Editor’s Note: This review includes a few details that may be considered spoilers, depending on how uninformed you want to be when you see Inception.
Remember that brilliant, twisted scene in The Dark Knight when The Joker announces to those two ferries — one full of convicts, one full of civilians — that if one of the boats doesn’t blow the other one up, they’ll both explode in an hour?
Inception makes your brain feel like it did in that scene, but for almost the entire two-and-a-half-hour running time. Christopher Nolan’s latest mindf*ck, in characteristic fashion, digs up a and connects a series of these kinds of paradoxical scenarios, like some kind of subterranean, subconscious master-planned community. Unfortunately, Inception doesn’t fold up into itself as neatly as that bit of Nolan’s last Batman movie. But if you think a good trip to the theater should pay off on the drive home, you can chase all kinds of mind-bending ideas down their respective rabbit holes and see where you end up.
In the world of Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a freelance dream-thief. He and his hand-picked team extract secrets from their marks by invading their dream worlds. But dream worlds aren’t always friendly places, and once you’re in someone’s mind, all sorts of Freudian shit can hit the fan. Stay in there too long or stir things up and a mark’s “projections” will hunt you relentlessly. And that’s hardly the half of it. In Cobb’s line of work, dreams can be strategically buried within other dreams, like metaphysical nesting dolls. Each subsequent dream builds on the foundation of the previous one, and some consequences echo through the layers so naturally its best to proceed with caution. Cobb is skilled so most jobs are as straightforward as shoplifting. Just in someone else’s brain.
“This forgettable setup is awfully pedestrian for a movie about the imagination, but it just lays the groundwork for what quickly unfolds into a sprawling, intricately imagined experience.”
And of course it’s business as usual until, in a disappointingly mundane setup, some ambiguously rich and powerful guy named Saito wants to shatter his rival’s empire. This involves getting into the dreams of the heir to the rival company and planting the seed that the company should be divvied up, which is dream “inception” rather than your usual crane machine style brainjacking (extraction). This sets the emotional stakes pretty low for the central dream heist, since the whole thing will immediately only benefit some dude’s stock portfolio and then hopefully Cobb, later, for reasons that aren’t initially clear. This forgettable setup is awfully pedestrian for a movie about the imagination, but it just lays the groundwork for what quickly unfolds into a sprawling, intricately imagined experience.
