Friday Films: Inception

Last Friday, as the heat index crept upward, I went to a matinee of Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception.  It seemed like the perfect way to beat the heat for a few hours, to duck into an air-conditioned theater and watch an action movie.  I expected a good movie, a summer action movie, but I had no idea I would emerge from the theater, two-and-a-half hours later, with my mind completely blown.  I couldn't stop talking about the movie all weekend, telling anyone who would listen that they had to see it.  Like The Dark Knight, Nolan takes the idea of "summer action movie" and turns it to his purposes, producing one of the smartest action movies I have ever seen.

The plot revolves around Dominic Cobb, a dream-thief who is able to steal information from his subjects' subconscious.  He has been exiled from his home and kept away from his children, and he's offered a chance to go home if he can accomplish "inception": planting an idea in a subject's mind.  He assembles his team, which includes a chemist, a forger, and an architect, to go into the mind of a corporate heir and convince him to break up his father's company.  Their plan involves a dream within a dream within a dream, which will allow them to plant the idea deep in the subconscious.  It also allows Nolan to toggle between several layers of reality, each with their own rules of physics and time.

This aspect of the movie was one of my favorite parts: Nolan made the rules, and then he told his story within them, and I love when a science fiction movie does this.  He explains, enough that no one should be lost, how time works within a dream, and how going deeper into the dream-world (another "level" down) affects the movement of time.  Physical effects are also felt at deeper levels.  So in the first level of the dream, as a van falls off of a bridge, the gravity in the second level kicks off.  And this fall, which takes only a few seconds in real-time, takes significantly longer to get to the next levels, allowing the characters to do what they need to at the lower levels.

Through the film, Cobb's dead wife, Mal, keeps showing up in the dreams.  She operates as something of a wild card through the film, with Cobb's guilt over her death making her into a vengeful specter throughout the dreams.  She arrives just in time to cause chaos during Cobb's missions, and the movie lets us know, through Ellen Page's character Ariadne, that the success of the inception mission depends on Cobb confronting Mal in the lower levels of the subconscious.  I love that I just got to write that sentence in a review of a summer blockbuster.

This is a movie that could have very easily been a confusing, sloppy mess.  When you're dealing with dreams and actions that take place largely in the imagination, and a plot that warps notions of time and space, it's pretty simple to let the fact that it is all a dream allow you to dismiss logic and order and have some sloppy writing.  Instead, Nolan set the rules, and he played within them.  The movie made perfect sense according to its own logic, and that's really what I want out of a science fiction film like this one.  I've heard there are some critics who think that the dreams in the films were too orderly, but I think that was a choice Nolan made to have a really cohesive film, and I prefer it to the latter, something that could have turned out really navel-gazing and dull.

I believe Inception will be a movie worth watching again, because the director's other movies become more layered and complex the more you watch them.  Once you know the twist in The Prestige, you notice all of the clues scattered throughout the movie.  I'm interested to see what kinds of surprises the director tucked into the dreams onscreen here, and what other layers we'll see on the next viewing.  Maybe he intends it to work like a recurring dream, where you remember just a little more each time.  I wouldn't put it past him.