• “Inception”, Directed by Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Pictures, Released July 16, 148 minutes.
“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient … highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed — fully understood — that sticks.”
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) opens Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” with a surprisingly deep discourse on the power of ideas. Yet this action thriller will not disappoint, with pulse-raising suspense and effects-driven thrills to delight the most jaded of theatergoers. Its complex plot, futuristic premise, and incredible visuals will please many looking for the cheap thrills of a summer blockbuster. But its rich tapestry of subtexts and hidden meanings will keep viewers busy for days figuring out the myriad twists and turns of its compelling plot.
In a world where dreams can be constructed, manipulated, and shared through drugs and neural links, a person’s subconscious can be a rich field for the data miner. Or data thief, rather. Dom Cobb is an Extractor — a white-collar corporate spy. He and his team enter a mark’s dreams, sometimes entering building dreams within fragile dreams to find the strongbox deep within a man’s subconscious, holding the secrets he keeps even from himself.
Cobb is the best of the best, an expert in his field. He once designed dream worlds for others, but —when a mysterious accident tragedy renders him unable tomakes it impossible for him to continue, he goes into the field as an extractor.
When a heist goes badA heist finally goes bad, and, Cobb is offered amnesty on his record and the opportunity to go home if he can complete an impossible assignment — rather than extract information from a subjectinstead of stealing information, faking , plant ann idea, instead, in his mind, an idea whose genesis the mark will never suspect, and will accept as his ownso deep in his subject’s mind that its genesis is never questioned and is accepted as his own. .—a small, but insidious idea, sufficient to make him change his course of action.
To pull off this feat Cobb must assemble his team — innocent Ariadne (Ellen Page), reliable Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), colorful Eames (Tom Hardy), and mercenary Yusuf (Dileep Rao); , willing to go not just into one dream or two, but three or more layers deep into a man’s mind to perform the most audacious heist in history.
The challenge: stop a massive corporation’s takeover of half the world’s energy supplies. Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) is the sole heir to the corporation and the only man who can destroy his father’s empire. To convince Fischer to break up his inheritance, Cobb’s team must destroy his trust in his advisors, plant documents and memories, and rebuild Fischer’s conflicted relationship with his father — all within a dream, 10 hours in a plane, 30,000 feet over the Pacific.
The danger: limbo. As time speeds up in dreams, a dream three layers deep can allow a man to live a lifetime in the course of a night. Under sedation, mistakes can happen — if you are killed in the dream, you will go insane in the ages before you wake. And dreams are dangerous places. The team must layer dream within intricate dream to catch Fischer, to plant the little seed, the subliminal, counterfactual, illogical idea that will change his life — and the world — for years to come.
Cobb is better at his craft than anyone on his team, but he carries a fatal weakness. The dreamer builds the world, but the subjects subject’s mind inhabit it — literal figments of their subconscious imagination imagination become real. As they drill into Fischer’s psyche, more and more of Cobb’s subconscious comes out to play. The spectre of Cobb’s dead wife, Mal, haunts his dreams, thwarting his plans, endangering all with him as guilt and sorrow for her death wrack Cobb’s soul. Ariadne must be willing to go to the brink, and beyond, cheating death and insanity, if she is to unravel Cobb’s obsessions and give them any hope of survival.
Given the contextscience-fiction premise of dreamers with access to eternal, addicting ages of time where only the experience is real (everyone knows that when you die, you wake up), Inception is surprisingly clean. But when reality itself becomes unreliable, and a lifetime of emotions and experience can come to be no more than an afternoon in a dream, morality takes a similar turn. There is no smut in Inception, but that doesn’t mean it’s suitable for the kids — and parents should think twice before introducing it to their teens. The problem lies in the structure of the fantasy — when death is a release, and only pain is real, morality gets twisted, fast.
Deep in the dream, Fischer eventually is trapped with a “Mr. Charles,” where the mark is convinced that the extractors are here to defend him from a psychological attack and is enlisted to help break into his own mind. Inception tells us we’re on the side of the angels, but takes us on a rollercoaster ride not unlike Fischer’s.
The movie feeds us one mind-bending change in reality after another, subjecting us to worlds where even gravity is called into question. More dangerous is life and death in the dream world — pain is to be avoided, suicide the best way out, and superstition the only way to hold on to reality. Even more insidious, the film leaves the viewer with deep-seated questions (and unsettling doubts) about the nature of dreams and of reality in general.
Christopher Nolan has invited us into his dream, into a vast world where dreams can nest into dreams and subconscious thoughts become physical realities. Dom Cobb warns warned of us of the danger: dreams plant small ideas, which can grow to define or destroy a man. We follow our guides down level after level as they plant just such an idea to change the course of a man’s life. Inception is a mind-blowing experience, no doubt about it. But when someone else’s dream takes us on a ride like this one, we would do well to consider the payload.