According to Nolan, the script had been floating around for years, and the result is an overplotted accumulation of details that feel compressed even in the film's substantial runtime. I appreciate that the characters (and audience) get thrown into the mix without much initial exposition, but there is no opportunity for peace in this sleep. Instead, it seems like plot devices are always being explained, guns are constantly being fired, things are ever exploding, and buildings are perpetually collapsing. The only real chance at introspection occurs after Inception's wonderfully ambiguous ending. When the audience walks out of the theater, we get our first opportunity to ponder the reality of what we just seen.
- I didn't get the chance to mention Tom Berenger as the Mark's godfather, Michael Caine as Cobb's father-in-law, or Pete Postlethwaite as the Mark's father.
- The Mark's name is Robert Fischer, Jr. Is that a chess reference? The Architect's name is Ariadne, which is certainly a maze reference.
- The elevator ride is a unique example of the equivalence principle, although I'm not sure why it required explosives.
