Inception Review (Short but Sweet)

Do you remember the last time you watched a smart summer action flick? A movie that had you leaving the theaters knowing you actually saw something that was more than some studio tent pole release? Of course you do, we’ve been seeing this trend slowly come to power over the last few years. In 2009 we had the razor sharp masterpiece of District 9 and in 2008 the world was treated to The Dark Knight, a movie that elevated the comic sub genre to a level of film making movie scholars will be analyzing for decades. Well, the creator of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, has decided to take another stab at the summer brain stimulus with Inception.

There has been a lot of talk circling Inception, some say it’s the most daring project in Sci-Fi since the Matrix, others think of it as an interesting yet flawed experiment, while others just scratch their heads as they try to wrap their feeble minds around the staggering narrative. Regardless of how you feel I can assure you that unless you really don’t know much about storytelling, you shouldn’t fall into the latter camp.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie IS complex, the story ostensibly revolves around three separate narratives that are stitched together within the framework of a five layer deep scene for well over 50 minutes. The rest of the time you are being told to believe in the procedural assembly line mechanics of constructing dreams and how the main characters navigate the core design principle of shared dream logic. However, the greatest praise I can bestow upon this film is its incredible skill in taking the labyrinthine plot and finding a way to hand it to the audience in the most logical way without seeming condescending.

It’s a rare thing to see a screen play this tightly composed. How Christopher Nolan even managed to communicate an idea like this is baffling to me. Yet here it is, presented on the big screen for all to see. Again, that’s not to say it’s necessarily an easy viewing; if you aren’t picking up on all the clues along the way you’re liable to get lost as you follow some other trail of bread crumbs into a dark and misty forest.

On the other hand its not like this movie has absolutely nothing to offer the critical thinker. To keep it an intellectual pursuit the film makers cleverly decided to make it one of those interpretive movies. While most of the story is opaque, there’s also a lot of it that is ambiguous, allowing people to create their own interpretations. Some call it lazy, others call it brilliant, and I call it fair. When exploring themes this compelling its best to leave something up to the viewer. Inception crafts an outrageous new world that you are invited to explore and write your own stories within, an idea that is sadly missing from many films today.

The cast is another aspect of Inception I found quite remarkable. Every member present gives there all and breaths a great deal of life into their character. Although not all are created equal in terms of importance one need only remind themselves that at its heart, inception is a heist movie. Sure some of the characters are relegated to being a 2-dimensional sidekick with a single defining role, but that is the case with most heist films. What makes each of them work is the contribution from the actor. The team that has been assembled here might as well be the Avengers or the JLA; it’s that epic.

The visuals are impressive although in many ways the movies weakest point. While interesting and fun to look at there are a lot of limitations imposed by the narrative. You won’t see any over the top surrealist dream-like images, but that’s because you’re not supposed to. By the very nature of the story the characters are to an extent controlling the dream world, preventing it from going off into some strange parody of reality. While this is a legitimate excuse and probably one that actually helps the movie from becoming too silly it still makes you wonder what could have been if they had perhaps invested even just a tiny bit more imagination into the dreamscapes.

Special recognition also goes out to Hanz Zimmer who composed the score. There’s a lot of praise to give to a man who seems to have traveled all the way to Valhalla and stolen a Viking’s ram horn to compose most of the sound track. While the plot is subtle, the music manages to stand in direct opposition by delivering a deep sound track that shakes the marrow of your bones. In a sense, it works to remove any sort of somber moments that may surface in a movie about dreams by reminding you of the underlying intensity of the film.

There isn’t a whole lot more that I can say about this movie without spoiling too much. Every moment holds a mystery and half the fun is just watching everything come together in one delicate movement. Regardless of whether or not this is the movie for you I can’t help but recommend it none the less. No, the movie isn’t going to appeal to every man, woman, and child out there but it’s something that maybe everyone should see. Christopher Nolan claimed to have been influenced by The Matrix, 2001 a Space Odyssey, Dark City, Blade Runner, and just about every other milestone of Science Fiction to have been released over the past 40 years or so. With Inception, it shows, and just like those movies this is going to become a pop culture phenomenon that shifts the entire paradigm for things to come.