Review: Inception (2010)

Background

Director: Christoper Nolan
Writer: Christoper Nolan
Running Time: 2 hours, 28 minutes
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine

Minimal Spoiler Section

Welcome to my review of the 2010 blockbuster, Inception. There are plenty of positive reviews out there about this film, from critics to your own friends and family. I’m here to tell everyone to take them with a grain of salt. I’m not here to say the film was terrible, or that it doesn’t live up to the hype at all. What I will be talking about is how it didn’t quite match up to my expectations, and left me a little disappointed that the potential of this film was lost to the mainstream Transformers (2009) audience.

Yeah, I’m a little cynical. Mainly because I felt this script had so much potential as an intellectual psychological thriller but opted for the action over story. Overall, I felt the film was too long to follow such a complex and foreign idea. The running time of this film was just about 2.5 hours which isn’t terribly long but it sure seems like it when you’re trying to wrap your brain around one new thing after the next. Don’t get me wrong, though. The overall concept is brilliant – possibly even better than Nolan’s earlier film, Memento (2000).

The background of the storyline is somewhat along the lines of what was written by a philosopher from 300BC named Chuang Tzu. Now the story isn’t quite this simple, but it does follow a similar concept:

Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly.
What joy, floating on the breeze
Without a thought of who he was.
When Chuang Tzu awoke, he found himself confused.

“Am I a man who dreamed I was a butterfly?
Or am I a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man?
Perhaps my whole life is but a moment in a butterfly’s dream!”

Essentially, a team of corrupt dream thieves (who essentially create dream worlds and let their target fill it with valuable thoughts), are given the task of implanting an idea into a target’s head, dubbed “Inception”. In order to make the dream feel real, they must enter multiple levels of dreams (i.e. dream within a dream), and manipulate their target’s subconscious. Still with me? Great! Most of the film is this “levelling up” in their target’s dream world (not unlike a video game), which, at around the 3rd dream level, feels a tad monotonous.

Though this film has a fairly high complexity to it, it’s got plenty of great looking action sequences to match the brainy parts. Essentially, Nolan mashed Memento and The Dark Knight (2008) together, creating a quasi-psychological-action-thriller. Sounds awesome, right? Well here is where I think the film falls down a bit. By dedicating so much time to the action sequences and then the rest of the time to the super-complex plot, which traverses multiple dream levels, you’re left with very little time for any character development. By the end, I didn’t feel like I was rooting for any of the characters. Of course, this also comes with such a large cast (6 people on the team along with antagonists and secondary characters).

If you’re into action and really cool psychological concepts, a la The Matrix (1999), you’ll absolutely love Inception. If you like character-driven plotlines, you’ll still find plenty to like about the film, but you might come out a little empty-handed by the time the ending rolls around, 2.5 hrs later.

Spoilers Section

Watching the film, you’ll note a lot of similarities to this year’s Shutter Island (2010) right from the get-go. Dom Cobb, the main character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, washes up on shore of an island with the water lapping over his face. Throughout the film, Cobb is haunted by visions of his dead wife, Mal, played by Marion Cotillard. Seeing the similarities yet? Well there’s more. Throughout the film, there are plenty of hints that tell Cobb that he needs to “come back to reality”, as if he were dreaming. It almost felt too obvious to be true. But lo-and-behold, he seems to be dreaming in the final shot of the film, but it’s too vague to be certain. If you remember Shutter Island, there were many hints throughout the script that told Teddy (also played by Leo) that everything he was experiencing was a game — that it wasn’t real — which of course turned out to be the truth.

Like I mentioned before, by the time they entered the fourth dream world, I couldn’t have cared less whether Cobb stayed with Mal or gave himself a “kick” to get out of the dream. The one important aspect of the script that I wish they had changed was the fact that they had entered three dream levels, and then ended up venturing into a fourth. They could have just as easily said they were going to do two dream levels and wind up going to three. I think that was Nolan’s biggest blunder in production of the film. If he had opted for three dream levels overall instead of four, the plot would have been far less confusing to keep track of, they would have had much more time to develop the characters’ backstories and it wouldn’t have felt as drawn out as it did.

But I can’t deny that it was an awesome story.