“Inception” Review

Note: This film begs repeat viewings, so consider this draft 1 of my review.

From the backwards timeline of the film Memento to the non-linear storytelling of The Prestige, director Christopher Nolan further explores his infatuation with time in his newest film Inception.

The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, a successful “Extractor” who is paid to extract secrets from people’s subconscious minds via their dreams. The idea of “Inception” is born when a client asks if there is a way to plant an idea in the mind of a corporate rival. Thus begins Cobb’s “one last hesit” of the mind.

For me the dreams conceit is an excuse for Nolan to dabble in his fetish with time as one of the film’s biggest plot devices is the idea of dreams within dreams and how the passage of time is exponentially lengthened at each layer. The movie is full of brilliant ideas like this that tap into recognizable details we’ve all experienced in dreams and fashions it into believable mythology. These rules and laws established in Nolan’s universe are mind-blowing yet completely make sense and is presented to the audience in an engagingly dynamic way.

Inception is full of bombastic headtripping sequences like this, but it’s when the film attempts to juggle these visual representations of deep ideas with cliched damaged character histories and some uninspiring action sequences that the film falters. A well-written comedy can be stripped of all its jokes and it would still work as a great drama. Inception fails that test. You strip away all the fantastical dream elements and you’re left with a plodding heist film and paper thin characters. Poor Ellen Page is stuck with clunky exposition through most of the film while Joseph Gordon Levitt is left floating around for 40 minutes.

The film brings up the notion of Inception being impossible to accomplish since the mark is aware of the manipulation—and that’s how I felt about the storytelling in this movie. I was constantly aware of its plot mechinations rather then being made to just relish in and accept it’s amazing ideas.

See and hear my full review of Inception on Episode 4 of This Week in Movies by subscribing to it on iTunes.

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