
Christopher Nolan’s Inception promises to be a movie that will divide audiences between those who love its dream logic action sequences and those frustrated by its shortcomings.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a corporate spy whose talents lie in a specialised field of espionage known as extraction. He can break into a subject’s subconscious while they dream and remove information for his employers directly from the minds of their rivals. Cobb’s team is made up of fellow experts in extraction, each of them with their own specialised talents. The architect is responsible for ensuring the level of detail of the dream the subject finds themselves in. Then there is the chemist, who is responsible for the strength of the sedative, as well as a forger who can recreate the appearance of people the subject knows.
Cobb and his crew are hired by Saito, played by returning Nolan performer Ken Watanabe, to go outside their comfort zone and perform an ‘inception’ – the planting of an idea into the mind of a business rival Fischer (Cillian Murphy) in order to ‘inspire’, him to break up his monopoly. In return, Cobb is promised that he will be allowed to return to his family in America. He immediately agrees, despite the reservations of his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). What the rest of the team do not realize is that Cobb’s dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is breaking into his dreams and working against him. His plan is to drag Fischer through multiple levels of the dreamscape, earning his trust by acting as a protector of sorts and tricking him into believing Saito’s simple idea. The dismantling of his father’s business empire.
Cobb is introduced to Ariadne (Ellen Page) by his father-in-law, a young student with a precocious talent for manipulating the dreamscape. Trained to be the team’s new architect, she becomes determined to discover the secrets of Cobb’s past and the reasons for Mal’s murderous attempts on their lives. In effect Ariadne stands in for the audience. Through her we learn the rules of extraction and inception, as well as the cause of Cobb’s debilitating guilt.
Before getting into what I disliked about Inception I would like to address its strengths. This is a marquee film that is filled with astounding images. Paris is folded like a pretzel and there are hallway fight scenes in zero gravity. The premise of dream thieves is fascinating, a concept that could have sprung from the mind of Philip K. Dick. That a blockbuster film is trading in these ideas is a credit to Nolan’s ambition and talent as a director who can woo modern day audiences. What’s more the film is an excellent showcase for young, up-and-coming talent. While DiCaprio is the ostensible star, this is actually an ensemble picture, the ‘dream heist’, storyline resembling a Freudian Oceans 11. Joseph Gordon-Levitt adds yet another wry performance to his CV, but it is Tom Hardy playing the quick-witted Eames who is the stand out. Adding much needed humour to the proceedings, his shape-shifting forger steals every scene he is in. Something of a relief I’m sure for Hardy, finally escaping the embarrassing memory of Star Trek Nemesis. With this and his performance in Bronson, I reckon we’ll be seeing his name in lights before the end of the year.
Ok now that that’s out of the way….this was a very frustrating film for me. For one a lot of media hype has been generated by the ’secrets’, of Inception and its purported ambiguity. Pajiba and Mightygodking have each addressed complaints of confusing plotlines and that ending. Personally I found the story of the film straight-forward, disappointingly so for a film about lucid dreaming and shapeshifting thieves of the subconscious, with Escher-inspired architecture to boot. Many scenes are given over to exposition and we know from the outset there is something wrong with Cobb. Had Mal’s fate been kept under wraps until later in the film, with the process of extraction running more smoothly, the plot might have been more surprising. This is a film with a smart premise that feels the need to explain itself to audiences, afraid they will be left confused. True this would be box office poison, but the quality of the film itself would have been more successful had it been more ambiguous.
Below is a diagram explaining the several dreamscapes invented by Cobb to entrap Fischer. As a visual aid it does the trick, but I do not recall feeling confused on this point. We are walked through each ‘dream within a dream’, so that we understand what is happening. Excellent work by @DeviantART

The ‘kick’, referred to in the visual aid is the means by which Cobb’s team surfaces from the dream. Gravity generally works and a montage sequence featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt falling off a chair proves yet again, as Zach Gallifinakis has noted, that falling is the essence of physical comedy. Moments of humour are few and far between though. This is grim, dour stuff. The kick releases them from the dream, but can it lead to death? From dropping off a chair we progress to characters flinging themselves off buildings. What is real and what is fantasy? I have heard reviewers say that audiences may return to watch Inception two, maybe three times to work out what scenes occur in the ‘real world’. I suspect the only revelation after multiple viewings will be to discover tinnitus, as Hans Zimmer’s portentous score booms and blasts through the proceedings.
What this film desperately needs is a sense of fun. At times it resembles The Matrix, the Wachowskis lightening the Cartesian dilemma of surfer-dude Messiah Neo by introducing comic book action and Hong Kong fight scenes. The above mentioned Oceans 11 reveled in the banter and camraderie of the casino thieves. Inception fails to convince us that Cobb, Arthur, Eames and Ariadne are individuals. God love him, I could not understand Watanabe’s Saito half the time. It occured to me that as they are all sharing the same dream the actor could have delivered his lines in Japanese, with the others immediately comprehending.
Ultimately the characters seem more like archetypes. Eames represents the mind’s capacity for imagination. Arthur is rational thought, linear and direct in his approach to problem solving. Whether this is intentional or not is immaterial. As I have no investment in the characters I do not care whether they live or die. The rescue of Saito, to my mind, is merely a means of Cobb exculpating his own feelings of guilt. As a result the ending, if you accept that the proceeding is nothing more than a dream, represents his final decision to embrace the dream. At one point he remarks to the team that a positive fantasy is more successful than a negative one. His brain has decided to abandon his paranoid fantasies and accept a happy ending.
Personally I left the cinema disappointed. I have heard Inception described as a smart film for stupid people. That seems like a terrible waste to me.