Inception is Christopher Nolan’s latest film, and it rolls in on the back of overwrought trailers in which the laws of physics seem to disappear inside the dreamworld: cities crumble; the horizon bends backwards on itself; and slow motion explosions seem to pop off the screen. The story concerns a team whose usual task is to illegally extract information from subjects by inserting themselves into dreams. Each member of the team has a specific function, such as designing the dreamworld (architect), administering the appropriate sedation to the subjects (drugs), or depicting someone familiar to the dreamer in the dream (forger). Now its leader, Leonardo DiCaprio, has been persuaded by a wealthy industrialist (Ken Watanabe) to try something much more difficult: “inception†is the insertion of a new idea into the dream of a subject, rather than simply the stealing of existing information, such that the subject comes to fully believe the idea.While by no means a great movie, and certainly a disappointment after Momento and Dark Knight, Inception is much better than I, at least, expected. The mission — entering several levels of dreams to plant the idea — takes up more than half the movie and it is genuinely thrilling. The thrill comes not so much from the special effects, in fact most of the gravity-bending scenes from the trailer occur early in the movie and are part of a training sequence (think Matrix) in which DiCaprio explains how dream manipulation works to new team member, Ellen Page. The mission is nail-biting, depending upon split-second timing, and coordination between at least three different levels of the dream. Many of the rules of the dreamworld are entirely arbitrary (why should bystanders in a dream come to latch onto the interloper like “white blood cells attacking a virusâ€?), but once you accept them, they have their own internal logic, particularly the different amount of time that passes in each level of dream.But I think that what I appreciated most was the contrast between the huge scale of the dreams — the architecture of the dreamworld — and the small scale of the stakes. There were no real enemies or “bad guysâ€, and no risk of the end of the world if the team fails. The only thing at stake is the minds of the dreamers themselves: if all fails, and they die in the dream, they never emerge from the dreamstate. So the movie is an excuse for a very human drama, which in this case is the guilt of DiCaprio over the death of his wife, who came to believe that the dream world was real and who now haunts every dream that DiCaprio inhabits, bringing danger to the mission and other team members.In a real summer blockbuster season, I’m not sure where Inception would rank, but this summer, it has no equals.
I can’t get the post editor to insert lines paces between paragraphs. Very frustrating.
I probably had my expectations too high, ’cause I was disappointed. By no means bad, neither is it particularly good–a reasonably entertaining film with so very much potential to be so very much more. Maybe MINOR spoilers below.
The dead wife/family stuff felt utterly flat. I liked a couple of the touches: her violence and aggression in Cobb’s subconscious; the faceless back of the heads of the kids.
The narrative tectonics of the levels of dreams and reality was ambitious as all hell, but aside from a neat new toy to create suspense–time rushing out on one level is moving more slowly, but with equal end-time determination, in another–what the hell did Nolan do with it? One helluva good low-gravity fight scene, ‘though the “physics” of that kept bugging me, because I kept thinking that if physical laws in one level are affected by the level up, why didn’t gravity go kablooie in the bottom-most level? Even in the logic of the film it felt more like a convenience….
…and that gets me to the use of dreams for this heist. All of these dreamworlds had lovely architecture, great environmental scapes–but they were culturally flat, devoid of almost any of the daily signifiers of meaning and life which you’d expect to be pervasive. The bottommost level was just a fucking snow fortress. Why? I can imagine a sort-of rationale (Fischer imagines an assault on a idea hidden, so they construct a Bond film finale), but it is just a lot of skiing and shooting and blowing up, which is true in all of the levels, really. But, c’mon–doesn’t Fischer have a potentially WHACKED subconscious? Wouldn’t his weirdness be at least as dangerous or personal as Cobb’s? And yet …. no. Big buildings and sleek costumes but otherwise bland worlds. Nolan’s vision of the unconscious seems trapped in the 19th-century, mind as a storehouse for memory. No fun Freudities at all.
I love heist films, and I was hoping for more heisty games. But the narrative “problem” centered on Cobb’s life, which is fine, I guess, but … also all too pat.
hum, well I had the advantage of very low expectations based on the trailer. I think we looked for very different things from the movie; it never occurred to me to think of it as a heist movie, and I was prepared for the technical aspects to overwhelm everything else. Instead, it was a human drama that centered more on Cobb’s backstory than the architecture of the dream world.
