Inception

As much as I love Memento and The Prestige, it’s that much more exciting watching this movie whose plot is literally a HEAD TRIP!

Cobb*, our main character, is someone who professionally travels into people’s consciousness and penetrates dreams in order to get information from them. It’s grueling work that can affect your mental health and we find out quickly that Cobb is feeling particularly tortured, as he hasn’t seen his children in what’s apparently a humongous amount of time. However, he gets an assignment that, if he succeeds, will break him free of any hurdles so his dad (Michael Caine, in his third collaboration with Nolan) can finally take him home.

So Cobb, his righthand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a girl whose architectural talent can help with creating dreams (Ellen Page), the wealthy Asian client (Ken Watanabe, in his second collaboration with Nolan), a specialist with the “kicks” that can get you out of dreams (Tom Hardy in his breakout role), and the chemist who puts them under (an Indian actor who hasn’t done anything else notable but of whom I’m insanely jealous) go into a dream inside a dream inside a dream of a scion (Cillian Murphy, in his third collaboration with Nolan, counting his Dark Knight cameo) to give him the idea of disbanding his late tycoon dad(Pete Postlethwaite)’s company, even though the dad’s cohort (Tom Berenger) has other ideas.

Going three levels deep is important to ensure the heir thinks he came up with the idea. However, it’s highly risky, and it’s gravely warned what happens if people die in dreams within dreams. What might be even worse is if they lose all touch with reality – and Cobb’s tragic past involving his wife (Marion Cotillard) speaks to that.

It’s okay if you don’t understand the limited information I’ve given you. Even if you’ve seen the whole movie 100 times, there’s probably more you can grasp with additional viewings. Heck, I might find out one day.

For you readers, I’ll say that my above description gives you the gist of the plot but you really have to see for yourselves just how many different ways it becomes a thought experiment, making you question the reality of everything in the plot, and how many different ways it blows your mind with its topsy-turvy-topsy visuals.

That’s all I can really say – you simply must experience it for yourself. Like I said about another movie, Inception isn’t just watched – it’s experienced.

***SPOILERS***

As with Memento, this movie’s ending is hotly debated. Specifically, the very last frame. Is the spinning top about to fall, indicating everything’s real now? Or will it keep spinning forever, to indicate it’s a dream?

Call me a buzzkill, but I’m going to go with trusting what’s right in front of us again. If Cobb could simply create a dream being back home with his kids, why wouldn’t he have done it earlier? He got the promise that he’d be out of legal trouble and could head back. Unless you believe the promise from Saito was also a dream, but that feels like a copout. Why not argue the whole film’s a dream then, including the part about the top falling being the necessary signal we’re in reality?

If we go with the notion that SOMETHING in the film is real, then it’s hard to argue against the scene with the main characters waking up on the plane being part of the something**. So Saito reiterated he owed Cobb and the latter was going home. I’ve seen the compelling argument that the kids hadn’t aged, but we don’t know how long Cobb was gone. Maybe it was just a couple of days and simply felt like 100 years because of the way we learned time works as you go down levels of dreams. Also, the top DID start to wobble a bit as the screen went black; it didn’t keep smoothly spinning as you would expect from something that would continue its rotation forever.

So why DID the screen go black before the top fell and settled the mystery? Reason one is that Christopher Nolan loves to keep viewers guessing, involved, and stimulated. Reason two is a symbolic one – we shouldn’t ever get too comfortable in our own reality. We don’t need to be traveling into dreams, or suffering from short-term memory loss, or practicing black magic to mess with someone’s head, or spending an indeterminate amount of time in outer space, to be convincing ourselves of certain things that have no basis. Just to give a simple example, how many people convince themselves their spouses love them when nothing could be further from the truth? Then they get blindsided when finding out about the spouse’s affair? Profound, powerful statement from this movie’s last shot.

***SPOILERS***

Whether or not you agree with me about the ending, you will surely agree that Christopher Nolan asks questions and makes statements about the human condition with a profundity to which no other writer/director can compare. My MCU game works well here, given we have three Oscar winners (DiCaprio, Caine and Cotillard) and five nominees (Page, Watanabe, Hardy, Postlethwaite, Berenger****). However, the real once-in-a generation talent was in the writer and director’s chairs.

Bottom Line: WWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!

Up Next: Last of The Dark Knight trilogy.

*Did he have to go by that? I keep longing to eat a chicken bacon sandwich while watching a Tigers game. Also, it’s the name of a main character in Following. Nolan’s British so I highly doubt he’s a fan of the ballplayer but of the sandwich why not?

** Ha, my skills studying Descartes in college are coming in handy!***

***I should mention that it was in a class called The Simpsons And Philosophy!

****Coincidentally, I just watched the latter’s breakout role in The Big Chill for the first time today. Thanks Fathom Events!

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