Inception

When I first heard of Inception I had rather high hopes. Director Christopher Nolan was responsible for Memento and The Prestige and the descriptions of the film that I read gave it a Phildickian bent with the whole bit about entering dreams. Then the movie was actually released and I watched as it stood atop the weekend box office for a two or three weeks in a row. I then realized that it was more summer blockbuster than cerebral epic but I wanted to see it anyway. Nolan is a good director (even if his version of Insomnia pales in comparison to the original and, if another Batman movie never gets made, it would be too soon for me) who generally takes on interesting material. And so I resolved to see his latest.

My lady and I did so and on the IMAX. Man, let me tell you, Nolan has a good friend in cinematographer Wally Pfister because it looked mighty pretty and the effect of everything was magnified by being on such a large screen.

The story concerns Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man who is able to utilize technology developed by the military to enter people's minds and extract information. Cobb is asked by Saito, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe) to infiltrate the mind of Robert Fischer who is heir to a huge corporation. Saito wants Cobb's team not to extract information but rather to plant it. He wants Fischer to be convinced to break up the leviathan of a company that he stands to inherit from his dying father.

And so Cobb assembles a crack team for the job including Arthur, Cobb's right-hand man, Ariadne who helps sculpt the world created by the subject's mind, the shape-shifting Eames, and Yusef who creates sedatives that allow everyone to be unconscious long enough for the team to do their work. It being such an important enterprise, Saito goes along as well.

During training, Ariadne learns of something that could be a problem. Cobb is still reeling from the death of his wife and she appears, completely out of place, in the dream scenarios that Cobb creates. Her presence can cause the subject to realize that his or her mind has been infiltrated.

Cobb and his team devise a plan which would give them access to an unconscious Fischer for 10 hours. In order to implant the thought in a subtle enough manner, they decide to penetrate three levels deep into his mind.

On a 10-hour flight, the team takes over first class and enter Fischer's mind. The first dream level involves everyone in a large city. They kidnap Fischer only to find that he has mental defenses to repel extractors like Cobb which take the form of military-trained and highly armed guards. Since they weren't able to implant the suggestion, everyone except Yusef goes to the second level of the dream world which takes place at a hotel. The chemist stays in level one driving a van in evasive maneuver mode while the others are unconscious in the back seats.

Level two takes place at a posh hotel where Cobb and company attempt to convince Fischer that the first dream level was in fact reality and that they are now in his mind to help him. Their subject is fooled to give consent to go to level three which takes place at a James Bond-like concrete fortress in a snowy valley. It even features a ski chase right out of The Spy Who Loved Me. Even a fourth level of dreamland is achieved where Cobb is confronted by his past and is forced to overcome the guilt he has over his wife's death.

There is plenty of great Phildickian mindfuck material here but Inception manages to avoid addressing any interesting possibilities and instead sticks to heist/action flick formulae. What a letdown. The first three levels are nothing but excuses for chases and shootouts that occasionally take a turn towards the surreal. Ariadne's role as the architect is to create shells of worlds within the subject's mind that he/she in turn populates with places and people that they know or have experienced in real life. What a wonderful premise for investigating the psyches of a couple characters and/or trying to talk about how our dreams, our pasts, and perhaps our subconsciouses influence our waking lives. Nolan needn't have plunged headlong into Phildickian or Lynchian territory but it would have been nice had he even approached these ideas instead of discarding them completely in favor of (some admittedly great) action sequences.

We learn in the film that those who use the machine to enter the minds of others eventually lose their ability to dream on their own. It's like building tolerance to a drug. In the movie, this revelation is a simple ploy to gain sympathy for Cobb but it could have been the gateway to something else. What does this say about us? What is the significance of dreams for human beings? What is lost by not being able to dream and only enter the dreams of others?

Unfortunately Inception is uninterested in trying to answer these questions. There's just no time for the characters to do or say anything to address them as there are always bullets to dodge or places to evacuate because Fischer's mental mercenaries will be arriving anon. I wish that the movie were a bit more cerebral and that Nolan had utilized his intriguing premise as something more than a background for shootouts.