Now much will be said about the jam-packed twist ending – we will be debating the final moments in-depth right here on Monday morning – and I admit that all this setup is a lot to digest. It’s taken me more than 500 words just to wade through it. But am I the only one who loves that fact? That this is an entirely new brand of reality, operating by new rules, that we need to discover as we go along? How many movies can legitimately make this claim: That they set out to create a new paradigm?
(More on Techland: Chris Nolan Wants To Do Bond. Someone Make This Happen)
So it’s a busy movie, yes. Chaotic. And thick. But all that early fat chewing allows for revelations that a conventional plot would never allow. Setting the story in the dream world allows the movie to create wondrous new landscapes and cities, and to manipulate such ironclad concepts as the pull of gravity and the flow of time. The device of getting the “kick” out of the dream invites Christopher Nolan to think of all new ways of depicting a dream world falling apart. The bottom-rung limbo land is a hypnotic, endlessly complex conceit.
Not only is this movie more interesting, and visually stunning, than most summer blockbusters; this dream-within-dream-within-dream structure is so intricate and elaborate that the movie wins me over solely on the basis of the juggling game that Nolan manages to pull off. With time moving at different speeds within each dream, this tapestry of four concurrent storylines becomes a jigsaw puzzle of tension, where the people in limbo land rush to escape so they can jump back up to the snow, up to the moving van, and then ultimately out to first class. And in each sequence, as they try to synchronize their “kick,” the clock counts down. It’s four bank heists in one, and as all the clocks hit zero, and the subplots collide within this one man’s brain, it’s hard not to feel the goose bumps: We have no clue as to what’s going to happen, and that fact alone is immensely satisfying.
(More on Techland: New Inception Trailer Hooking The Heist Thriller Up To The Dream Matrix)
After all the heist movies we’ve seen, all the virtual reality adventures, the dreamscapes and the sci-fi explorations of memory, here’s Inception, arriving at an apex that melds all these themes together in a brilliant montage. Even if you think it is too murky and coagulated, even if you think that Nolan reaches for too much and loses touch with the heart of the story in the process, this is a defiantly original vision, told impeccably, structured ingeniously, acted breathlessly.
It reminds me of why we want to go to summer movies in the first place – not just for big explosions but for big, gutsy, out of control experiments just like this.