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| Inception |
| Written by Paul Gagne | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 20 July 2010 23:18 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Imagine that the technology existed to share a subconscious dream experience. Now imagine you could assemble a team to infiltrate a specific person’s dream and thieve information right out of their head. Kind of like Ocean’s Eleven meets Dreamscape meets The Bank Job meets The Matrix. Now take all that and stand it on its head: what if the purpose was to leave information behind; to seed a brain with the crystal of an idea that would germinate into a thought the victim would honestly believe was their own?
From the insidiously clever mind of Christopher Nolan comes Inception, his first all-original screenplay since his debut film, Following. Not only is it an all-original concept and script, but it is a screenplay that took him over eight years to create. And it shows. The ease with which the audience nestles into the complexities of the story shows the hand of a master craftsman, as do the actual mechanics of the shot film. This is a film that challenges the audience without alienating them, and it is high time we have a thinking man’s summer blockbuster.
Also, while it is sci-fi, it is sci-fi in the way Donnie Darko is sci-fi. It takes place in the real world, not some Dystopian future society, and there are no asinine gadgets to familiarize yourself with. The gear the team uses to enter the shared-dream state is a low-tech aesthetic, even slightly biological in appearance. Keeping it organic grounds the movie, and allows you to focus on the characters and plot, and also allows you to marvel at the special effects without becoming jaded by them. I was literally pitching and rolling in my seat during the zero-gravity hotel sequence, I was so invested in the action. What also helps to ground the story is Nolan’s utter disinterest in explaining the physicality of dream-sharing process. This was a very shrewd move. So much time is spent on the metaphysics: creating the architecture of the dream; traversing the different levels; the kicks and death-exits (you'll find out about those in the film); and avoiding the hideous limbo state that getting bogged down on the exact hows would have, well, bogged down the movie. The acting and visuals sell us on the concept: we don’t need a blow by blow.
Wait: one thing about Leo, actually. His character has a butt-load of issues. Hell, his wife is named Mal for Christ’s sake. And when said wife does a horrible thing, the screaming pain on his face made me ache inside. One of my few regrets about this film is that it didn’t linger more on that heartbreaking scene. The man was putting it all out there, folks.
On a geeky side note, Ellen Page’s character, the “architect” of the dreams, whose job is basically to construct mazes and paradoxical staircases, is named Ariadne. Ariadne is the Greek character who helped Theseus escape the maze created by Daedalus at the behest of her father, King Minos. SUPER SPOILER ALERT: (seriously. if you haven’t seen the movie, stop goddamn reading) Leo having just come off of Shutter Island kept throwing me off in this movie. The two characters just have way too damned much in common.
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 10 October 2010 02:52 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
