Imagine entering a lucid dream in which the rules of physical reality can be bent and broken, where a person’s subconscious is open for exploration, where their deepest secrets reside. Now imagine that you can use a vaguely-defined technology to infiltrate and extract those valuable secrets and sell them to the highest bidder. You’ve just looked into the world of Inception, The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster for 2010. Now you can own Inception on DVD!
Nolan leads the viewer on an exciting, surreal, and somewhat confusing trip into a world in which dreams can be infiltrated and exploited, leading to some remarkable set pieces, imaginative imagery, and some truly bad-ass moments. It might be a little too confusing for some viewers, with its large cast, convoluted plots, and multiple layers of reality, but while it is somewhat of a high concept for a summer blockbuster, Inception still provides a lot of action and excitement, and can inspire the imagination as well as some of the best science fiction has to offer.
Leonardo Di Caprio plays Cobb, an architect-turned-dream-thief after he was exiled from the United States, accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He works with a partner, Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt from (500) Days of Summer and 3rd Rock from the Sun), as an extractor: someone who uses special technologies to share dreams so that he can steal important information from the subconscious mind of sleeping businessmen for corporate espionage. After a job goes south, Cobb is offered a chance to clear his name, if he can only perform the difficult task of inception: planting an idea within a target’s subconscious mind rather than removing it. While possible, inception is notoriously hard, so Cobb puts together a team of expert thieves, forgers, and chemists to go on an inverse heist deep into the subconscious mind of corporate heir Robert Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy, Batman Begins, Tron: Legacy). In order to make the idea stick, Cobb and company must travel through dreams within dreams, with each layer of dream taking the form of distinct scenarios.
Inception boasts a remarkable collection of talent. Leonardo DiCaprio proves himself able to carry a film as an action lead playing the smooth talking wastrel Cobb. Marion Cotillard (Best Actress Oscar Winner for 2007’s La Vie en Rose) is positively creepy as the psychological imprint of Cobb’s wife, Mal, a ghost who is convinced that Cobb’s world isn’t real. Ellen Page (Juno, X-Men: The Last Stand) learns the rules of the dream world along with the audience as an architecture student recruited to help Cobb build worlds within the dream. Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Letters From Iwo Jima, Batman Begins), Cillian Murphy, and Tom Berenger (Star Trek: Nemesis, Black Hawk Down) fill out the cast as the corporate interests involved in the job. But the movie is really stolen by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the debonair dream-thief Arthur and Tom Hardy as a slick and totally bad-ass forger Eames . Both actors get plenty of time to shine on screen as they fight their way through layers of dream, and their interactions, which mostly consist of giving each other a hard time, add a comedic element to the film. It is hard to finish the story without feeling like both characters – and by association, their actors – are absolutely awesome. A gravity- defying fight with Gordon-Levitt was a highlight in the movie, and Hardy’s portrayal of the quick witted Eames injects cool into the film from the moment he is introduced.
The story drags somewhat, with the back story and set up for the great heist taking up more than half the film before the action really kicks in, but Nolan uses that set up to build the foundation of the world that he plays with for the rest of the film. Once the action kicks in, it hardly lets up for the rest of the film. The special effects used are very cool, and lack the artificiality that accompanies most CGI work. There are some awesome stunts in the movie, and some riveting action sequences. The plot becomes a little convoluted as the film progresses, and while it should be easy to track if you are accustomed to following the multiple plot threads used in modern TV series, it might be a little bit difficult to track if you are not used to following complicated stories. The story also keeps you guessing throughout, even after the credits start to roll.
Special Features:
The DVD includes a small set of special features, short discussions from Christopher Nolan and his crew regarding the inspiration for the story (which Nolan had been working on for years before the film was made) and also the planning and execution of some of the set-piece special effects, specifically detailing the Japanese Castle at the beginning of the film, the paradoxical staircases reminiscent of M.C. Esher paintings used several times in the film, and the sequence in which a freight train destroys a street within a massive metropolis dreamworld. While all of the short features provide fascinating insight into the way the film was conceived and made, the sequences chosen for examination seem to be an odd selection, with early film sequences weighted more than later scenes. Perhaps the DVD was short on space, but it would have been nice to see more coverage of the special effects in heavy scenes later in the movie.
Complete Special Features List:
-4 Focus Points: The Inception of Inception – Christopher Nolan shapes his unusual concepts for “Inception”
-The Japanese Castle: The Dream is Collapsing – Creating and destroying the castle set
-Constructing Paradoxical Architecture – Designing the staircase to nowhere
-The Freight Train – Constructing the street-faring freight train
Overall:
Inception is amazingly convoluted for a summer blockbuster. Between the thematic questioning of reality and perception, the large cast and branching plot, the multiple layers of reality and the ambiguous ending, Inception is designed for an audience that wants to think. If you go in looking for a special-effects-driven-action-movie, you might come out of the film baffled and frustrated, though you will probably still have enjoyed the fight scenes and reality-bending dream sequences. If, though, you are prepared to follow Inception’s characters through a wild ride into a character’s subconscious, the film is an enjoyable sci-fi experience grounded in very human themes.
ComicsOnline gives Inception on DVD 4.5 layers of reality out of 5.
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