Inception (2010): Favourite Films Series

 Inception (2010): Favourite Films Series

 

In order for a movie to be one of my all-time favourites, it needs to not only be one I can always watch again, but also one I can derive different means of enjoyment from. The first time I saw Inception, I loved it as a sci-fi/adventure/action film, and the high-concept premise—breaking into someone’s mind through dreams and either extracting or implanting information—was so dense I couldn’t fully grasp it all, so I felt compelled to watch it again based on two things: wanting to enjoy the action and visual effects once again, and wanting to figure out the intricacies of what, exactly, happened, story-wise.

Inception strikes the perfect balance of being an accessible film, but also a puzzle that needs some solving. The concept is pretty well explained: Cobb and Arthur (Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are thieves who infiltrate a person’s subconscious through a state of shared dreaming and take information, but the powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants to hire them to do the opposite: he wants them to put an idea in the mind of a business rival, so Cobb hires a team to help him pull it off, with various team members fulfilling different roles in the mission, such as the architect (builder of the dream world). Things get rapidly more complicated though, and a viewer not tuned right in might lose track of what’s going on. In fact, even the characters sometimes aren’t sure what’s happening, but at least it isn’t all just a dream in the end. I think.  

The vague explanation of what Inception is about boils down to basically this: sharing dreams, stealing ideas in dreams, and planting ideas in dreams. But Inception is really about a lot more than that. It’s about ideas, and how much impact ideas can have. Where do we get them? Inception, as a concept, is about giving someone an idea and making it impossible for the person who receives the idea to trace the origins of it. The idea will seem like their own, but it was really placed there by someone else, only the idea is placed in the subconscious so deep that they won’t know the truth. It’s also about the radical impacts ideas have on others. The drive of the plot is the team trying to make Robert Fischer want to dissolve his father’s company, which will have drastic consequences despite the relative simplicity of the idea (though, as Cobb says, “no idea is simple when you need to plant it in someone else’s mind”) but in doing this, it becomes a journey of catharsis for Robert Fischer, who always had a bad relationship with his father. The journey to bring him to the idea they need to plant in his mind also takes him to a place of reconciliation. From the beginning Cobb is resistant to perform inception, and over the course of the film we learn why it’s such a dangerous and tricky job. Cobb’s story is one of catharsis as well, but different from Robert’s. He must learn to accept the loss of a loved one, and grapple with the danger in hanging on to the past, in holding on to ideas, not moving forward with new ideas, and learning to live in the present reality instead of existing in an illusion of the past. The concepts, like the level of dream states, go deep.  

I love the premise of Inception, but the story is also so tight in focus that it just completely captivates me. The possibilities are literally endless. One of the most fun and visually fascinating scenes is when Cobb lets Ariadne (Elliot Page) experiment with the physics of the dream world, bending buildings overhead and moving architecture into illusionary places. As the mission goes on, the team descend into ever deeper levels of dreaming. The first act establishes the dream-within-a-dream idea, but to make it even more complicated, they go into a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream to plant the idea in Fischer’s mind, with each dream layer being distinct enough that it’s easy to tell which one we are seeing at any given time just by the visuals, but none of the dreams are too wacky or different in tone, either.   

Not one of the characters is uninteresting or without a good line of dialogue. The only actor I feel like I’m actively aware of when I watch it is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but I’m not really sure why. He doesn’t do a bad job, though he is a bit emotionless at times. I just see him as JGL and not the character, which I can’t say about the others. Even though Leonardo DiCaprio has had so many starring roles, and other actors like Tom Hardy and Ken Watanabe are now recognizable from many other big films, when I watch Inception they are the characters. They make you absolutely buy into the impossible concept of shared dreaming and dream control, and without such great casting the credibility of the film would likely have been compromised. 

Something Inception sometimes gets blamed for is popularizing the loud horn-driven soundtracks, although I can’t actually recall if that was because of the trailer or the actual film score or both. Hans Zimmer has scored most of Christopher Nolan’s films, and his Inception score is more than exceptional. I agree that the horn sounds are often overused, but it also fits well and really does enhance the epic feel. The visual effects, too, are particularly noteworthy, which really says something, because not everything is all rendered in cgi, a lot of it is practical, and the blending between the two is very seamless.

Inception has elements of espionage, tragedy, reconciliation, and so much more that it’s no wonder this high-concept sci-fi-thriller has been able to stand out as one of the most-exceptional films from the 2010s. Writer-Director Christopher Nolan has made some excellent films, but this is my favourite original one of his, with my other favourite being The Dark Knight. Inception is a showcase for cinematic imagination, and a multifaceted story that I always enjoy going back to.