As an English major and an appreciator of good stories, it's been hard to keep myself positive about finding good stories in today's age of 3D gimmicks and reality TV. I'm a child of the 90's, I grew up watching shows like Batman: the Animated Series, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain: animated series with sophisticated stories and great action that kept kids entertained and adults interested. I moved on to anime and found series like Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell which provided equally sophisticated stories. Years of this and what do we have now? American Idol, Seltzer and Friedberg, and Michael Bay.
It's enough to make me cry sometimes....
...until I saw The Dark Knight, and I regained faith.
Christopher Nolan has proved to be a consistently good director in the field of Speculative fiction (AKA comic book films and Sci Fi) and his latest work Inception was his baby: his pet project for ten years. Those ten years have delivered. This is without a doubt the best original film of the year and the decade so far. A film that combines a deep, think-heavy story with literally lucid and visceral action that tops The Matrix as a cyberpunk film.
The film is set in not-to-distant future where specialized heist teams called Extractors can intercept a mark's dream and steal valuable information from their subconscious. Di Caprio plays Dom Cobb: an extraction master on the run and dodging extradition from the states by hopping between Japan, France, and Australia. A Japanese corporation owner, Mr. Saito ( Ken Wantanabe) approaches him with an offer: plant an idea into his competitor's subconscious and he will make it possible that all US charges will be dropped against him. Desperate to see his children again, Cobb assembles a crack team, each with their own role: Cobb as the extractor, Arthur (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) as the point man, Ariadne (Ellen Paige) as the Architect (I see what you did there, Nolan...) Eames (Tom Hardy) as the Forger, and Yusef (Dileep Rao) as the chemist. Sabaauging their efforts is Cobb's own subconscious guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) which manifests itself regularly to sabotage his efforts. How are they going to pull the plant? By creating a dream within a dream within a dream: 3 levels of dreams! Reality is relative and perception is warped in its more promoted scenes in the trailers.
The effects are so visceral because real world factors actively alters the subconscious: if the body is off balance the physics are off balance, and yes, they do establish that if you die in a dream you wake up. I haven't seen a film with such ambition and grandeur since Nolan's previous film The Dark Knight which was a morality tale writ large. Inception is an old-school Noir heist film twenty minutes into the future as crafty subconscious safe crackers. As a speculative film, the implications are terrifying: how do you defend something you have little to no control over? The question of their own sanities also come into play with Cobb's own deep-seated guilt issues actively sabotaging his efforts. It's a grand cyberpunk heist film served straight, no frills and I loved every minute of it.
Film experts and critics have been asking if this film is too deep for the average filmgoer: well, yeah! Did anybody understand The Matrix the first time around? No! But if you set off enough fireworks it'll keep audiences busy enough to where they won't get confused. Don't see it to understand it the first time through: see it to have fun and to see how far a film can go with the right imagination. Christopher Nolan is without a doubt the Stephen Spielberg of our generation: no other director has delivered so much visceral consistency in years, and I salute him for reaffirming my faith that good stories do have a place in Hollywood today.
Final Rating: A. Go see it right now. Support the efforts of a true visionary and show Hollywood and the rest of their ilk that we do want originality and good stories in our media. This is Ghost in the Shell meets James Bond and Nolan pulls it off as epic as it sounds.
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