Inception (2010)

 

Cobb and Arthur are "extractors"; they perform corporate espionage using experimental dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their targets' subconscious and extract information. Their latest target, Saito, is impressed with Cobb's ability to layer multiple dreams within each other. He offers to hire Cobb for the supposedly impossible job of implanting an idea into a person's subconscious; performing "inception" on Robert, the son of Saito's competitor Maurice Fischer, with the idea to dissolve his father's company. In return, Saito promises to clear Cobb's criminal status, allowing him to return home to his children.

Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: a forger named Eames, a chemist named Yusuf, and a college student named Ariadne. Ariadne is tasked with designing the dream's architecture, something Cobb himself can no longer do: his previous experiments with "inception" have had dangerous side effects that would almost certainly sabotage the mission.

Though of course, even with someone else designing the dream, I doubt it will surprise you to learn that Cobb's past will play a major role in complicating the job ...

Inception is essentially a heist movie with the added complication that the heist is occurring across multiple layers of a dream. The multiple dreamscape setting has a couple of interesting impacts.  As you might expect, events in the real world can affect the top-level dream, but so too events in the top-level dream can impact the one below it, and so on.  This creates some interesting opportunities for unusual environments and memorable action sequences.  The "hotel hallway fight" is a prime example of this, as the events of one dream cause the appearance of rapidly shifting gravity in the layer below.

Another side-effect of the multiple layers of dream is that time moves at escalating rates within each dream; a hour in dream 3 might be only a minute in dream 2, and a single second in dream 1, for instance.  This time dilation is a useful mechanism for the script to build tension, as events in lower level dreams are impacted by those above.  While I do think there are definitely times where the film stretched this time dilation on a little too long, it's overall a clever and effective mechanism.

The film is directed by Christopher Nolan.  I must confess to having seen only a little of this work: his first 2 Batman films, which I didn't much rate, and Memento, which I liked.  I'm pleased to say that my reaction to Inception much more in the vein of Momento.  And the two movies seem to have more in common than that.  Inception sees Nolan exploring with some similar themes to those he explored in the earlier film: firstly that you can't always trust what your eyes tell you; and secondly in playing with non-standard passage of time within the movie.  Memento more or less happened backwards, while as mentioned above, this film has multiple simultaneous sequences where time passes at different rates.

Overall, I think Inception is a pretty effective and entertaining film.  It's definitely helped in that regard by a fine cast who all do good work, though I would single out Tom Hardy in particular as he manages to stand-out even in this crowded field of talent.

I had a good time with this film, but if I had to offer one word of caution, it would be to note that Inception does feature a deliberately ambiguous ending.  I was okay with it as it didn't really damp the experience for me; but it may annoy some viewers.