*Poster image found randomly on google.comDirector: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Rating: 2/5
‘Reality’ is a subject that thinkers cannot but speculate about and cinema has also followed with its own explorations. Especially in more recent times, with advancements in technology, film directors have been enabled to translate ideas of a more abstract nature into something tangible. Over time, this has encouraged younger filmmakers to focus on original, ‘never-before-conceived’ ideas. Over the last decade, the Matrix Trilogy took the world by storm. These films (primarily the first one) played an important role in creating a new standard for the ‘conceptual’ cinema that followed. This, combined with the rapidly changing world – now equipped with facebook, twitter and several other tools for its virtual extension - subject matter dealing with ‘identity’ and ‘reality’ became highly popular. Plots were no longer orderly because the greatness of ideas needed to be demonstrated and the audience needed to be convinced that these ideas were complex. But with more and more of these conceptually ‘complex’ films flooding the market, mainstream cinema has become grotesquely showy – like a carnival of bearded women – with each one trying to show off the most extravagant beard. Of course, not all the beards are the same – they can be streaked, cut, curled and twisted into newer shapes. However, one must keep in mind, that at bottom of it all, they’re only phony beards.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception is one of this year’s more ‘complex’ films. It has already made quite an impression and has everyone, from the critics to the public, raving about it. Inception stars Leonardo Dicaprio (recently recovering from a tryst with ‘reality’ in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island), who plays a thief named Cobb. Only, Cobb is no ordinary thief. He literally breaks into people’s minds and steals their ideas. The process is fairly simple: An empty world is virtually created, into which the victim and Cobb’s team are placed. This is done by physically plugging the participants into a device when they are asleep.
This empty world works very much like an empty cupboard. When the victim dreams, s/he fills it up with his/her thoughts, turning them into phenomena that are more accessible and stealable by the others. It is just like someone unknowingly using your empty cupboard by filling it with their personal, most prized belongings, giving you complete access to them.
Cobb’s new assignment, however, is not to steal an idea, but to plant one. The term given to this is ‘inception’ – a procedure that is generally perceived as impossible but not for Cobb. For an idea to grow in someone’s head, it must be planted deep inside the consciousness, so that the individual believes that the idea is his/her own. Going deeper into the consciousness would mean to have a dream inside a dream. For the process of inception, one must be deep inside the person’s head. For this to happen, Cobb’s team must create a dream inside a dream inside a dream – three levels of dreaming.
Inception is packed with gunfire, laborious special effects and effortless performances that make it an entertaining watch. However, the plot is excessively convoluted and between flashbacks and disappearing into people’s heads, the film turns into a mess. Several other elements, such as Cobb’s relationship with his dead wife, also complicate the film. It is here, in this mess, that we realize that perhaps Nolan isn’t the genius that the buzz around him indicates. For example, one aspect is dubious is the location of the ideas that are being stolen. They are kept in high security places, very fortress-like – which is perhaps a play on the term ‘heavily guarded secret’ but it becomes an excuse for gunfire. An individual’s secret being literally locked away in his/her mind suggests too literal an imagination. At one point in the movie, one can even lose track of the number of dream-levels that are being accessed. A dream within a dream within a dream within a…oh well.
Moreover, the idea of breaking into someone’s head to steal an idea does not appear to be particularly original. The thought of manipulating thought, even literally, has been done before in films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The idea being not too fresh, Nolan’s task is to present in a form that provokes thought, to tease the audience with a logic that has either eluded them or lingers in the back of their heads somewhere. But instead of attending to this task by focusing on the narrative logic, Nolan turns the world he creates into pure spectacle. If Inception draws from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, - especially in Cobb’s interludes with his dead wife – it is only perfunctorily and not in spirit.
Of course, that is not to say the film is a complete failure. Nolan comes through in a few instances, making the film an entertaining watch. While having complete disregard for a lot of elements such as the clutter that comes along with a person’s mind – the information stored in the head, Nolan does do justice to a few, such as the effects of the individual’s physical state in the dream-world. Also, the special effects are remarkable at times and the film is best experienced on a big screen.