Inception is the latest film by Christopher Nolan, the director of the functional and entertaining, though massively overhyped, Dark Knight. And guess what? The hype for Inception almost deafened the initial hype for Dark Knight. Somewhat begrudgingly, I decided that this time I wasn’t going to concern myself as much as I did with Dark Knight, and just try to enjoy the film for what it is. By now we know what kind of films Nolan makes; entertainment films that masquerade themselves as something more important, with a hint of “it’s serious and dark” pretentiousness. The big concern is of course that the average audience doesn’t see through the masquerade, but let’s discuss that later.
So the film is about Leonardo DiCaprio looking moody and serious, which he has been in most of his recent films. Actually, Inception reminded me a lot about Scorsese’s recent Shutter Island, this is the second film in which we are trapped within the mind of DiCaprio, God help us. So DiCaprio makes a living by infiltrating the minds of important people, going into their dreams. But to do this the most effectively he has to go within a dream of the dream, so he has to make the person dreaming within the dream, dream. Enough of that awkwardness. DiCaprio has a dark past, his wife is dead but still haunting him through his dreams, or other people’s dreams, just go with it. He also has two children who he wants to be together with again, but he can’t because he is an outlaw in the US. Then, a rich Asian business man has one final job for DiCaprio and his crew, and as a reward will get rid of all the charges against him in the US (How does the rich Asian business man have so much power over US legislature? I don’t know, he’s rich, so that’s probably a good an explanation as any). However, DiCaprio needs an “architect” who can create dreams, so he hires the girl from Juno, we’ll call her the “Juno Girl” from now on. Him, her, and the A-Team now start to prepare for their final mission, where they have to infiltrate the mind of a rich business owner and implant ideas into his mind about what kind of business model he should use, because this in some way benefits the rich Asian business man. But to do this, they have to go into a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. Simple enough.
A lot of people have said that this is a very complex film that you have to see at least twice to “get it”. However I don’t agree with this. Each level of the dreams has a very specific look, and there is never any doubt where we are at each time. There are no confusing elements. Everything is set up pretty well for us to understand what is going on and where we are. This might be attributed to the fact that the first hour of the film is exposition, describing the rules of the film universe. The whole long opening is truly boring and tedious, going through the motions of explaining to the audience what is going to happen and how. I would have preferred it if they just handed out pamphlets at the beginning of the film and that could be read as an option. I feel that if you need to go through this much trouble to explain something, then it isn’t worth explaining. The story itself is complicated, and hard to explain, but the film isn’t. Of course it isn’t, because the first hour is spent on exposition. There are also a couple of things that are a bit to quaint. In the mind of the business man they are infiltrating there has been set up a defense against intrusion. This comes in the variety of blank faced machine gun wielding goons, so we get a good opportunity to have loads of shooting scenes. It becomes almost banal at some point. Visually the film does look quite interesting and it opens up for a lot of nice scenes and set pieces, but I still feel that the film missed out somewhat, I never felt like the film was like a dream. When you talk about going into dreams you think of irrationality and crazy things happening, but they don’t in this film, so its representation of dreams is actually quite boring.
One major problem though is that the film is quite funny, most often when it’s not supposed to be. There’s one moment that had me laughing out loud in the cinema, where DiCaprio leans close to the camera and mutters something incomprehensible with the music droning on in the background. What he was saying sounded quite ridiculous, but the film took it so seriously. That’s another thing; this film takes itself way to seriously. But the whole concept is quite silly when one actually thinks about it, and it makes me think that Nolan is something of a manchild. So it’s very funny when the characters talk with the utmost seriousness about what’s going on, when it’s all just very silly. It doesn’t help that the music is ultra serious as well. Apparently, Nolan liked the music from The Dark Knight so much that he just had the composer remix that track, because it is pretty much the same as it was in that film. You might have noticed how I refer to the characters, that’s because they are so blank and empty that they don’t deserve any more. The film lacks any serious characterization, and most of the characters are boring. The only one I found interesting was the business man who they are trying to infiltrate, he’s played by the same guy as Scarecrow from Batman Begins. Otherwise, the characters are just puppets that make things happen on the screen. DiCaprio does an ok job, but it’s just too similar to the roles he has been playing of late, and while his character has issues that might be taken seriously, they are just too cliché. Oh, and of course, at the end Nolan couldn’t resist playing with the idea for the audience whether or not the whole thing was just a dream or if it was real. But at this point I had stopped caring. My problem with Inception, and this goes for The Dark Knight too, is that it’s a standard summer blockbuster film, but it pretends it’s something more. Yes, it’s somewhat smarter and complex than the average blockbuster, and its well made, but at the end of the day it’s just another action film.
I didn’t like Inception. The only remarkable thing about it is how much it’s stuck up its own ass. The film takes itself way to seriously, the emotions within the film are too flat, and overall I found it quite boring. The first hour is mind numbingly boring with all its exposition, and although it picks up after this, I just think “why bother caring anymore?” But the endless drones of faceless goons aren’t that interesting, and sometimes it makes you think that the whole concept for the film was just an excuse to have loads of gunfights. And before anyone says that I’m biased or something because of my expectations, this film let me down. The opening scene was beautifully shot and well paced, it was mysterious and interesting. I thought, “Wow, this might actually be really good”. However after the initial ten minutes the film started letting me down, and in the end I almost forgot about the good opening scene.
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