So I brought my notepad with me to the theatre and I took some pretty amazing notes... the thing is, I forgot it back at the office and I'm writing this at home.
I've decided that, instead, I'm going to review it all from memory. Or shouldn't I? (an inside joke if you've already seen it... oh yeah, this thing will also be riddled with spoilers, but they'll be in white, so highlight if you want to read).
When I was a child I would have these terrifying nightmares that would haunt me. It wasn't until I reached around 11 or so, that I was able to control things. I would fight these nightmares back and create my own world the way as I saw fit. Lately, though, my nightmares are pulling things out from my subconscious and reformatting them in ways to haunt me again. As I'm struggling to fight between my control and my subconscious, my dreams have become quite abstract.
Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Tarsem's The Fall have both come quite close in reproducing something very similar to my dreams.
Inception hits a little close to home as well, with its colliding dreamscapes and interpretations of occurrences in reality within the dreams. The beginning thrusts you immediately into this confusing state. You are trying to unfold what is happening and discerning what is reality just like when you wake up and try to remember what just happened to you. Things merge with other ideas and concepts your brain is creating, at a faster pace than a hobo scrounging in a dumpster behind Applebee's before the thickest snow falls.
You begin to question the reality of the movie. What is real and what isn't. The entire time, I thought the thing was going to just be a dream. Just like the season finale of Dallas. Leondardo Di Caprio's in the shower just waiting for you to pull back the curtain.
He also has excellent taste in shower curtains
It isn't though, and thankfully, Christopher Nolan knows not to fuck around with a mass audience like that. He still needs to make money for the next Batman movie. He'll let you know what's real and what's not through a simple metal top. It's a totem Leonardo Di Caprio's character, Cobb, uses to ground himself in reality. A device that when spun gives the illusion that it is standing on it's tip until it spins out of control and falls. The kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun's character, Arthur, uses a weighted die. Only he knows the weight of a device used to control fate. Juno... I mean, Ellen Page's character, Ariadne, uses a weighted chess piece, the Queen, a major piece in the game that can move in any direction, however far... honest to blog.
When none of these things acts the way they're supposed to, then they know they're in a dream of someone else's creation.
Mirrors are heavily used throughout the film. A lot of it deals with the symmetry of the movie. The beginning is actually the end of the movie. The entire thing's a flashback. So how's that for a twist? A dream within a dream within a dream within a flashback... within a dream! Mirrors are also a fragile sense of reality. They show you everything, but at any moment, they can be shattered only to reveal that it's only glass. As a bit of a side note, I actually like the idea of vampires that can't be seen in mirrors as it dictates that they only exist in this reality, and not in a reverse universe made of glass.
Speaking of ideas, the movie plays them up the concept of ideas up to the Nth degree. How an idea created in a dream can shape someone's reality. How something like inspiration or guilt can be cultivated in a dream and brought out into the real world. This is similar to how Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories are laid out. Dreams are of the utmost important influence. If you can't tell, this is where the movie gets its title from. The inception of an idea.
Ken Watanabe's character, Saito, is the head of a giant energy corporation who wants to hire Cobb's team of people to plan an idea in someone else's head. That someone else? The heir to the competing energy corporation. This draws numerous parallels to Philip K. Dick's book, Ubik (also the writer of the book Blade Runner was based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the short story Minority Report, and the short story an upcoming movie is based on with the same name, Adjustment Team). I've always loved PKD's universes that involve competing corporations that go through the most extreme methods of trying to kill each other off, the questioning of realities, and the religious undertones of a personal purgatory.
Purgatory for some. My Moon Over My Hammy for me.
Christopher Nolan proves that he knows how to finely craft and hone movies and is establishing himself as a classic movie director/writer. I feel quite confident in saying that he's the next commercially acceptable Stanley Kubrick. He proves that he can better direct Leonardo DiCaprio better than James Cameron and Martin Scorsese. While Michel Gondry still bests Nolan in the dream writing department, Nolan can make a more cohesive story that Gondry still can't quite grasp. Don't get me wrong, I love Gondry's whimsy and dreamscapes, but a plot usually seems to be created as an afterthought.
Back on topic, Nolan has come a long way in doing action. The scenes in Batman Begins were very shaky and not very understandable. He played it safe in a lot of ways and there were times when were just watching a vehicle chase. The Dark Knight made better strides in the action, still involved a vehicle chase that was littered with flimsy dialogue (due to David S. Goyer's terrible writing). Inception on the other hand, played the action to a level of a good Bond film and to the level of crazy dreamscape fighting. When I was a kid, I had this ear infection. It caused me to lose sense of gravity in my dreams quite a bit and they play this up a lot with the action involving Joseph Gordon-Levitt; it was probably my favorite, as from what you've seen in the trailer is the crazy zero gravity stuff.
The acting on the other hand was okay at worst. During the appropriate times, I actually really felt for DiCaprio's character and Marion Cotillard did a spectacular job of playing an evil bitch; very much like the Joker in The Dark Knight, you nearly dreaded seeing her in any scene.
All the other characters were pretty much walking plot devices, but there was a style and slickness that came with them, that it was excusable. Also, anything with Ken Watanabe is worth seeing. I'm still waiting for a version of the Last Samurai without Tom Cruise.
The plot, while all over the place at times, plays kind of like a surreal version of Ocean's 11. Its clever and entertaining, while retaining a denseness to keep it grounded. It doesn't always berate you with one emotion and has time for you to catch breathers in between its amazing set pieces and action sequences. Although, before going into the movie, I thought it would be more heavily layered, like all the previous dream-related movies I've seen, but it was fairly straight forward without any major lingering questions or plot holes.
Hans Zimmer and the sound designer played an excellent job of creating specific sounds that you are supposed to hear and fade in the background when the visuals need the full attention of the audience, but they also created an interesting sense of weight in the film.
The film has its strengths and plays them highly. Its pitfalls are relatively small in comparison and the ending is actually kind of predictable, but in a satisfying way. If it had ended in a happier tone, I might have actually been disappointed with it. But that's mostly my opinion of it.
Breakdown
Cinematography - A
"A visual mix that'll delight the Art House people, but not turn away the average man"
Script - B+
"The pacing could speed up here and there, but overall, was very enthralling"
Audio Science - B
"I'm not going to buy the soundtrack, but the audio was very noticeable; in a good way"
Performance - B+
"STOP USING DiCAPRIO, HOLLYWOOD."
Overall - B+
For its Genre - A
Also, I find myself wondering about the unconscious of my mind. I wrote this poem two weeks before the movie's release. It's not great and I'm not exactly proud of it, but it feels like two scenes lifted from the movie:
She lays down
Head against pillow
Dreams crash shores
Of unkown sands
Griped in awe
Doused in sweat
Swept swiftly away
With each ceding wave
Red ribbon flows
From fair wrists
Tethering back
Knife in hand
She cuts loose
Drowning in a sea
Like a visual Harp
Each image seen
Fades away
As the next plucks in
