Movie Review: Inception

Oh my heavens was this fantastic! Christopher Nolan impressed me with Memento, entertained me with The Dark Knight, and completely blew my mind with Inception. It was cinematically stunning, perfectly paced, and intellectually compelling.

Our lead, Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is a new kind of criminal.  He maneuvers inside people's dreams in order to steal their secrets.  Skilled at the art of extraction, he is now asked to insert an idea into a subject's mind, a dangerous and intricate action which requires multiple dream layers and multiple players all of whom are risking their lives for this one payoff.

With an evocative narrative, the film was complex enough to be mentally stimulating, but still cogent enough to be satisfying. No easy task when the plot revolves around multiple realities - dreams within dreams, all needing to be perfectly orchestrated despite the absence of utter control within the dream world.  

An exotic blend of fantasy and reality, the world within the film was subject to flights of fancy such as folding a city in half and shifting gravity.  This world lacking the laws of physics allowed for Matrix-esque fight scenes, power through grace, on a grand scale. It also allowed Nolan (and cinematographer Wally Pfister) to construct beautiful images.

I do wish there had been more time for character development; outside of Cobb (DiCaprio) and Fischer (Murphy) we know almost nothing about the characters, and even those two aren't overly complex. We know some motivations and can relate to them on some level, but this simple fact, this one piece is all we know. Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) is an absolutely fascinating character from a personality standpoint, and yet all I know about him is that he is Cobb's right-hand man. Ariadne is clearly brilliant and compassionate, but she has no real story other than as a conscience for Cobb. While it may seem that this really bothered me, I have to admit that it was not something I noticed while watching. It was only in the days that followed I found myself wondering.

The film is a treasure trove of symbolism. Ariadne, the architect, is also the name of a Greek heroine who led Theseus out of the Labyrinth; Mal is French for evil; even the song used to cue dreamers to wake up is symbolic; and I could go on... I may have to use this for my Introduction to Film course, which means that my movie-buying-ban may be in the bag for the first time since I started Netflix.

In short, go see it. Multiple times if possible.