Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan’s Inception is about perception, specifically the way we perceive our dreams as reality when we’re asleep. It’s about seeking out the innermost secrets of the mind while fighting off the defense mechanisms it creates to protect itself. It’s about two-and-a-half hours of trying to perceive this movie as a worthy mind-scrambling successor to Nolan’s masterpiece Memento, but, in my perception, it falls far short of that goal.

Inception is actually about deception. Leonardo DiCaprio–current king of the dream world after this and Shutter Island–plays Cobb, leader of a literal dream team of technicians and “architects” (designers of the dream worlds) who arrange to render a subject unconscious, then connect to him in a shared dream state to perform an extraction by finding the secrets the subject has locked away in his mind’s innermost recesses. The team’s most recent target, a Japanese industrialist named Saito (Ken Watanabe), is impressed with their work and asks if they can perform an “inception” by entering the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the privileged son of a dying rival (Pete Postlethwaite), and planting an idea instead of stealing secret thoughts.

Cobb knows inception can be done, but it’s a very tricky and dangerous business involving not merely a dream, but a dream within a dream…within another dream. As Cobb and his technician partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) assemble their team, Cobb’s college professor father (Michael Caine) suggests a promising young grad student, Ariadne (Ellen Page) as his new dream architect. (What does Daddy Cobb teach that he would know about any of this stuff? The movie’s unclear about that.) When Ariadne gets the expository “here’s how the dream world works” sleep tour with Cobb, she catches on quickly, including the realization that Cobb’s subconscious is scary and quite dangerous.

That’s because Inception is also about incursion and intrusion. While Cobb and his team–with Saito along for the ride–penetrate deeper and deeper into their layers of dream states, they face fierce and deadly assaults from defensive forces generated by both their target’s mind and from Cobb’s own overactive subconscious, which is tormented by guilty thoughts of his mysterious ex-wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). Her significant presence within the storyline becomes one of the most compelling aspects of the film, giving DiCaprio’s character some depth and evoking memories of Guy Pearce and his deceased wife in Memento.

And that’s because Inception, most significantly, is about recursion, of layers within layers and circular reasoning. Recursion comes in many forms, including mathematics, language, and music. In one scene, Ariadne demonstrates a commonplace recursion, the “infinite tunnel” illusion that occurs when between two mirrors facing each other. There’s also a very clever depiction of the Penrose stairs, an impossible stairway in an infinite loop, which was employed by the Dutch illusionary artist M.C. Escher in one of his famous works. I was reminded of Douglas Hofstadter’s mind-expanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which explores recursive phenomena and more, including the recursion of a story within a story within another story, nested like a set of Russian dolls.

That’s the central gimmick of Nolan’s film–as the characters go deeper, entering a new dream within the dream(s) they’re already in, we eventually reach a point where four or five levels of dream reality are in play, each one affecting the dreams and dreamers within it, while Nolan bounces the story from level to level almost randomly, practically daring the audience to keep up with it all. It’s an intriguing and unusual narrative device, but reminiscent of watching someone spinning plates–how long can they maintain the juggling act before the inevitable crash? There’s no big surprise, and the payoff is interesting yet not that compelling.

One of the masterstrokes of Memento was that it surprised and fascinated the audience in spite of its own reverse-order narrative conceit; we’ve already seen what happens next, so the focus of each scene is on how the characters and their actions led to that previous scene. The film spelled out some of its parameters succinctly and let the audience figure out the rest, resulting in a film that maintained an intriguing mystery even though we already saw how it ended. Nolan wants us to be just as galvanized by Inception’s recursive construction, but his surprises and mysteries this time are weak and lack interesting detail.

Furthermore, his characters–apart from Cobb and his wife–are two-dimensional across the board. Almost nothing is learned about any of the other people on the team apart from their job functions, and the same can be said of their targets, Saito and Fischer, which is particularly troublesome considering they are the minds supposedly being explored. Most of the dialogue is heavily laden with exposition about time compression and wake-up “kicks” and even the concept of limbo, and it all devolves into windy, unsubstantial technobabble like Scotty fixing the warp drive on Star Trek.

Many of the settings and special effects, such as a locomotive barreling down a busy city street, are merely showcases for CGI and stunt work that add nothing substantial to the narrative. For instance, one of the dream layers late in the film involves a snowbound assault on a mountain fortress; a character asks why they couldn’t have dreamt up a beach instead, and I’d ask that too. It seemed like a feeble attempt to shoehorn snow and skiing into the movie, as though the crew had vacationed in Vail or somewhere and needed to justify the expense in the film budget.

All of these flaws, plus a wildly overwritten and constantly intrusive musical score by Hans Zimmer, make this Memento-meets-The Matrix wannabe mediocre at best. Inception is an exception to truly being considered a great film.