Inception sees Christopher Nolan return to a subject he obviously holds dear: the workings and complexities of the mind. With his breakthrough hit, the mini-budget Memento, Guy Pearce played a man coping with the loss of his memory. Prior to that, in the micro-budget Following, a young actor meets a burglar named Cobb who 'helps' him discover more about the human condition.
The lead character in Inception is also called Cobb, and he's also a burglar. Is this a sign that Nolan has come full circle and that Inception is a large scale version of a story he has been obsessed with since he began film-making? Following cost a reported $6,000 and with an apparent $200m at his disposal, Inception is massive in scope yet still asks the same question: why do we know so little about the workings of the mind?
It's certainly a film unlike any other Hollywood release of the year. In fact, it's hard to remember when such a big-budget complex plot was unleashed on the public. After the success of The Dark Knight, Nolan clearly has the big studios at his beck and call.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, the burglar: specifically a breaking-and-entering expert who is capable of getting into people's dreams, extracting information, and selling this information to interested third parties. With a team of experts helping him and an international lifestyle, Cobb's work is highly rewarded, but the money is unable to help him to fulfil his own personal dream, a return to the United States (forbidden due to one of the many plot complications).
Cobb and company - a smirky Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a feisty Tom Hardy and a brainy Ellen Page - receive an assignment from a new client (Ken Watanabe). For high end business reasons, he asks Cobb for the reverse of his normal routine: to enter the mind of a rival businessman (Cillian Murphy), and actually plant an idea. Cobb initially refuses - protesting that it can't be done - until Watanabe's character offers him a reward that he cannot refuse.
There are several extraordinary things about Inception, chief among them the complexities of the plot. Imagine Last Year at Marienbad crossed with The Matrix crossed with Minority Report and you are part of the way there: but the layer upon layer of dream worlds that Nolan presents us with is arguably as hard to stay on top of as any of these other films. In fact, one of the chief critics of the film is likely to be that for a lot of people, it will simply be very hard to follow.
Also extraordinary is the scale: the effects and cinematography are spectacular. As he showed in The Dark Knight, Nolan is possibly the greatest contemporary director of action sequences, and Inception has many of them, with the last hour looking like something out of the best Bond film that has never been made. But it's when the team enter the dreamscape of their subjects that the levels are raised even higher: Nolan and his team use every frame, and every pixel of every frame, to create a crazy, vivid, hyperreal world, and one which rewards seeing the film in its IMAX format.
But, and there is a but, there are likely to be many who find the film too flabby. At two and a half hours, the plot and dialogue are dense, and until the final act cranks into top gear there are periods that drag. It's the chief criticism of the film, and was also the chief criticism of The Dark Knight. It's also why Inception will be the most talked about film of the year: millions will find it a stunning and rewarding release and regard it as a modern classic, yet others (a significant minority) will find it puzzling for the wrong reasons, and even question the validity of its central premise. But they will be united in agreeing that it is a film that stays in the mind.
Paul Hurley
