Inception

I went to see "Inception" in a theatre that was just about the biggest, most ridiculous, and loudest IMAX auditorium that you'll ever find.  And even though that theatre could fit hundreds of people, it was packed (this movie will make millions).  But the theatre wasn't the only thing that was huge.  There was a bag of popcorn on my lap so big* that by the end of the two and a half hour movie, I still couldn't see the bottom, if there even was one.  The drink was a fluid monstrosity which I think held more liquids than the average lake.  It was so heavy that I was afraid of dropping it, because I'm pretty sure if I had, the soda would have smashed right through the floor and through the Earth straight down to the oceans south of Australia.  But even so, nothing could metaphorically reach the scale of this gigantic movie.

"Inception" is essentially the "Avatar" for director Christopher Nolan, of "Memento", and "The Dark Knight" fame.  Like James Cameron did last year, Nolan claims that he's been working on this for at least a decade, and has been waiting for the technology to advance or maybe just to get the funding for his little big pet project.  It goes without saying that "Inception" never would have happened if not for the new Batman series.  Eventually this concept of giving directors huge resources to make personal pet projects is going to bite Hollywood in the ass quite badly, but for now it seems to be working well.  So once again we have a big experimental movie that the critics seem to like, audiences are going to see in droves, and probably will even get a pity Best Picture nomination which it has no chance in Hell of winning.  Movies like this can't win Best Picture, sadly.

At two and a half hours this movie is already Jurassic (I'm running out "big" synonyms) in scale.  But even though its twenty minutes shorter than last year's "Avatar", it feels about an hour longer.  I don't know exactly what it was, but something about this movie just made it feel like forever.  It wasn't a drag, just long.  This movie is draining.  The plot gets so complex that even I had a bit of trouble keeping track of everything.  But the movie is even more epic in scale.  There are about fifty different gun fights, amazing visual effects, and the most complicated plot I've ever seen in a movie.  If all that sounds like a sandwich too copious for your mouth to bite down on, maybe you'll want to skip this.  But then you'll be missing out on a truly once-in-a-lifetime film experience.

The most epic part of this movie I think is the soundtrack.  Most of the musical queues in this movie are loud shuddering noises that smash through the audience like a sonic boom.  Its like this: BWWWWWOOOOOOONNNGGGG!!!!!!  Its long, booming, loud growls, the auditory equivalent of having your head smashed with a ten-ton cast iron hammer.  Did they get these sounds by putting a microphone to an oil tanker's horn?  Lucky thing I don't have tooth fillings, because they might have shattered thanks to this soundtrack.

Personally I made sure to know next to nothing when I came into the theatre, trying to keep the plot as vague as possible and avoided every review.  This is my Big Movie of the Year, and I didn't want any preconceptions.  When somebody showed me the cover of the New York Daily News which proudly presented the "Inception" poster with five golden stars below it, I covered my eyes like Dracula exposed to the burning rays of the Sun.  But in order to even talk about this movie, I need to at least give you some background.  I'll try to keep the plot summary as brief as possible:

First of all, no.  This is not a remake of the anime movie "Paprika".

Its the convenient Sci-Fi near future, where our world is almost the same except for one little new technology:  shared dreaming.  With shared dreaming, certain well-trained thieves can walk into your mind and steal your darkest secrets while you are still lost in the semi-conscious world of your own design.  Basically this new frontier is filled with lawless corporate espionage with no dream police to be found.  Since its a dream, basically anything can happen.  Leonardo DiCaprio is an expert dream thief who has been charged with his most difficult mission yet:  not to steal an idea, but implant one; an inception.  The subject for this mind-morphing is the son of a major energy conglomerate, Cillian Murphy, who must be given the inspiration to destroy his estranged father's empire.  Along for the ride are the basic players for a good old fashioned heist movie all played by very good actors (Ellen Paige, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, amongst others).   However, Leonardo DiCaprio is haunted by visions of his lost family, as steadily his loose subconscious starts to ruin his team's carefully played plans.  The one place you don't want to be is inside the mind of a man who is starting to lose it.

Along the way the plot decides to complicate itself over and over again.  However, despite how complicated the events are, the plot remains fairly linear:  a heist movie where everything is going wrong.  Steadily the movie breaks up into dreams within dreams, and then dreams within those, and then yet another dream within that one.  Its over-complicated by the point that I was left laughing every time the movie cut back to Dream Level 1, when by that stage in the movie the plot was only moving in Dream Level 3 and 4.  Its a huge amount of detail to keep track of, at one point there are no less than four layers that the movie is continuously showing you.  That's four worlds, four streams of events, and four different kinds of movies to remember, and its just an intellectually exhausting experience.  There's at least one layer too many, making a fairly straight-forward movie into one that is a jiggling mind-rape.  Its like solving a very complicated puzzle without pen and paper.

Personally I think its a good thing that a movie so challenges its audience.  Too many movies this summer are safe predictable movies that we've all seen before.  Even "Predators" and "Despicable Me" were not exactly surprising.  If the audience is confused, it means their mind is working, and that maybe they're thinking in a way they probably haven't done in a really long time.  Too many people have a mental engine filled with cobwebs and dust, they need something to get the gears turning again.  Even though the plot is fairly straightforward, there are a lot of little twists and turns to the movie that keep you on your toes.

