Inception

Normally summer is my peak movie watching season. For starters the theater offers a welcome respite from the heat. The days are longer so I usually have more leisure time. But the main reason is that Hollywood schedules their biggest movies for this time of year. Up until now, the summer of 2010 has been a bit disappointing. As you can see from the scarcity of my reviews, the only movie I had seen so far was the rather mediocre Robin Hood. And honestly the last few weeks when I had wanted to go and looked at the movie listings, nothing really inspired me to spend $12.00 on a ticket. Finally there was a worthy candidate when Inception came out, and the hype started building immediately after its release.

This review is going to be a bit difficult to write because I don’t want to give away too much to anyone who hasn’t seen it. But the basic premise has to do with dreams and the ability to either extract information from people’s dreams (extraction) or implant an idea in someone’s consciousness (inception). It’s the inception technique that becomes the “Big Score” of the film, and it kind of reminded me of a “Long Con” as alluded to in various con artist movies like The Sting.

The last hour or so of the movie is all about this big score, and I think this is where the movie really takes off. The amount of creativity involved here to create the layers upon layers of dreams is just amazing. Not only did the movie create layers of settings/scenarios (van chase, zero gravity hotel, snow fortress, and bizarre limbo), but each of these settings had different perceptions of time. One minute in the van could be an entire year in the lowest layer limbo. The amazing thing about the movie is that you feel the tension in each plot in each layer, and the fact that they’re all connected.

I’m not sure how long Christopher Nolan worked on the script, but however long it took, the guy is a creative genius. What really stands out about this movie is the creativity and originality compared to the rest of the films lately from Hollywood. In a typical week, 95% of the movies are either sequels, adaptations of comic books or graphic novels, or horrible big screen versions of old TV shows like The A-Team. I think this originality is what makes movies like Inception or the Matrix so great. Oddly enough, Hollywood doesn’t seem to recognize how much audiences will flock to this kind of creativity. This was evident in the completely sold out show I went to, now two weeks after the release. More likely, they do recognize the commercial success, it’s just not easy to find original ideas, and they go with quantity over quality.

The only criticism I can make about the movie was that it glosses over the finer details of how the dream sharing and architecture work. This is one of those movies where the viewer really has to just take things as they are presented. At one point in the movie, when Ellen Page’s character in undergoing her orientation, they use some cheesy explanation about military technology used to train soldiers. But they never explain how multiple people can share the same dream consciousness, or how one person can be an “architect” in another person’s dream. You basically just had to believe in the magic briefcase machine and suspend your disbelief – which honestly I didn't think was that hard to do.

Inception definitely lived up the hype. I have a feeling it will be at the top of most people’s list for best movies of 2010. I strongly recommend seeing it in the theater.

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Acting: 4 out of 5
Story/Script: 6 out of 5 (deserves an extra credit here)
Action Sequences: 5 out of 5