Inception: overhyped film remains in dream limbo

Christopher Nolan, “Inception” (2010)

I found this film disappointing despite the ingenious combination of
science fiction with the conventions of an action heist film, based on
the notion that one day it might be possible for strangers to invade
one’s dreams and muck around in there stealing secrets and planting
ideas and impulses that end up defining who you are and your life’s
work. I don’t expect a great deal from Christopher Nolan as a director:
the ideas he has for his movies may be good but their eventual execution
falls far from brilliant even when you allow for conformity with
Hollywood and mainstream audience expectations. I’m sure David Lynch,
Terry Gilliam or David Cronenberg among other Hollywood directors would
have made something far more interesting and much wackier with the idea
of a dream-thief and his team implanting a notion into the head of an
heir to a corporate energy empire to force him to break it up. The
result might be messy and confusing for the audience to follow, with
sub-plots that might break off suddenly and remain unresolved in the way
of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Various snide asides and jokes at the
corporate world and about mind surgery would be dropped along key points
in the plot to relieve tension, lighten the mood and enable some
character development. With the idea in Nolan’s hands, everything
becomes part of a cool, glossy, sterile corporate-world veneer of glass
skyscrapers, picturesque historical architecture, marble floors and
people in expensive suits. Scenes of fighting and mayhem shot in a
Kenyan locale look well-ordered and clean with one narrow passage
between buildings strangely free of rubbish, pools of smelly water and
scavenging dogs. Even cities in the First World aren’t that
dental-flossingly clean! An unseen inflexible logic lurks in this world,
allowing nothing to disturb it and pursuing and getting rid of anyone or
anything that does.

In order to properly plant the idea into the victim’s head, the
dream-thief Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo di Caprio) and his companions –
an apt description as one of these people, Ariadne (Ellen Page), is a
novice at dream invasions and needs must have the parameters and
pitfalls of the inception explained to her (so the audience understands
what’s involved) in the way Doctor Who explains his actions to yet
another befuddled female Earthling he’s taken a shine to – find they
have to descend to four levels of dreamscapes, each one dreamt by a
different team member who must stay on that level in order to bring back
his fellows from a deeper level by a device or series of devices they
call the “kicker”. I happen to find it easier to view each dream as
being on a “lower” or “inner” level from the next as though they are
parts of a progressive vertical hierarchy. Each dreamscape runs at a
different pace of time so that the main action bar the kicker on one
level can finish before the team can enter a lower level. Hence we have
constant flipovers during the last hour of “Inception” to a van falling
in slow motion from a bridge to a river below. It’s very curious that
activity on the higher dreamscape level can affect levels lower down but
the effects of activity on the lower levels cannot filter up. Equally
curious is that Cobb’s guilt feelings about his dead wife Mal (Marion
Cotillard) intrude into the various dreamscapes while any subconscious
feelings Ariadne and the other team members might have resolutely stay
away from the dreamscapes.

Along the way, one of Cobb’s companions and instigator cum corporate
sponsor of the heist, Saito (Ken Watanabe), suffers serious injury on
one level which causes him to die on a lower level. This in turn sends
him to dream limbo and risks putting him in a permanent coma in real
life so Cobb diverts into a sub-plot – and another dream loop – to save
Saito. They end up recreating in mirror form a scene from the film’s
opening frames in which an aged Saito faces Cobb over a polished black
table. In these frames Saito asks Cobb if he wants to die old and alone
with regrets – in order to induce him into the inception caper – in the
recreation, it’s Cobb who asks the question of Saito to get him out of
dream limbo and back to reality. This is the climactic scene of the
movie: both Cobb and Saito are faced with a choice to continue dreaming
(and cut themselves off their loved ones in real life) or to return to
reality (and cut themselves off their memories of their loved ones, dead
or alive). I half-expect at this point they realise they’re in “Blade
Runner” so they pull out a Voight-Kampff polygraph test from under the
table to determine their human / replicant status and then exchange
origami unicorns. Instead, the extended denouement that follows becomes
a kind of limbo between the dream world and reality in which all loose
plot ends are apparently tied and the viewers must decide if they’re
watching Cobb in dream limbo or reality.

What impresses me is the conservatism and narrowness of Nolan’s vision:
the dream-thieves are contracted for a job to break up a corporate
monopoly in the long term. This is done mostly for the benefit of Saito
who altruistically includes his fellow corporate competitors as
beneficiaries. Nothing is said about any possible benefits or
disadvantages of this con-job to the planet and its inhabitants. Dom
Cobb has his reasons for accepting the job but the motives of his fellow
dream-travellers (apart from Saito) remain unknown and these people
remain one-dimensional for that. Ariadne initially is repelled but
decides to go to keep an eye on Cobb’s subconscious. The dream-worlds
they enter are banal even by our own Hollywood movie dream standards: an
urban highway chase scene in one dream, an attack on a fortress (which
turns out to be a hospital) in snowy country in another, a swish 5-star
hotel in a third. We may share the same culture so our dreams will often
be very similar in background scenery and symbols, no matter how kitschy
and trite they are, but the links and inter-actions among those symbols
and their meaning or significance have creative potential for something
original, something subversive, and become very personal. In the dreams
that feature in this movie, Nolan doesn’t attempt even in a small way to
play around with film genres like action film, science fiction film,
film noir or spy films that might extend their creative potential or
comment on the nature of making movies. (The aforementioned scenes
involving Cobb and Saito may themselves comment on linear plot
narrative.) For whichever genre appears in “Inception”, its conventions
are studiously obeyed. Irony and playfulness are replaced by explosions,
constant flipping among dream narratives and go-go-go action which
demands more energy than skill from the actors involved.

The result renders “Inception” as a smooth and efficient film with
little zest and soul. The film slots into a category along with James
Cameron’s “Avatar”, Cronenberg’s “eXisteNZ”, Gabriele Salvatores’s
“Nirvana” and possibly even Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (which
I’ve not seen) among others. In these films, characters take on other
identities and go into other “worlds” to interact with inhabitants of
those places: there is often a hidden agenda behind the purported
reasons for doing so. It may be cavalier or depressing to some that I
should treat the world of dreams as no different from virtual reality
worlds or brain / technology interfacing but other reviews of
“Inception” have noted the similarities between the dreamscape world and
computer games. This may have been part of Nolan’s intention when he
conceived the idea for the movie. In its drive to attract teenage and
young adult audiences, at home with the idea of blurred identities and
multiple fractured narratives that have an inner logic, Hollywood
undoubtedly will invest more money in directors and writers who can
deliver a similar style of film as “Inception” and its kind. If these
films can give us memorable characters and something challenging and
subversive about the way we see the world, that would be a bonus but
such bonuses are very rare in the rapacious and amoral corporate world
“Inception” seems to aspire to.

Contact: Official “Inception” movie website,
http://inceptionmovie.warnerbros.com/

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