"I've come back for you... to remind you of something.
Something you once knew... That this world is not real."
Inception is one of those rare movies that not only got me hyped with the trailer, but more than delivered on it's promises.
I remember seeing the poster with that stereotypical loner-with-his-back to the camera layout and even though it said "from the director of
The Dark Knight", which I thought was great, I wasn't impressed.
It wouldn't be until I sat in one of the D-Box demo seats outside my local theater (which actually seriously narrows down
the number of places I could have seen the movie) that I first saw the trailer.
I sat through that trailer several times and while I would eventually become disappointed that Zack Hemsey's
Mind Heist wouldn't appear in the movie or even the official soundtrack, the movie more than delivered on the tone and concepts it promises.
In fact, Inception baffled me with the sheer scope and complexity it ran with, flying directly in the face of recent blockbusters, by presenting what
appears to be an action movie, but really leans the brunt of it's weight on the concepts and emotional themes it plays with. Again,
spoilers here, but how often do you find yourself needing to track the events of a movie with a diagram? Let alone THIS kind of diagram?
Holy **** is that a lot to keep track of! But unlike most other movies which are complicated because they're poorly written, Inception holds no cards save the explanation of the dream device which is necessary to rationalize the story in the first place. Nearly EVERYTHING is given to the viewers to keep track of what's going on and it's edited to be presentable and digestible so that the onus is on the viewer to understand and interpret exactly what's happening and why onscreen.
Originally, I thought that my biggest complaint about the movie was simply the liberty it took to justify the plot, the contrivance that time goes slower in the dream than it does in reality. This is the total inverse what anyone who's ever dreamed knows to be true, but it's one of the only serious suspensions of disbelief asked of us and I find it more than acceptable to justify the plot.
However now, on my latest go-round, I feel that Inception actually suffers far and away most by it's complicated setup. It takes a LONG TIME, nearly half the movie to feed the audience enough information to keep us oriented in the second half and even then it's still very easy to lose track of which dream is who's and even what some of the characters' names are.
I know Ariadne, Cobb, Mal, Saito... uh... Fischer... uh... Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Tom Hardy. Pharmacist Guy. And that's just the characters' names.
It's a lot of exposition, which HONESTLY is well disguised amidst it's pacing and presentation, but it's still exposition. A LOT OF IT and I think it's easily the biggest reason why I find myself resistant to watch it again because it's a rough climb to the good bits. It's not bad, it's just not very easy going down.
Aside from that I pleased to see that a movie so intellectually demanding also offers some potent emotional narrative. The idea of Cobb literally haunted by his ex-wife in a world where dreams are tangible realities is compelling and I think it's worked in excellently with the central narrative of Inception.
WARNING: "Inception" spoilers below The ending is fantastic too with the question of whether everything is a dream or not left hanging in the air. I think a big reason why the ending is so effective though is that the movie specifically includes a scene that would rationalize a "bad ending":
Earlier we see Cobb testing Pharmacist Guy's sedative in a nameless room where people are left to dream because "the dream has become their reality". Shortly after, Cobb awakens and escapes to the bathroom to spin his totem to test whether he's still awake or dreaming. We've seen this a couple times by this point and know what it means, but this is the last time he does it before he performs the Inception job and he's interrupted.
We never do see whether he was dreaming or not. It could very well be that Cobb is also in one of those beds, dreaming out his happy ending.
That is if Word of God didn't say that wasn't the case. I'm cool with that, I'll certainly accept a happy ending with a splash of BUT WHAT IF!?
The ending is fantastic too with the question of whether everything is a dream or not left hanging in the air. I think a big reason why the ending is so effective though is that the movie specifically includes a scene that would rationalize a "bad ending":
Earlier we see Cobb testing Pharmacist Guy's sedative in a nameless room where people are left to dream because "the dream has become their reality". Shortly after, Cobb awakens and escapes to the bathroom to spin his totem to test whether he's still awake or dreaming. We've seen this a couple times by this point and know what it means, but this is the last time he does it before he performs the Inception job and he's interrupted.
We never do see whether he was dreaming or not. It could very well be that Cobb is also in one of those beds, dreaming out his happy ending.
That is if Word of God didn't say that wasn't the case. I'm cool with that, I'll certainly accept a happy ending with a splash of BUT WHAT IF!?
Ultimately, Inception is a must watch. It asks you to think harder than your average movie while playing with themes of reality, dreams, and ideas. It offers some impressive setpieces, particularly those involving absence of gravity, and it's a solid emotional gutpunch which is thumbs up in my book.
I first saw
Inception when it released in 2010 and it remains one of my fondest movie-going experiences. So rarely do I see a trailer, am immediately sold, then go and see the movie, and get exactly what was advertised.
6 years later I wrote the above review, giving it top marks, but I later removed it from my Favorites list and have been resistant to see it again until now... another 6 years later. It's become another one of those movies, which, while I casually granted a high rating based on my strong first experience of it, I have always remained skeptical of my own opinion and privately braced myself to think differently about it after giving it some time.
It has now been over a decade since the movie has released, to glowing fanfare, and a legacy of other movies borrowing it's
BWOM sound effect so prominent in the trailer.
So how does it hold up?
