Review: The Sticky Spiraling Dream World of Inception

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Grade: A+

A couple weeks ago, I published my spoiler-free first take on Inception. It was positive. A rave. A bubbly exclamation that was openly questioned out there by other media outlets. But I stand by every word.

In fact, the more I think about it, the richer this tapestry becomes.

I have since spoken to several people about Inception, about its many twists and turns, its head-spinning structure, its metaphysical melodrama, and have been surprised by how many have replied that its ambition exceeds its abilities. They suggest that the movie is making promises that Christopher Nolan can’t quite deliver. It’s asking a lot of good questions, while running dry on a couple of the answers.

But as I look back over my all-time favorite films, I think it starts to become clear that I’m a big old sucker for ambition. I love the movies that swing big – and for me, the swinging is the juice. I see a movie like The Fountain or The Fall or 2001: A Space Odyssey and love it purely for its gusto. Show me something I’ve never seen before, something truly new and unique, and I’ll show you a giddy film critic. (See my top 10 sci-fi films of the decade)

So let’s start right there: I’ve never seen a movie do what Inception does. It uses all the familiar devices and genres, and scrambles it all up into an insane, exciting, hallucinogenic stew that is a true hybrid original. Yeah, it’s a really thick stew – one of lengthy setups, trippy concepts, and muddled conclusions – and I realize some people don’t take their movies this way. But Mr. Nolan: Dish me up some seconds please; I’ll be seeing “Inception” a second time this weekend (let’s meet here again Monday to discuss).

Boiling the storyline down to the essential, it’s about the dangers of mistaking dreams for reality – not only the dangers of losing track of where you stand, but also in becoming haunted by that which you cannot change. I know the ads are making the movie look like a rip-roaring tour through your most exciting psychic fantasies, and you do indeed get a couple shootouts here, but it’s actually far more somber than you might be expecting. Behind all the exciting stuff is a sad, sad guy desperately trying to find the exit sign from his most depressing nightmare.

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The exposition is thick in this movie – clearly too thick for some – but once you see where the trajectory’s heading, it’s not all that different from, say, The Matrix, where we had to learn the rules before we could play in the sandbox.  In Inception, the conceit is that you can journey into someone’s mind, into their dreams. And then within that dream, you can find the dream version of that subject, make them fall asleep again, and plunge into yet another dream, spiraling down their subconscious. Just think of those dreams you have, where you wake up, only to discover you’re still in a dream.

In a rushed first mission, we learn the logistics and rules of the game. If you’re killed in the dream, you wake up. If someone outside the dream needs to wake you up, they can dunk you in water and that will shock your system into consciousness. If something happens to your body outside of the dream world, then that sensory information will find a way of leaking into your dream storyline.  If, say, you were flipped upside down, then your dream world would spin upside down as well.

Once those new ground rules are in place, here comes that clichéd “last job” that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes on, not for some quick bucks but for the chance to clear his name. His wife is dead, the cops think he did it, and he’s been forced to flee his children and his country, reduced to a life of crime overseas. If he can do this last job – plunge into someone’s brain and plant an idea – then his employer will help him clear his name and head hoe.

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So the plan is hatched. To plant the seed, they will knock out young businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) while flying across the ocean and tunnel down into his psyche. They get him to board a plane, drug him in first class, and plunge in. One level down we find the more frantic action; there are shootouts and hostages and foot chases through darkened hotel hallways. It’s the dream level that most closely resembles an exciting Hollywood action movie.

It’s here where Cobb informs his team of one important caveat: To accomplish this lengthy mission, they were forced to use so much sedative that if someone dies in the dream world, they won’t wake up. Instead, they’ll be wiped away to what they dub a limbo land – the bottom rung of our subconscious where dreams can stretch on for eternity. Until the end of time, the murdered team member will wander a psychic purgatory.

Increasingly terrified of all the men with guns down in this dream world, Cobb and company toss Fischer – the dream version of Fischer – into a van, and drug him again. This time they plunge down into a second dream level – a snow-bound mountain where a secret vault’s been created for Fischer to crack. It’s a vault that has been designed to plant that covert idea into Fischer’s subconscious.

(More on Techland: Inception, First Take: No Spoilers, Lots Of Reasons To Be Excited)

But by the time we get down this far, things are going seriously wrong. Blood has been spilled, people are dying, and the whole team has missed its first signal to jump back to reality. So the rush is on to get out of here, even as a few members of the team are slipping down one level – killed in dream #2 and falling down into the limbo land that Cobb knows so well. It was down here where he and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), once experimented with long-term dreaming – a multi-decade existence in limbo that Mal became so addicted to that she could never readjust to the real world.

Mal is the subplot that propels the film’s deeper emotional themes. She keeps appearing in Cobb’s dreams, much to his dismay, keeps threatening to destroy their missions, keeps sending Cobb into emotional spirals where the pain of his wife’s death is made fresh again.

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?

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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.

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