SPOILERS:
And I guess I just disagree about the flatness of the dead wife/kids story. I was genuinely entranced by the elevator of memories in which Cobb keeps his wife imprisoned, and the notion of spending 50 years of dream time designing an entire world, and then not being able to escape it. Perhaps I was just happy to see DiCaprio have a chance to do some acting that didn’t involve his trademark bewildered anger expression.
As for the snow fortress, it was not clear to me from the movie how much of that comes from Fisher’s subconscious, and how much is designed by Ariadne. The Bond finale (and it does have exactly that feel) seemed to create irresistible pressure for Fisher to push forward and unlock the secret, so I assumed that Ariadne had designed it for exactly that purpose.
I’m with Mike on this one. Elegantly constructed, ambitious, thrilling while in-the-moment (I saw it on an IMAX screen which made it even more of a ride), but ultimately devoid of humor, wit, and characters to care about – empty spectacle with little to no emotional depth (and compared to 2001, The Matrix, and Blade Runner, Inception lacked a truly visionary mise-en-scene . . . as my friend remarked upon leaving the cinema: “Fifty years constructing a world of their own and the best Dom and Mal can come up with is something resembling an Eastern European public housing project!”). Tom Hardy’s Eames, however, was brilliant! I didn’t recognize him as the lead actor from Bronson until later . . . but he livened up every scene. And yeah, why were dream levels one (the van) and two (the hotel) affected by the van’s free fall, yet dream level three (the snow bunker) remained free from zero gravity’s pull? And then, of course, there is Mal; the villainous woman who must be contained in order for our hero to find peace (whether said peace is a dream construction or “real” doesn’t really matter as both options are predicated on the psychic death of the femme fatale). And finally, is it me or did this film echo so many psychological threads DiCaprio already explored earlier this year in Shutter Island. As I said then, someone find this talented actor a comedy.
David Edelstein: “For the record, I wanted to surrender to this dream; I didn’t want to be out in the cold, alone. But I truly have no idea what so many people are raving about. It’s as if someone went into their heads while they were sleeping and planted the idea that Inception is a visionary masterpiece and—hold on … Whoa! I think I get it. The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype—a metaphor for itself.”
David Edelstein is the one raving since the reviews (outside of the usual shills) have been well below mediocre. No even semi-serious reviewer has called Inception a masterpiece. So trashing it in the name of going against the grain is disingenuous at best. It’s a summer action movie, no more, no less. It’s fine not to like it just so long as you know that the fate of the summer blockbuster season now rests on the narrow shoulders of Salt and The Expendables.
Well, it does have a 74% favorable rating from Metacritic including eleven 100 scores (including Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss at Time, and Kenneth Tynan at the LA Times. Ebert writes: “The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. Inception does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in Memento: How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there’s a hole in Inception too, but I can’t find it.”
Lisa Schwarzenbaum at Entertainment Weekly gave it a very positive review (which Metacritic scored 83 points) and then wrote a second review detailing her second viewing for this week’s Inception cover-story extravaganza (she writes: “So ultimately I felt even more delight this time around in the brainteaser aspects of the story and how Nolan conveys his labyrinthine notions of dream time.”). Owen Gleiberman, on the other hand, is still confused by the experience and doesn’t understand why anyone would feel the need to see the film a second time to make sure they understood it in all its glory (or, one supposes, to dive deeper into its Escher-like mysteries).
Over at Rotten Tomatoes, the score is an even heartier 86% fresh, though the “top critics” (i.e. people who actually get paid to write about movies) give it a 78%. Those aren’t Toy Story 3 numbers, but they do suggest a few raves are floating about.
I do wish I could be concerned about the fate of the summer blockbuster, but I’m too busy trying to figure out when I’m going to see The Kids Are Alright.
Ebert?! That’s funny. The New York Times, The New Yorker, Salon and the Voice were all negative so I don’t think David Edelstein has to worry about how Inception will be viewed by posterity.
As it happens “Salt” is pretty good, so the summer isn’t a complete waste.