Well, overall, I am still extremely impressed with the movie. In all the years since, and across all of the movies I've reviewed since 6/27/2016, I have yet to see a movie I'd so readily call "intelligent". That may sound pretentious, and I want to avoid using the term "challenging" since it's not exactly a
hard movie to follow or "complicated" at the risk of sounding negative, but how else can I describe a movie that asks me, as a viewer, to mentally keep track of 5 different timelines, operating at different speeds, and synchronizing across them with the same characters playing different roles all in the pursuit of presenting
a reverse sci-fi heist, complete with foreshadowing, plot twists, a cliffhanger ending, and an emotional subtext to tug at your heartstrings.
This must read like the most delusional, over-ambitious piece of shit movie ever conceived, but I'd be completely lying if I said it didn't knock almost all of it out of the park.
Trying not to retread stuff I've already talked about, I would still agree that this movie takes a significant degree of exposition to get up to speed, not just to establish the setting, the characters, and their roles, but also rationalizing the creative liberties necessary for the plot to make sense.
I don't think it was at all necessary for them to pull the "you use 10% of your brainpower except when you're asleep" line, it really only exists to double down on the "you perceive more time when you're asleep", which is completely opposite of my dreaming experience.
It's dumb, but it's a small concession for the story it allowed them to tell. And it helps that again this movie is presented like a heist thriller, which greases the exposition scenes the same way a bank heist movie would go. We're given a clear idea of their plans and how it's expected to go, so we have the strongest grasp of what's going on when it inevitably goes wrong.
The whole movie is engaging, but that doesn't change the fact that it still has to dump all that pretext on us before events can simply unfold and allow us to experience them as they happen.
Now to actually get into some story gripes for once, because while this movie is incredibly thoughtful, it is not without apparent plotholes:
The concept of a kick is not clearly distinguished from suicide. It's argued that killing yourself under a certain level of sedation wouldn't lift you up one dream level, but that it would send you to "Limbo", a non-deepest depth of dreaming with unclear properties beyond the understanding that because of the way time works, anyone in limbo could be forced to live a very long time over what may be a few minutes in the real world.
Both Saito and Cobb are presented as though they've forgotten that Limbo is a dream, but why would that be a property of Limbo? It's implied that they can simply kill themselves to escape which seems to trivialize the threat of ending up in limbo in the first place because if killing yourself once sends you deeper, but killing yourself again wakes you up... what's the concern?
Again, this turns entirely on the assumption that Limbo would cause you to forget that you're dreaming, but no part of the movie suggests why that would be,
especially considering how Fischer is able to maintain a contiguous memory of the previous dream, even though he didn't create the dreams until then.
Why also does the anti-gravity effect extend to dream Layer 2 when the van is in free-fall, but not into Layer 3 when the elevator is?
How does Cobb even get to Limbo? We literally cut from the apartment in what I thought was Limbo to him laying out in the waves elsewhere... in Limbo? There's seriously no transition between these scenes.
The worst line in this movie is when Mal drops from the ceiling in army fatigues in Dream Layer 3 and shoots Fischer and Cobb deadass asks "how can you be sure" she's not real instead of shooting her. It's so completely contrived for his character to do that in that moment since he's been adamantly insisting that she's not real the entire movie. It's just an awful excuse to shoot Fischer and drag out the movie even more.
My least favorite character in the whole movie is easily Ellen Page as Ariadne and I definitely felt this way when the movie was new.
Juno came out 3 years prior so she was basically at the height of her popularity at the time and it really felt like she was just the celebrity casting choice. Main reason for this being that her role as the "Architect" is so poorly communicated by the events of the movie. Other characters, like Tom Hardy's Eames play an active role in the actual perpetration of the inception. The other characters shoot guns, drive vans, set explosives, time the kicks, are otherwise rationalized to have made them custom drugs offscreen...
But Page is supposed to be the "architect" that "designs the dreams" and "teaches the dreams" whatever the **** that means. So she's the one who dreams up the world and everyone else populates it. We don't want the population to become aware of her dreaming though, so she has to design the world in such a way as to mitigate interaction, just as by the example of "closed loop" paradoxes.
This is NEVER shown in practice in the movie, each dream is just one big environment, and she's only the dreamer of the
Layer 1, so why is the only closed loop paradox shown in Layer 2? JGL is shown to be the dreamer of Layer 2 and he's the one explaining how much of this shit works in the first place, so we don't need her! Are we just describing random doors and paths through traffic as parts of a maze?
Am I supposed to take for granted that every Dream Layer is actually full of invisible walls secretly implemented by Ariadne and no character runs into them?
Having no obvious role in the heist and just tagging along is bad enough, but her entire character seems to exist purely to concern-troll Cobbs about Mal every ****ing step of the way. She brings up Mal and even deliberately engages Mal more than any other character, ostensibly because the transient "danger" she poses.
Sure we get a train flying out of nowhere...
once... in the Dream Layer SHE was chiefly responsible for, but we're already expecting projections in the dream to be trying to kill the cast! So what does it matter if one of them literally prefers to take a knife to a gunfight!? JUST SHUT THE HELL UP, GOD!
I also just don't like Ellen Page. I liked her in
Hard Candy, but I thought
Juno was awful, her video game,
Beyond: Two Souls was a joke, and now she's a millionaire whinging online about wearing dresses to red carpet events. What a tortured existence she must live.
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