Inception

Christopher Nolan's "Inception" is a film about characters who perchance to dream. There is something deeply philosophical and fascinating about man's ability to dream, to analyze and reflect on one's own dreams, one's own nightmares, that offers women and men the ability to command such creative power that would make everyone a Dante or Shakespeare, as H.F. Hedge put it, and Nolan capitalizes on this.

There seems to be a genuine dissonance between man's rationality of being awake and the insanity of dreaming, where all absurdity and surrealism is finally available. This is the case with Nolan's film, a film which almost entirely creates a perfect equilibrium between intellectualism and entertainment.

The story is likely inspired by the science and psychology of lucid dreams, that is when a dreamer recognizes and acknowledges that he or she is in a dream. Many characters have such moments in "Inception." The film toys with our own recognition of dreams in that it is difficult to recollect them; we in essence quickly forget what dreams we dreamed. Another aspect is dream incubation, or the placing of a seed in the brain, or inception.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a dream extractor who leads teams to steal secrets from people's dreams. But in this case, for a complicated and quickly-described reason, Cobb and his team are not extracting but creating an idea in someone's mind. Dreams within dreams are created, totems are used to detect whether or not the person is in a dream, and the subjects (those whom the idea is created or stolen from) possess subconscious protections against the extractors. The more dreams-within-dreams that are created, the more risk there is; usually "death" in a dream returns the dreamer to reality, but with heavy sedation (as is the case on the team's special assignment), being killed could result in actual death. To die is truly to sleep for these characters.

Like in Scorsese's "Shutter Island" from earlier this year, DiCaprio's character is a man struggling with deep guilt and alienation. It is as if he exists in a prison when he is awake, and dreaming provides him the perfect escapism. The dreams allow him to take enormous risks, regardless of the potential consequences to him and his team members.

Another wonderful aspect is the fact that Nolan has largely avoided shortchanging his actors. Aside from Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite who both have small roles, this is an ensemble piece, with DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Tom Berenger all having important roles.

With Nolan, there is a special attention to detail, and when there are elaborate and expensive CGI images, one gets the sense that Nolan, unlike so many other directions, has not forgotten that the onus is on him to make the audience believe that these images are real. Cities fold onto themselves and characters fly like acrobats in a gravity-less corridor. There are nightmares--Cotillard's near-perfect moments as practically a ghost tormenting Cobb's guilt--filled with sudden horrifying glances, a look that could kill. And then a firm grip with a broken glass, and a powerful charge. And there is the wonder of subtext with regards to psychology and even architecture, all culminating in a film inspired by obvious previous science fiction films.

But this is a film with flaws. While there certainly is a sense of wonder here, that wonder unfortunately often does not go far enough. At times it feels as if there is nothing really new here, unlike other films that have dealt with similar subjects, as varied as Wilcox's "Forbidden Planet" to Hitchcock's "Spellbound," to Kurosawa's "Dreams." This film has been called a Kubrickian masterpiece; it is not. Part of the reason is that Nolan already is one of the best directors around, so the bar is just so high every time, but that does not mean one should not see "Inception." If you can tolerate the intensity, confusion, rapid speed at which the plot is explained, the lack of details to the plot, the real-or-not jargon about our dreams, the non-stop gun fights, etc., then it is a film worth seeing. There are many reasons to see this movie: its thrills, its acting, its cinematography, its ideas and especially its visuals.

You probably have heard about the ending. I won't mention much, other than it will probably make you smile (or groan if you are less patient or intellectually curious), and it would be best not to dwell too much time on it.