Thoughts on Inception

Inception is a cool movie - starting with it's most basic idea: that dreams are not just fleeting mental apparitions, but instead are more like places that you can go to. You can build a dream like a building, take a dreamer there and let them populate it, fill out the details with their subconcious mind. Then, if you play a few tricks, you can extract secret information. This, of course, is the prize skill of Inception's main character Dom Cobb; he's a thief that steals from your dreams. How's that for a cool premise? It's perfectly suited for a big-screen adventure complete with beautiful visuals, exciting action, and a delicate plot - all of which Inception delivers.

Now we have the premise, but of course it has to be a little more complex than that. There have to be rules, limitations and dangers even in the dreams, or else what's to stop the characters actively dreaming up a quick solution to every problem they encounter? Well, there is an answer; while you can play with the dream-reality a little, doing so too much will alert the target's subconscious to a foreign presence and the dream-scape will quickly become a hostile environment. This is Inception's best trick. It establishes very clearly exactly what the rules of the dream-worlds are, including their relationships to reality and other dream-worlds, and plays by those rules to produce a stunning and creative heist movie.

And that's what Inception is, it's a heist movie. It's not really any deeper than that at it's core. There are twists, obviously - the heist takes places over multiple levels of dream-reality, and the object is not to steal money or valuables, but to plant an idea in a man's mind. But it's a heist - you have the gang each with their own skill, you have the heavily guarded objectives, and of course you have the plan gone wrong. It's the adventure itself that's the major attraction, rather than the characters or the concepts. The playing board and the rules of the game are laid out at the start, and then the characters are sent wheeling away into one obstacle after another, through fights, chases, moments of emotional realization. It's a lot of fun to follow along with.

It's been touted as a movie that's convoluted or difficult to follow, but it really ought not to be. It's not -that- complicated! Once you've grasped the basic points, it all clicks into place pretty nicely. Apart from the opening, which launches right into a dream-caper in progress, there is no concept which is not explained to the audience ahead of time, and there is no deliberate obscuring of the mechanics of the plot. Inception isn't a movie that wants to confuse. It has a couple of unique ideas, but importantly it's always clear about the way that they affect the action.

The key thing - which Inception does very well - is that the story makes sense according to the rules that it sets for itself. That getting killed in a dream while sedated will send you to limbo, that a falling sensation or impact can wake you up, that dream-time is faster than real-time. That's great, and it's a critical part of some of the movie's best scenes, in particular the fight sequence in the rotating hallway.

The plot advances very quickly, and despite a two-and-a-half hour running length, does not feel long or bloated. There's not much to cut. It's marvelously well constructed, and it has a neat quirk that not a lot of stories have - it didn't have a villain. Think of the candidates - was Fischer the villain? No, if he's anything then he's a victim. What about Mal? She's more deluded than villainous. Saito and Cobb, in fact, are probably the best villain-candidates in the film, and they are both a little too easy to sympathise with to be classified as out-and-out bad-guys. There is no central mustache-twirler in Inception, no sinister master-mind with a plan to rule the world. And yet, the movie is packed with thrilling action sequences - shoot-outs, car-chases, and the fist-fight in the rotating hotel corridor. How many films can you think of that stage a similar level of action without ever setting up a central villain? It's a wonderful thing to pull off, and Inception does it very naturally.

If there is a criticism to be made of Inception, it's that Christopher Nolan could have been more ambitious with the dream-scapes. In fairness, it is explained in the film that the locations the characters visit while dreaming are designed places meant to appear at least superficially real, and are not ad-hoc constructs. There is scope in the movie for some odd occurances, although it may have been difficult to keep the movie tense if the gang were being pursued by angry pink unicorns instead of gun-men. The more restrained approach works very well in any case - and besides that, as a matter of taste I tend to prefer action grounded in reality anyway.

What about the final question: was Cobb dreaming at the end of the movie? My instinct is that he was back in the real world, and that the top was about to stop spinning. Of course, cutting away from the top just before the moment of truth was the only way to end the movie – I wouldn't change it.

Inception a straight adventure with a neat idea at it's core. It's not played for pretense. It's a thrill ride through a reality where dreams are places, and enterprising individuals can make a profit by going into them. It's presented with style and intelligence; it's well acted, and it features a couple killer one-liners. It even has a fantastic score. Isn't that cool? I liked it a lot. I feel like I could write more about what I thought of it, but there's a thousand words here and that will do for now.