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Inception (Film)

by Erin Free | July 21, 2010 13:27 | Edited July 21, 2010 13:28

While its complex narrative is often tough-going, audiences are rewarded with an absolutely gripping ride marked by a top-notch cast and breathtaking visuals.

Brave, intelligent, daring and complexly plotted, Christopher Nolan's Inception stands tall as a lovingly crafted middle-finger-salute to every studio executive in Hollywood who thinks that filmmakers need to "dumb it down" in order to appeal to a wide audience. With its labyrinthine narrative structure and constant barrage of big ideas, Inception is undoubtedly tough going, which makes its success even more affirming. The box office in the US has been ringing over, striking another blow for the belief that the audience is a lot smarter than most Hollywood studios think it is. From Memento and Insomnia through to Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, writer/director Christopher Nolan has always challenged his audience in striking ways. He takes his biggest gamble yet with Inception, and it pays huge dividends.

 

Set in a near future where industrial espionage has become the world's new battlefield, the film swirls around the emotionally damaged Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an expert at extracting valuable information from the very dreams of corporate high flyers. When he's asked to do the opposite - namely plant an idea in someone's head, instead of removing a piece of information - by a major industrial player (Ken Watanabe), international fugitive Cobb sees it as an opportunity to return home to his estranged family. From there, the film becomes a twisted maze of dreams within dreams within dreams as Cobb and his team (new recruit Ellen Page, trusted right-hand man Joseph Gordon-Levitt and cocky rogue Tom Hardy) try to subconsciously convince the son of a wealthy corporate boss (Cillian Murphy) to break up his dying father's empire. But Cobb's fragile mental state - and in particular his feverish subconscious renderings of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) - threatens to destabilise their complicated, perfectly engineered plan.

 

Boasting a deluge of mind blowing images (entire cities turn in on themselves; decaying buildings crumble into a fractured coastline; industrial spies fight in zero gravity) and inventive concepts, Christopher Nolan is also smart enough to give Inception a robust humanist kick, as we care just as much about Cobb's bleary, guilt-ravaged psyche as we do his hi-tech adventures into the human mind. The film is also brilliantly characterised, with Nolan displaying an almost Tarantino-like ability to make even the smallest of roles sing. He's helped immeasurably by his fine cast, with A-gamers DiCaprio and Cotillard doing an unforgettable, emotionally fraught psychological dance, as Page, Gordon-Levitt, Murphy and Hardy invest their characters with humour, spark and humanity.

 

As he did so effectively in his towering The Dark Knight, Nolan makes his far-fetched (and even occasionally ridiculous) dialogue and plotting utterly, absolutely believable within the film's finely structured framework, while never losing his grip on the dense, multi-layered narrative. Nolan proves himself once again to be a fantasist filmmaker of the first order, with Inception rating as a triumph of both the heart and mind.