In my opinion, Inception, the new film by Christopher Nolan, is not a masterpiece. To be sure, I saw it sitting next to a group of people I consider it reasonably intelligent who seemed to have their minds blown. And its failure to become a hallmark of modern cinema doesn’t mean I didn’t have an enjoyable time, and leave the cinema feeling resentment for the nine dollars I spent to see it. But, this year alone, I would have said the same thing for Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island, Grown Ups, and Iron Man 2. Yes, I will go ahead and put Inception on par with those films.
Especially Shutter Island. People are starting to say not nice things about Leonardo DiCaprio. Not me. I’m all for him starting a tradition of pudgy matinee idols. I will, however, question why he would choose two films in the same year linked so closely thematically. I mean, how many times can one actor question his personal reality without being typecast?
Besides Leo, there are a few other familiar faces in Inception that usually put a smile on mine: namely, Ellen Page (Juno) and Jason Gordon-Levitt (Third Rock from the Sun, (500) Days of Summer). Other people you will recognize are Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, Public Enemies), Cillian Murphy (the Scarecrow from Batman Begins), and Tom Berenger (Major League), and a cameo by Michael Caine (from you know what). I would tell you their characters’ names, except they’re kind of unimportant and forgettable, except Dom Cobb (DiCaprio), which I believe might be the most cacophonous name I’ve ever heard.
I heard a girl outside the theater decry that the plot was so unfit for articulation as to be sublime. That isn’t true at all. Two thieves (DiCaprio and Gordon-Levitt) steal information—on commission—from people’s minds. They are hired by a shadowy, important Asian man (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea—the “inception” of the title—in the mind of the heir to a vast energy corporation (Murphy) to dissolve it. By doing this they will save the world—or something. More importantly for Cobb, shadowy Asian man will fix it so he may re-emigrate to the United States and see his children. Cobb has a lot of personal problems which I will not ruin for you.
I hope you found that synopsis riveting, because there’s a lot of exposition within the movie, with poor Page bearing the brunt of it. Nolan feels compelled to violate the first rule of writing (especially in writing a script) to show more than tell, feeling the rules of mind travel to be complex to be understood by the audience intuitively. I think this should have raised some red flags, but I digress.
One could argue that this movie isn’t so much about plot as it is a tour de force of visceral images. However, it looked pretty standard to me. I haven’t seen anything for quite a while that has taken me aback, although I foolishly passed up the opportunity to see Avatar in theatres because I thought I was taking some sort of stand for storytelling. The technical aspects make me feel like I do about the whole of the movie: my qualifications could be lacking, but what I saw in Inception was an average (though not bad) movie.
Inception is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout.
