'Inception': Mind-Blowing Head Trip

by Brett Parker

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker who likes to create cinematic games that deeply challenge the psyche of the characters who play them. Whether it's a man battling short-term memory-loss or a cop suffering from insomnia, Nolan's characters obsessively trudge through his mazes while complexities of the human mind fester underneath. His latest film, Inception, has to be the most elaborate and creative play on this cinematic ideal. As Nolan paints characters who can literally walk through dreams buried within the subconscious, he unleashes his most brilliant and literal exploration yet of the dark recesses of the human brain.

Inception imagines a world in which technology exists to enter people's minds through the dream state. If a person is heavily sedated, then a suitcase-sized device can allow outsiders to invade the subjects' dream and create an environment in which their deep secrets can be discovered. An extractor named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) abuses this technology by stealing people's ideas and selling them to big businesses. Cobb can work his way around the unstable environments of lucid dreams better than almost anyone and, along with his expert aide Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), can find almost any secret buried within the subconscious. However, Cobb's experiments within the dreamworld created big problems that has made him a fugitive in his home of America and estranged from his two children.

One day, Cobb encounters a wealthy corporate man named Saito (Ken Watanabe) who promises to help repair his past. Saito assures Cobb he can make his charges in America disappear if he performs an act of Inception; instead of stealing an idea from a subject's mind, an idea is to be planted there. The mark is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the wealthy heir to a corporate empire. Saito wants Cobb and his associates to plant an idea in Fischer's head that will dismantle his worldwide empire. However, Inception is a highly risky and dangerous procedure, for it involves delving deeper into levels of the subconscious than most players can handle. With the help of a forger thief (Tom Hardy) and a brilliant architect (Ellen Page), Cobb and his team plunge deep within the world of Fisher's head, a world that involves lethal shoot-outs, zero-gravity, a snowy fortress, and the ghost of Cobb's deceased wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), stirring up deadly trouble. Can Cobb and his associates plant an inception before being trapped in a deep subconscious limbo?

What is first and foremost impressive about Inception is how wholly original this world appears to be. Even though specific shades of other films can be hinted at (particularly The Matrix), we truly do feel like we are looking at a cinematic landscape we've never seen before. Nolan has brought to the unstable and abstract nature of the dreamworld a strict logic that uses everything we've even researched or realized about human dreams to create a specific universe filled with detailed and fascinating rules. Even though this film plays on formalities of a heist film and certain action-thriller standards, it'd be such a gross disservice to confine this film to broad genre outlines. Here's a film that doesn't depend on “killing the bad guy” or “disarming the bomb” but instead focuses on penetrating multiple levels of the subconscious and synchronizing your actions so that you can simultaneously awaken throughout all layers and return to complete consciousness. Sound confusing? Well Nolan maps out the logic of the plot with great attentiveness. Sure, you have to pay close attention to every minute detail, but so fascinating is the world Nolan has painted, you'll be absorbed by every exciting aspect thrown your way.

Since pretty much anything can happen within a dream, almost anything can happen within the world of Inception, liberating it from mundane predictability. As these brainy thieves run amok through other people's dreams, we're treated to such wild visuals as a train pummeling through a city street, a Parisian street folding upside down on itself, a hotel hallway tilting sideways, sleeping bodies floating in zero gravity, and a decaying city crumbling at the edge of an ocean. These visuals complement the elaborate logic of the plot wonderfully, and since these strokes of creativity can come from any angle, the film constantly keeps us on our toes and glued to the screen from start to finish.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays up his finely-tuned confidence and intensity to fit the mold of a Nolan protagonist quite nicely. Like all of Nolan's flawed heroes, Cobb is a man obsessive in his quest, consumed by guilt, haunted by heartbreak. Nolan's men are usually haunted by a past love, one that puts a heavy strain on both their hearts and their already clouded minds. The ghost of Mal constantly taunts and haunts Cobb in his dreamworld as he battles constantly with the blurred lines between dreams and reality. The men in Nolan's world hope that their rigorous journey to make sense of things will bring them some kind of closure, but the brilliance of this filmmaker is the idea that the end result is always shrouded in some kind of ambiguity. There's no easy way out from heart ache and the darkness that haunts the mind (The film's final shot puts a serious skewer on any idea of a complete happy ending for Cobb).

Indeed, each film of Nolan's deals with a specific aspect of the mind that can plague most men. He's dealt with revenge (Memento), guilt (Insomnia), fear (Batman Begins), jealous egotism (The Prestige), madness (The Dark Knight), and now with Inception, he has covered the idea of perception. Cobb is a man so caught up in the dreamworld that he himself has confused it for his actual reality. What constitutes reality? If something feels deeply tangible to us, is that enough to justify it as reality? What if there is a deeper level of truth we haven't perceived yet? The main conflict within the Mal character is the idea that maybe everything is a projection from our minds and there is underlying levels of revelations we have yet to perceive. If our idea of reality is built within our minds, then whats to say that dreams aren't as tangible as our reality?

These questions probably only scratch the surface of Inception's underlying ideals. The beauty of the film is that endless analysis can be sprung from within the subtext. Dream logic, in itself, has inspired many broad theories and specific ideas over the years. Since Inception is so intuitive to a wide range dream research, countless theories and ideas can be pulled from this film for years to come. You'll be deeply rewarded on repeat viewings and will probably find new things that will redefine the film for you each time you watch it. Since the film takes place mostly within dreams, you can never be too sure that everything is what it seems or that it even takes place in reality at all (a climactic conversation between Cobb and Mal as well as a shot of an old couple walking through a dream city threw me for a loop and will certainly need revisiting).

Since the very nature of dreams can be surreal and trippy, part of me wonders if Inception could've been more surreal and trippy. Should this material have gone way more off-the-rails? Shouldn't it have dealt with the erotic and the nightmarish aspects of dreams more? Could abstract directors such as David Lynch or Richard Kelly go further down the rabbit hole than Nolan does? Perhaps, but it's important to realize that Nolan is not out to confuse, but to challenge and entertain; two things that can be rarely seen in the same package. The great achievement of Inception is the way it presents a supreme challenge to our intellect while still delivering an adventurous and exciting thrill ride. The film could be a turning point in proving that audiences can handle complex and ambiguous philosophical thoughts within the context of a Hollywood action-thriller. Here's a rare action-adventure where the ideas are way more exciting than the action.