Suppose one could enter into someone else’s dream and convince that person to think a certain way or make a certain decision. Problems with friends would be solved, and companies could flourish or save workers; change their point of view on someone or something, bring them to a sudden realization or epiphany! How cool is that? Like, very cool. Of course, there are risks involved and dreams can seriously distort what is real and what is make-believe.
Director, Christopher Nolan, created yet another successful film this summer. Inception’s plot is brilliant, suspenseful, and best of all: mind-bending, making viewers want to see it again to catch all the information thrown at them.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays the skilled, sly Dom Cobb, who extracts deep secrets, information, and ideas as a living. He and his team are assigned to reveal secrets of their competitors and use it against them. But Cobb is in for a greater challenge. His newest client, a Japanese businessman, Mr. Saito, hires him to do the opposite: implanting an idea into his competitor’s mind. If he succeeds in the operation, Cobb will be granted the privilege to return to his two small children in the U.S. Chosen to work with Cobb’s team, Ariadne (Ellen Page), an intelligent architecture major, designs the setting and environment in the dream that will be used to accomplish the task. However, Cobb’s tormented, dark past complicates the mission, providing the team with the dangerous risk of possibly being stuck in the dream—or in other words, limbo.
Inception covers a topic that many of us internally reflect upon, but never openly converse about. As human beings, we have all experienced being in a dream that felt unbelievably real and can cause us to feel frightened, happy, sad, angry, grateful, or any other imaginable emotions. Everything in a dream seems to make sense, until you wake up. We also have dreams that feel like they are hours, days, months, or even years long within a 10-minute period of sleeping. The “falling dream,” something that we have all experienced, is also incorporated in the film. It was cleverly used as a technique to awaken the sleeping information-extractors from their client’s dream; that experience of being dream inside a dream, inside a dream. Concepts like this catch people’s interest.
Nolan’s storyboard skills astonish me. Starting at a seemingly random point and changing settings every ten minutes is what will keep viewers attentive. The plot is very psychologically based, as are many of his other films including The Prestige, Doodlebug, and Memento. Illusions, dimensions, mental processing and putting stories in their own unique sequence are his calling.
Despite the lengthiness of the film (148 minutes), it is definitely worth viewing. Of course, like many of his movies, it has a dark twist, filled with vague flashbacks and clues in the character’s tone of voice. The ending leaves the viewers hanging, almost in an aggravating way. It is, however, a great start for Nolan if he wishes to make a sequel to this thrilling masterpiece.