Inception

Inception (****)

Inception is part Dark City, part Matrix, part Ocean's Eleven, part Sandman. It's also not quite like any of these, because it's not quite like anything else whatsoever. It's visual effects are impressive enough to at least put it on par with most of the big summer releases opening around it, but it has none of the convention, the cliche, the gimmickry, the timidity of the average cookie-cutter blockbuster. On some level, it fits snugly in the category of heist movie, but there's no bank--not a physical one anyway, and there's so much going on than merely the execution of the grand scheme. Christopher Nolan reaffirms what he pretty much already established with both of his Batman films, that he can create a grandiose effects movie with mass appeal and still make it fiercely original and thought-provoking.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb and he's an Extractor. What the hell is an Extractor? An extractor essentially hacks into people's dreams, during which a person's mind is vulnerable we're told, and steals people's ideas on behalf of a client (like a rival businessman). How do you steal an idea? Well, you literally pick it up and run with it. In the dream worlds of Inception, ideas are actual tangible things, perhaps written on a sheet of paper and locked away in a safe. Problem is, dreams are also populated with elements of a person's subconscious, and when they detect a foreign presence in a dream they'll attack it, like how white blood cells attack a foreign substance in a person's bloodstream. The techniques to do this were developed in a secret military program, we're told, but apparently it's existence has leaked out in certain circles, and some people have actually been trained to fight extraction, which basically militarizes the projections in their subconscious. What might normally be an old girlfriend strolling down the street becomes a commando with an assault rifle. If you die in the dream, you just wake up (not following Matrix rules here), most of the time at least, but you still feel the effects of however you got killed and there's no guarantee that you die quickly. The machine that does this is suitcase sized device with a big red button in the middle. Nolan, wisely, doesn't really try and explain the specifics of how it's supposed to work. They're not really important, and would only serve to bog the movie down in exposition that wouldn't really be believable anyway.

Cobb is a widower, and hasn't been able to see the two children that he had with his wife (or set foot in America for that matter) because he's a suspect in his wife's death. As to the circumstances of her death and whether or not he's guilty, that's something the movie reveals bit and bit and would be too spoilerish for a review. Cobb is working in Japan when he gets offered a chance at the proverbial One Last Big Job from Saito, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe, last seen in a Christopher Nolan movie playing Ra's Al-Ghul), who has high-level connections that can get Cobb back into America. The catch is that Saito isn't asking for Extraction, he's asking for Inception (hey, that's the name of the movie!). Inception is the antithesis of Extraction--planting an idea in someone's mind. The problem is that it's hard to convince a person's subconscious that it's their own idea. If it doesn't feel like something they would naturally think up, the idea won't take hold in the person's mind. What does Saito want to plant? He wants to convince Fisher, (Cillian Murphey, the other former Batman Begins villain) the heir to a rival energy business, to break up his father's company, essentially scuttling his billion-dollar inheritance. So yeah... that's gonna be tough.

To pull off either Extraction or Inception, you also need a Chemist and an Architect (is someone hard at work creating an RPG system based on this right now?) The Chemist will induce sleep deep enough to not be easily disrupted through a series of drug compounds, and the Architect will construct the landscape of the dream. The Architect can change up the landscape on the fly with a thought, but again, if the target figures out that there's shenanigans going on in their dream, the jig is up. For an Architect, Cobb recruits Ariadne (Ellen Paige), a student of his father's (Michael Caine), who is as much a stranger to the whole Extraction/Inception concept as we are, and thus mostly serves as our point-of-view character. In spite of being a fish-out-of-water though, she's smart enough to realize that Cobb has some serious demons in his closet and at several points confronts him about them, worried that they'll endanger the mission.

A good chuck of the second half of the movie, is just the execution of the big Inception plan. While at times it turns into very formulaic gunplay/car chase stuff, Nolan manages to keep the energy going such that it doesn't at any point feel pointless. And certain elements are anything but formulaic, as when Josh Hartnett's character has to fight in a hallway in which the gravity is constantly shifting making the whole room rotate on an axis. Things get a bit hard to keep up with as the movie approaches it's climax, as eventually there are four distinct groups of character(s) in four separate imagined places. The confusion that arises is slight though, and I have little doubt that Nolan crossed his Ts and dotted his Is in his writing and that it'll make sense upon repeat viewings. A lot of people seem confused by the movie's ending and I'm not sure why. It's ambiguous, but I thought it was clearly deliberately so, and I'd frankly defy anyone to devise a better way for the movie to end.

Nolan has simultaneously created a popcorn movie and a thinking man's movie, something which you could say he already did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but Inception frankly surpasses them on both levels, and keep in mind that Dark Knight was my favorite movie of 2008 and that I'm border-lined unhealthily obsessed with all things Batman. The movie has spawned discussion everywhere. I've seen several blog entries, for example, arguing that the movie is actually a grand metaphor for filmmaking--that it's basically Nolan's 8 1/2. I'm sure over time wholly different interpretations with at least equal merit will arise. And yet, if you just want to enjoy it as one of the most ambitiously warped heist movies of all time, you can and have a hell of a time with it. A great movie.