On Inception
Inception: A Movie Review
by John David Ebert
Inception is the latest film from Christopher Nolan, of whose two earlier films The Dark Knight and The Prestige I am a huge fan. I think he’s less successful this time out, since this film is not as good as those others, but it is still worth seeing. Nolan is showing himself to be a skilled director with good storytelling instincts and he is becoming an auteur in an age when auteurs are vanishing. Directors are a dime a dozen these days, and most Hollywood movies seem like they are directed by the same person. The businessmen have regained power over the industry as they used to have prior to the film school generation of the 1960s, and directors are entirely at their mercy. As a result, there is little going on in film these days: no risk taking, just one “safe” commercial bet after the next. I’ve never seen Hollywood so dull.
So at least with Inception we’re getting fresh storytelling with few cliches. It is not a formula film: there is plenty of action, but it unfolds at its own leisurely pace and dialogue fuels the majority of the scenes. It is a movie that you have to listen to carefully in order to understand what’s going on.
The premise, though, is not totally new: it is a reworking of the kinds of material that we saw in David Cronenberg’s Existenz and Tarsem Singh’s The Cell or, further back, Total Recall. Leonardo di Caprio plays Cobb, a man who specializes in entering, and raiding, the unconscious of other people’s minds, usually on behalf of corporations who want him to get data. In the present case, he is assigned to enter the mind of the son of a business tycoon whose father is dying and instead of taking data out, he must place an “inception” in the form of an idea: a rival corporation wants him to “originate” the idea of dividing up his father’s business so that it will no longer have any competition.
Cobb doesn’t do the job alone, however, for he has a team: the architect is a woman named Ariadne whose job is to imagine the structure of the dream, so that it will have a consensual frame to it that can be shared by others. He has a forger, as well, and the coporate tycoon who has hired him wants to come along for the ride. The rules of the game are simple yet complex: if you “die” in the dream, you wake up (unless you are heavily sedated, in which case, you run the risk of falling into Limbo). And the dream’s creator must not use memories to forge the dream’s landscape, otherwise he will introduce elements that can disturb its equilibrium. And if the person who is doing the raiding draws attention to himself, then the other person’s subconscious will treat him as a foreign agent, and its people projections will begin to attack him like white blood cells. Fun stuff.
But the most interesting part is Nolan’s concept of the dream within a dream: the film’s architecture is based on a simultaneously running sequence of three or four dreams that are going on, each inside the other, like Chinese boxes. Anything that happens in one dream, such as a car falling off a bridge, can send tremors through the “worlds” of the other dreams. And there is a recognition of the relativity of Time, which moves slower and slower within each of the dreams. In the time it takes that car to fall off the bridge in the “outermost” dream, for example, a heavily guarded fortress can be stormed, raided and destroyed a la James Bond.
Nolan’s film is complex thematically. The experience of going to a movie and sitting with an audience while watching it is in fact a kind of shared dream, and so Nolan’s premise of people participating in shared dreams seems at one level to be a disguised commentary on the nature of film itself. Cobb, on this reading, might be an avatar of Nolan himself, the dream designer, while Ariadne, his co-designer would correspond to his muse. She is the only one in the film who constantly voices objections to the nature of what Cobb is doing and the dangers of how his “public” dreams are becoming more and more contaminated by his personal memories. Cobb’s dead wife keeps trying to sabotage his operations by appearing unexpectedly in the middle of his dream missions. The narrative itself almost seems to imply that Nolan is unsure about the nature of what he is doing as a filmmaker. Should he be making quiet independent films like his earlier Memento? Or stick to the big, noisy Hollywood shoot ‘em ups? His muse seems to have doubts about the latter.
Another question the film asks is about ideas. Where do they come from and who, or what originates them? In ancient times, people did not think that they “originated” their own ideas. Instead, they recognized that their ideas came to them from the gods. Mohammad, for example, did not write the Koran; the angel Gabriel dictated it to him. The rishis, likewise, who were the authors of the Rig Veda, did not invent the poems themselves; rather, they “heard” them sung by the gods. But ever since about the fifteenth century or so, it is the human being himself who has become the source of his own thoughts. This is the deep structure of Descartes’ discovery of the cogito, for instance. It is I who thinks; not some Other who thinks through me.
In Nolan’s narrative, it is not Fischer who comes up with the idea to divide his father’s corporation. The idea is implanted into him externally by dream technologists who dive down into his psyche and put it there. The Muse, in other words, has been technologized. Nowadays, our ideas are coming to us from the Machines, which send avatars plunging into the depths of the minds of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates. The result is the almost total mechanization of the world around us.
There’s a lot going on in Nolan’s film (the wonderful use of the Oriental Chinese box method of storytelling, for instance; or the retrieval of the archaic multi-tiered cosmos which once upon a time composed the fabric of creation), and I could continue explicating it long past the scope of this review. But I’ll stop here, for despite the film’s thematic richness, I walked away from Inception feeling unsatisfied. Something was missing from the film that should have been there but wasn’t, and I’m not sure I can pin down what it was.
Perhaps it is that the premise is more promising than the story that Nolan actually delivers. His dreamworlds didn’t seem to me to be particularly imaginative. The fantasial imagery of folding topologies of cities and floating people is kept to a minimum, which I think was a mistake. Basically, what you see in the trailer is just about all the fantastic imagery that turns up in the film. I guess I expected Nolan to do something more imaginative with his dreamworld premise. After all, it is a dreamworld, right? Theoretically, you should be able to do anything with it. But his dreamscapes seemed remarkably stable to me; rather than being inside of a dream, I felt like I was watching three James Bond movies simultaneously. Dream imagery is usually more florid. I think David Cronenberg in Existenz, for example, got the feeling of a dream just right, with all his irrational segways and strange, squishy creatures. Nolan’s dreamscapes are too rational, too stable and too unimaginative to be convincing dream stuff.
But, as I said, the film is worth seeing, if only because there’s nothing else out there this summer. At least, it’s not a sequel or a remake.
[ See Comments, below, for thoughts by Lobell ]