But even I have a very large segment of my brain that can only enjoy a movie thanks to the visual elements.  A movie can hold the very answer to the ultimate question of the universe but still won't be a good movie unless it takes advantage of its visual medium to show up something truly awesome.  And "Inception" delivers on that front.  I mean, just the trailers should alert you that you're going see something really cool stuff.  There are cities folding in on themselves (if you have a weak stomach be warned), stairs looping around in an M.C. Escher visual paradox, and of course, the best part of the whole movie:  zero gravity fight scenes.  There aren't a lot of them, but this gravity combat thing is the coolest action scenes that anybody has created since the hallowed days of "The Matrix".  If Christopher Nolan can deliver anything its an awesome action scene.  On the other hand, there are like fifty gun fights in this movie (all of which are in normal gravity, sadly) but towards the end, despite even the best efforts of the director, the latter fights all start to run together.  I think there was just too much in this movie.

But while the execution of the plot here was nearly perfect in every technical level, I think the plot itself needed a bit of work.  Ultimately my biggest problem was in Nolan's concept of a dream itself.  Its all so solid, so lucid, it makes too much sense.  I don't think much research was done into what dreams really are, only how they could be used to make a cool action movie.  Dreams are a realm where your mind goes haywire and creates all sorts of fantastical things that rarely make all that much sense.  You could wander around an office building, go through a door and find yourself in your house.  A dream can have a plot, but things are constantly shifting in a fluid form.  At times you don't even exist in your own dream, its other people or characters.  You might see TV characters or dead people or show up as child.  I think the problem is that Nolan treats a dream as just a microcosm of the real world following the real world's rules, when dreams are actually a crazy blender of everything you've ever experienced morphing around into bizarre patterns.  The movie does no exploration into recurring dreams, those people who only dream in black and white, or any of the tricks of reality testing that lucid dreamers attempt.  Nolan does include the phenomena of outside details permeating into the dream world but only in a very solid set of rules (which ignore the fact this phenomena usually only occurs when you're just about to wake up).  Also, the complex rule set has plenty of inner contradictions which are probably plot holes**.  In an odd case of irony, the main problem is here is that "Inception"'s dreams are so realistic as to be completely unrealistic.

But then again, that entire paragraph is just me questioning the movie's concept, which is never a good thing to do.  If you just pretend that the so-called "dreams" of "Inception" are actually some new kind of subconscious projection created by the magic new technology rather than real-world dreams, the movie becomes easier to accept.  Or just let go of your previous ideas of dreams, you'll need the extra brain power to juggle all the plot points anyway.

Occasionally every so often a character will question whether or not such brain twisting is ethical.  Throughout the whole movie they're fighting Cillian Murphy's subconscious (apparently everybody's subconscious acts exactly the same).  But the movie never addresses any of the ethical issues here.  Its a heist movie, it would just be a bummer if the movie started sermonizing about how stealing is bad.  Even so, the movie doesn't seem to show much of a positive use to this shared dreaming technology, which I find is just a failure of imagination.

There were a few possible stock twist endings that I was particularly afraid of happening, which luckily didn't.  I did have a few funnier endings in mind, like Leonardo DiCaprio's character turning out to be the same guy he played in "Shutter Island"***, but the ending they gave I was pretty happy with.  Its ambiguous enough that you can fill in your own perceptions.  Personally I always go with the more optimistic view, but that' me.

I don't think "Inception" is a perfect movie, but it was a very good movie.  Is it Christopher Nolan's best movie?  Probably not, but its definitely his most ambitious.  This movie was a huge gamble on the part of Warner Bros, and I think it probably will hold up.  While audiences might be confused by the movie, I don't think anybody was left disappointed or frustrated.  And there is enough room here for a sequel.  There's still tons of meat on this dream bone that Nolan has yet to eat into.  And of course you have to see this movie for the zero gravity fights.  You cannot miss those.

Can't wait for "Batman 3", by the way.

Off-Topic:  I had to include this story here.  During the opening credits (all FIFTEEN of them) there was a trailer for a thriller movie named "Devil".  Five characters are trapped in an elevator and one of them is not what he or she seems, presumably they're Satan.  The trailer was looking okay, kinda like a good plot for a "Twilight Zone" episode, until certain words passed on the screen:  "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan."  At this point - no joke - the entire audience in unison let a groan "ohhhhh~".  Hundreds of voices at once all moaning at once in derision, that's what M. Night's once illustrious career has come down to.  It was the funniest thing I've ever seen an audience do.

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* Remember when you're eating your titanic bag of popcorn as part of Western culture's complex movie watching tradition that some people out there don't have any food at all.  We're the only ones with too much food than we know what to do with.  Basically what I'm saying is this:  kids eat your peas like Dad wants, somebody is dying of hunger right now.

** At one point everybody in Dream Level 1 is caught in freefall, so gravity disappears in Dream Level 2.  Yet gravity remains constant in Dream Levels 3 and 4.  I guess they didn't think of that.

*** Lately all DiCaprio seems to be doing is hard-boiled characters on the edge of losing it.  The man needs to do a comedy or something, something with levity already.  It looks like his skull is about to pop out of his head.