Great Films of the 21st Century: Inception (2010)

 

Inception 

Director: Christopher Nolan. 

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard. 

Rated: PG-13 (for sequences of violence and action throughout). 

Running time: 2:28. 

Cinema has angered me, moved me to tears, made me laugh until it hurt. It has enthralled, exhilarated me and physically drained me at times.

But I have not seen anything quite like “Inception;” a film that left me shaking my head at how creative it is. I cannot recall a time when I finished watching a film and was awed by its accomplishment.

And mind you, this is an exhibition of creativity within a rather conventional framework. It uses characters we’ve perhaps seen before, a story that is also quite familiar to us. Yet Nolan’s work still comes across as new and exciting, which is perhaps his most subtle yet most significant accomplishment here. It’s just one of many within the film.

Here, Nolan goes back to familiar territory, the kind he explored when he made “Memento.” He is apparently intrigued, or perhaps obsessed, with the relationship between reality and fantasy. More specifically, he explores the complex relationship between our memories, our subconscious and how they guide us.

The military has developed technology allowing the willful entrance into dreams and sharing them with others. That opens up the possibility of people going in and extracting information, which is what Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) does for a living. He is hired by corporations to go in and steal ideas from people’s subconscious.

His latest and last job is to do something that is quite a bit more difficult. He is to introduce an idea so that it can take hold and ultimately benefit the corporate CEO Saito (Ken Watanabe) who hired him. The target is young billionaire Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who will head a company that rivals Saito’s.

There is a reason why Cobb takes on such a complex job. He wants to get home to his family. He is accused of a crime and cannot go home to America. If he’s successful with this last job, Saito has the ability to clear him.

Cobb’s team consists of an architect, the person dreaming who creates the maze for others to follow. New recruit Ariadne (Ellen Page) will design the dream for the last job. She is a young student in Paris recommended by Cobb’s mentor. Cobb teaches her how to navigate and even control dreaming, which is essentially our lesson as well.

It’s a complex subject at that. Nolan runs the risk of alienating us if he bombards with too much detail, too much scientific theory. If he were to oversimplify, it’s not interesting enough, so our attention drifts. It’s a tightrope he is on as he’s writing and filming.

But this is why Nolan is so good at what he does. There will certainly be plenty of debate over what has truly happened here. Specifics become a little fuzzy. We’re never quite sure. But Nolan guides us expertly. There are bound to be details we’ve missed. But by the end, we don’t feel as though everything was too obtuse.

To counterbalance the somewhat technical nature of dream navigation, Nolan inserts an emotional core to the story, as there was in “Memento.” That core is the thing that drives Cobb, why he can’t be an architect anymore. One person from his past keeps popping up. It is why this has to be his last job. The risks of continuing are just too great.

Because of the conflict between Cobb and his nemesis, whether real or imagined, we are invited to become emotionally invested, not just passive observers.

With each dream state, the visual effects used to create them are spectacular. Nolan’s visual representations of dream states are rooted in reality. But computer generated effects allow for manipulation of those states in a fantastic fashion. The scene in the trailer is a perfect example. As soon as Ariadne discovers how to control dreams when she’s the architect, she literally folds the city of Paris in half just to see if she can do it.

It is the best use of computer generated effects: subordinate and complimentary to the script’s overall purpose. It’s not the other way around, where a film is created around a new computer technique.

There are those who attempt to be auteurs, the artists who are in control of most if not every aspect of their art. In film, they are the ones who write, direct, perhaps act as well. Many cannot handle being spread so thinly. But Nolan succeeds and thus has become one of the most exciting filmmakers working today.