Inception - the Misconception of the Summer

Inception Missed the Mark

Inception, a Christopher Nolan film, is being labeled as 'smart, innovative, and thrilling' by critics. I found the movie to be a bit jumbled, disorganized, and exceptionally long. The basic premise of Inception is going into a person's dreams to plant an idea and for that person to think it is their own idea. It's not a new concept. We've seen it in The Matrix, The Cell, and Vanilla Sky. Inception's leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio, starred in a movie with a similar concept as recently as February 2010, Shutter Island. Inception is not innovative. Elements of the listed movies as well as a dash of Mission Impossible make up the basic premise of sneaking into dreams to do a little espionage to your corporate competition.

For the first one third of the movie I was left wondering what's going on. The plot was not explained, it seemed jumbled, characters were thrown at me. I think Christopher Nolan wanted that effect, for the audience to feel disjointed. An attempt to bring us into the movie and make us interested in the concept he then lays out. But the sum effect is I began to wonder what was going on in this film and when would it be over. However, the movie theater's popcorn was good.

The feeling of 'when will this end' stayed with me throughout the movie. That's not to say the entire film is a bore, there were a couple funny scenes. But I never reached a point of on the edge of my seat excitement, nor did I ever find myself caring about what was going to happen next. Both qualities I look for in an action movie. And don't let them fool you; as much as this film is being toted as a science fiction film, it's just another action adventure without a lot of adventure. There were some nice special effects, but the most interesting ones were not at climatic moments of the film. At one point a city street is turned into the inside of a box, complete with a mirrored sky, and later a steam locomotive barrels down a New York styled busy street. The explosions and avalanches were pretty boring and obviously timed.

The Plot (spoiler alert)

The movie opens with Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) being washed up on a beach where he's discovered by a guard. He's taken into an oriental looking room and asked by an old man if Cobb is there to kill him. As he asks the old man twirls what appears to be a small spinning top on the table. Then we cut to Cobb, along with another man, fighting through what appears to be the set of the Titanic to get some secret plans from a safe. Then as that world is falling apart we cut to what appears to be a third world country on the brink of a revolution where now three men are fighting over some undisclosed secrets. Then as that world is exploding, we are taken to a young boy starting to play some music which awakens the people we saw in the last scenes. By this point we've been introduced to the majority of the cast but if you can remember who is who, then you're doing better than I did.

Then we have a scene where Cobb and Saito (Ken Watanabe) have a conversation which explains the process of going into other people's dreams and finding out information. Saito then offers a job of implanting (Inception) an idea into the son (Cillian Murphy) of his dieing competition's brain for that son to break up his father's empire. And in so doing, stop the threat of it overtaking Saito's market base. In return Saito would clear up some undisclosed legal issues which prevent Cobb from returning to the States and his children. Cobb agrees.

Then we follow Cobb as he pulls his group together to accomplish the mission, we have further explaining of the process of implanting the concept into the brain so that the son would think it was his own. I felt this further explaining was in place in case you were so confused and/or bored out of your mind the first time around that you missed it. Along with this we have an unneeded plot twist of Cobb feeling guilty over his wife's (Marion Cotillard) death due to him implanting a thought into her unconscious mind while they were trapped in the dream state. That thought followed her out and caused her to commit suicide in reality. The sum effect is that when Cobb sleeps he projects his wife's memory into his dreams (and therefor also the mission) as a antagonistic force within the dreams.

To complicate things further, an idea can not be planted on the first level of sleeping. So the film takes us through three depths of dreaming, where the cast has to come to a place to sleep twice more. Additionally the son has been trained to avoid inception on a subconscious level by projecting an elite army to combat Cobb and his crew. The movie ends with the message implanted, Cobb saying a farewell to his wife's memory and being able to return to his children. No big surprises.

Inception Misconception.

In order for Inception to be anything but the jumbled mess that it was, the audience should have been included in the plot from the beginning instead of led on a goose chase of 'what is going on here.' For me, I was able to follow the movie conceptually, but my interest was lost after the first 30 minutes. I found myself wondering who I could text message and not really caring about the characters in the movie.

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception_(film)