Summer movies have been a huge disappointment so far. Not merely in quality, but also in selection. I haven’t been eager to see any films outside of the annual Pixar voyage demanded every summer. Not so with “Inception” – a thrilling, psychological, science fiction, heist flick blend that had me glued from the first frame.
The story is this – a team of mental ninja’s (led by Leonardo DiCaprio) are commissioned to go into the minds of others and extract information. In addition to extraction is inception, a nigh impossible technique where said team of ninja’s go in and implant ideas into the mind’s of others. I don’t want to say more – the less known the better.
Let’s talk the good, firstly being the structure of the story. If you are going to introduce new rules of reality, make sure the audience gets it, and we get it. I have never seen a film like this before, but Nolan and company do an excellent job of setting up the parameters, the rules, and show us how they work in the first hour or so. The second half or more of the film is the team of mental con artists playing by the rules. In terms of genre I have a positive bias towards heist flicks, especially the “one last job” noir style tragi-drama. “Inception” is a great heist flick.
The effects and the means by which they are employed are perfect. Nolan blends the best of naturalistic effects with CGI. There are things on screen that happen that I have never imagined, and yet I was thoroughly immersed - I believed it all. Especially memorable is a hallway fight that involves a spinning room and drunken laws of gravity. Acting is uniformly convincing, but I have to give a big nod to Joseph Gordon Levitt whose athleticism, wit, and acting chops have appealed to me beyond nearly all other big screen actors.
Now the critical – the movie is so densely packed with information, that the emotional intentions get obscured. Nolan goes for big emotional buy in – marriage, death, grief, Father/Son relationships, and love all make weighty appearances. Yet, the viewer has been on alert since the first act that it might all be a dream. My attention to all of the details made me work at the film, so much so that I had a headache at the end of its 2 ½ hour running time. I praise that it made me work to be in the film, but it was hard to let myself get emotionally invested.
Psychologically speaking, the film is one big, intensive therapy session for one of the characters. We are introduced to the power of the mind, dreams, and memory interacting like a volatile chemical with feelings waiting to explode. The film almost espouses Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy (CBT), a popular brand of therapy which posits that when the thoughts are changed, the feelings will change as well. This brand of emotional confrontation seems to be at the center of the mind game. The characters experience a confrontation of painful truths, changed ideas, and big feelings to mix it all together.
There is much to be theorized about the film, and it certainly demands multiple viewings. However, I want to point out that it’s nice to see Nolan sit comfortably as an auteur – something of a lost brand in modern filmmaking. It would seem that he, Scorsese, Spielberg, and few others share a common creative control, touch, and feel in their films. In other words, Nolan’s films – cold and detached, yet slick and innovative – have a look and feel that are distinctly his. His creative touch is all over “Inception” with what appears to be almost no interference. With “Inception,” Nolan has managed to live up to the hype he created for himself after making “The Dark Knight,” creating even more hype and expectation for what he will make next. I can’t wait to see.
