Christopher Nolan seems to write screenplays as personal challenges, like the way some musicians attempt pieces of music they know they can’t play in order to stretch their abilities. Every screenplay of his has surpassed the previous in logistic complexity, and Inception finds him at his current peak. The film is about a group of corporate spies who infiltrate the dreams of their victims to catch them unaware, and extract information. They are given an impossible task, to reverse their usual procedure and introduce an insidious idea into someone’s mind without their knowledge; to perform an inception. This leads us through multiple layers of reality and dream state, as well as incredibly inventive ideas.
It is amazing how quickly we accept the main concession of the film, that people can enter into each other’s dreams. From the first scene we are willing to accept this as a natural state of affairs, because the pacing of the film is nearly perfect. Nolan is good enough to convey complex ideas in such a way that not only are they understood immediately, but they are allowed to be fully complex. Despite the large amount of screen time dedicated to exposition, we never feel like we are being babied through the complexities.
Dream logic is central to the functioning of the plot. It lays down a set of rules that are easy to understand because we have all experienced them first hand (dream time being longer than real-time, elements of reality entering dreams, etc). The Curious thing about Nolan, especially pronounced in this film, is his relentless attention to logic. This makes for the dream sequences in which most of the film takes place, to seem more like the created worlds of something like the Matirx, than the feeling of actually being in a dream. These are just rules for the fantastic worlds Nolan wants to create for us, and not akin to the experience of dreaming itself. Never has there been such an attempt to show the logical inner workings of the illogical.
At its core Inception is a masterful blending of three genres; the action film, the heist film, and the science fiction film. The great success of this blending is that at no point does it feel like we are watching something we have seen before. The constant feeling of being shown something new is pervasive, especially in the action sequences. There is a fight scene in which the gravity is slowly changing, so the combatants are forced upon the walls, and the ceiling as they fight for their lives. This type of extreme stylization rarely works for me, but here it is riveting.
The major complaint about the film is that there is never any actual feeling of connection with the characters beyond the tension of wanting them to complete their heist. This does not sound like a problem for a sci-fi, action heist film, except that the film asks you to feel more for it’s characters than the average film of it’s ilk. This is me stretching here, because I liked this film so much it seems like nitpicking, but for a film that tackles themes of the subconscious and deep character issues head on it never delivers any meaningful catharsis. The subconscious of the characters act as literal battlegrounds for the action of the film to play out in, and never go beyond that in a satisfying way.
However if we accept these interior worlds to act simply as a means to create adult, distopian wonderlands then they function marvellously on that level. We see exotic locales, lush interiors, and crumbling personal kingdoms. All working as fully realized worlds on their own as successfully as any A-budget fantasy picture.
Bottom Line: The film is a masterpiece of construction, and it’s greatest strength is in the dizzying ability to run under the weight of it’s own complexity. This is a great example of an artist challenging himself to do something of great difficulty, and accomplishing it. However, as Pauline Kael said of Citizen Kane its’ a masterpiece, but a shallow one. Oh well I’ll take my masterpieces where I can get ‘em.*
*Not intending to compare this film to citizen Kane, or myself to Pauline Kael. That would be stupid.
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