"Inception" Inside Out

I had a great time with "Inception," the new science-fiction thriller from Christopher Nolan. After diligently avoiding any spoilers for the film over the past few weeks, now I'm honestly not sure it would have been so terrible if I did catch a few more details in advance. The plot of requires the precise set-up and explanation of so many different concepts, there's really no way to spoil anything important with just a sentence or two. However, this review will be considerably longer than a sentence, and I waited this long to post it so I could discuss a few of the labyrinthine story's specifics. So spoilers ahoy.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an Extractor, a man who can walk in other people's dreams, using techniques and technology that the film does not waste time trying to explain. He's engaged in corporate espionage when we first meet him, invading the dream of a Japanese executive named Saito (Ken Watanabe) in order to steal information. The dream is revealed to be a fabrication, the job is botched, and Dom and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are left with a choice – they can either go on the run to escape the wrath of their employers or take a job offer from Saito to perform a much more dangerous assignment.

Saito wants to implant an idea in the mind of one of his competitors, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), through a process known as "inception," where a target is brought into a specially designed dream, which allows invaders to simulate the natural genesis of an idea, and pass it off as the dreamer's own. Cobb quickly assembles his team, including a young dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), a "Forger," Eames (Tom Hardy), who can assume others' identities in dreams, and a chemist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who handles the vital sedatives and other compounds that control the dreaming. As the team makes preparations, Cobb struggles to deal with personal issues connected to his ex-wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose unexplained presence during recent jobs poses a looming threat.

"Inception" has been described as a heist film, albeit with a heist in reverse. The goal is not to steal information, as the trailers suggest, but to implant information deep into the subconscious mind of an unwary dreamer. It's an incredibly elaborate venture, requiring the dream manipulators to create multiple levels of dreams within dreams within dreams, and synchronize actions on each level. It's easy to lose track of what's going on, who is dreaming which dream, and what the rules are for each level. However, the visuals are so sharp and the structure of the story is so tight, it isn't as difficult to follow as it sounds. Christopher Nolan does an amazing job of creating and differentiating his dream worlds, and dropping little reminders at just the right moments to keep viewers up to speed. The way he handles the concept of time dilation in the various dream levels is especially novel.

The special effects in this film will be talked about for years, but what impressed me the most was how Nolan's use of them was fairly restrained. Most of the really eye-catching shots are featured in the film's trailers, but they don't figure that heavily into the story. It's fun to see Ariadne folding Paris in half and Arthur engaging in zero-G fisticuffs in a rotating hotel hallway, but it would have been easy to overuse those tricks, or let them become distracting. There's so much going on in the film, I never felt the need for any more stimulation. Some of the best visuals were the most subtle ones, like the dreamers' projections staring at an invader when they realize something is wrong. I especially appreciated that nearly every major effects sequence takes place during the daytime or in well-lit interiors, which is a lot easier on the eyes than the obscuring murk of "Dark City" or "Dreamscape," films that explore similar territory.

The characters are underdeveloped, which is inevitable in a film like this, but the performances are all excellent and we get a lot of subtle details about the various players that helps them register as three-dimensional personalities. At the end of the film I was surprised to realize that none of the team had turned out to be backstabbers or creeps, and you couldn't really call anyone a villain, though nearly everyone qualifies as an anti-hero. DiCaprio as Dom Cobb lacks the piercing, wild-eyed intensity we saw from him in Scorsese's "Shutter Island," but he's convincing here as a similarly troubled protagonist. The performance that really impressed me was Marion Cotillard's as the haunting Mal, a character whose integrity is shaky on all levels from the outset. Yet she provides such a strong emotional center to the film, Cobb's attachment to her is believable and this anchors all the other metaphysical parlor games.

There's been criticism that "Inception" is far too orderly and precise about its dream logic, especially in the way that it parses out the increments of time dilation and lacks any element of the bizarreness often associated with dreams, such as the flights of fancy found in Satoshi Kon's "Paprika." Nolan fanboys are already filling blogs and message boards with dissections of the film's structure, trying to figure out how the stated rules of dreams apply and how they might give clues to the ambiguous ending. However, after a single viewing, I'm fairly sure that the order and precision is just another illusion. None of the rules turn out to be hard and fast - most of them are subverted throughout the film. New tidbits of information are introduced at the last second to explain the discrepancies seem to make sense at the time, but fall apart upon closer inspection. Why does the lack of gravity affect the hotel level, but not any of the deeper ones? Why does suicide suddenly work as an escape hatch from Limbo instead of just sending the dreamer another level deeper into their subconscious? How did Cobb and Ariadne get to Limbo from the snow fortress level anyway?

As for flights of fancy, not everyone has them. I'm willing to bet that "Inception" looks a lot like the kind of dreams that Christopher Nolan has, full of nested puzzle-box universes and terribly intelligent people who say very reasonable, but impossible things. Batman fans are gunning for him to start working on a follow-up to "The Dark Knight," but if Nolan keeps turning out passion projects like this, I wouldn't mind if he kept the Bat on the back burner for as long as he likes. I'm not so sure that "Inception" is a great film, but it's ambitious, original, well made, and has pulled off a truly fantastic feat – it's gotten the summer blockbuster audience to *think.*