In a drought, a glass of water can seem like champagne. Critical reception for the most part seems positive yet not hyperbolic, aside from some astutely critical reviews. Again, it was just fine, but overlong and undercooked in some ways. I am glad to hear about Salt, and I am betting that other fun (The Other Guys, Scott Pilgrim, and *maybe* The Expendables) will be had. Still, a lousy summer for summerish stuff, aside from Toy Story 3.
(And Kris and I are kicking ourselves for seeing Inception instead of Kids when we had that rare childcare option…)
And it continues.
Christopher Nolan = William Shakespeare . . . according to, wait for it, the Daily Kos!
Hilarious.
Hmmm . . . the fun stuff continues to find its way to the surface.
A few of my friends who had seen it thought it was awesome, so I fully expected to hate it thoroughly, because that’s just who I am. But I thought it was a good deal of fun. And wow, you care whether gravity is affected on level three as on level two when um, a person who doesn’t exist can kidnap a person and bring them to a fourth level? Really?
When we were leaving I overheard some women talking. One wanted to know who the old man was in the beginning. Another imagined how you would write it as a book so you could see it without all the “confusing” special effects. You want to know why it’s not consistent? Because average people are STUPID.
Why am I always rankled by Jeff’s feminist readings? Is that just who I am?
Lurkers shouldn’t be too rankled. I’m not sure I tossed out a completely coherent feminist reading (more of a sleepy observation), but your concerns seem to predate any and all conversations about Inception. I am, however, certainly interested in your take on Mal’s role in the narrative
I wouldn’t have cared about the gravity if the film hadn’t given me 46 lectures about how they need to time this explosion and that to work with the van falling and its lack of gravity and…
wha–huyh? Is that a… I. I fell asleep there. Yeah, I didn’t really care too much. Now let me get some popcorn for the Nikki/Jeff smackdown.
hey nikki, the fact that you are always rankled by jeff’s feminist readings (does he do that many? man, i should read this blog more often) demonstrates that you read this blog. yay!
First, I would like to apologize to Jeff. That was unfair. In real life, when I sucker-punch people, it comes off as much more charming. You have to know me better for it to work.
To Mal–was anyone else confused that her name wasn’t “Moll” which is what I kept hearing? Were all the characters supposed to have really bad French accents? Does “bad” in a bad French accent make it good?
When Dom gives Mal the speech “I can’t imagine you with all your complexity…You are just a shade of my real wife. You are the best I can do, but you are just not good enough.” I practically stood and cheered. I didn’t hear it so much as a speech from Dom to Mal (or to himself) but as an apology from the director to all women. Of course, it would have been better if it hadn’t been for Araidne, the sexless creator. (Her sexlessness is underscored by the “unconvincing” kiss with Arthur.) She doesn’t create life–not without sex!–but rather whole worlds. But more importantly, she is a caregiver delving into Dom’s dreams and (of course) giving him the “thread” to (perhaps) return from Limbo. I’m always more disappointed with woman-as-caregiver than I am with woman-as-sex object.
I do appreciate a good sucker-punch when it arrives face to face (I’ll furiously await . . .).
As for Mal’s name (and why not Moll?): in French (according to Google) Mal means evil, ill, wrong, harm, difficult, hurt, and/or trouble. So, I guess Nolan didn’t want to be ambiguous. Cotillard is French so I can’t comment on her accent, but what’s up with the architecture school in Paris that only employs and enrolls Americans? I don’t think of Mal as a sex object (nothing really sexy about her character though Cotillard is certainly beautiful) as much as I’m bothered by the fact that she is an agent of destruction who must be destroyed in order for our hero(s) to find peace (however rendered).
Still, I do very much appreciate your radical read against the text (Dom’s speech) which nearly made you stand and cheer (is that truly the confession of an individual who enjoyed this film).
Ariadne. Just that name alone makes me want to poke Nolan in the eye. And, yes, your read on her character suggests we are very much in agreement when it comes to gender in this film. The whole woman-as-caregiver trope was overdetermined from the moment Ellen Page pricked up her ears. Do you ever rankle yourself?
Do you ever rankle yourself?
Whenever I can.
Nikki, we hardly knew you!