Inception

It’s undoubtedly one of the most highly anticipated films of the summer. But does Inception live up to the hype? Kimberly Gadette, Paul Martin and Emma Rowley weigh in (with nary a spoiler in sight).

Kimberly: Quoting Douglas Adams: "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."  I wonder if the same might be said about Inception.

This is a special kind of love story. One that develops between a filmmaker and his film. Writer/director Christopher Nolan seems to treat each shot as if it were signed with a handwritten note of adoration, framed and perched on a bedside table within inches of his pillow, ready to send him off into pink clouds of slumber each and every night.

If only we adored each piece of celluloid even half as much.

Instead we're stuck, like hapless acquaintances of the fellow just returned from his awesome (!) vacation, having to wade through disjointed snippets of story while viewing umpteen shots of places and people we barely know, if at all. But because he knows how to take great pictures, we'll keep looking. For a while. However, multiple snaps of the same building will eventually engender our indifference. Which may grow ugly by the time we witness the billionth raindrop or the most infinitesimal snowflake. (Hey, they really are unique!).

If you think I'm going on too long ... just wait till you wade through this 148-minute film. Making matters worse, we're told early on that 5 minutes of reality = 60 minutes of the dream state. Since approximately 130 minutes of the running time is spent in dreamland then, cutting to the chase (a feat that Nolan seems incapable of): if we enter the theater at, say, 8pm on a Saturday night, when we resurface around 10:30pm, it will seem like a late Sunday evening. Seriously. Do the math.

And yet, with all the numerous locations, bad guys and dreams within dreams, the plot is a lot less complicated than the smoke and mirrors obfuscating it. Instead of an "A Team," think a "Zzzzzz team" who are experts at corporate espionage through dream manipulation. The team is hired by big business magnates to sneak into the subconscious of the competition, either raiding company secrets, or embedding ideas that would only be beneficial to the competitor. The main players of the team include expert extractor/team leader Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio), point man/producer Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and newly-hired dream architect Ariadne (Ellen Page). They've been enlisted by deep-pocketed businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) who wants them to wreak havoc within the gray matter of the mark, one Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), heir to his dying father's multibillion-dollar empire. If they can successfully execute the "long con" (an extended setup that entails winning the mark's trust in order to ultimately dupe him), planting the idea in Fischer's mind that he needs to break up his father's company, then Saito will pay Dom handsomely. For Dom, an international fugitive, the only reward that he's after is the ability to go home again.

Themes dealing with the manipulation of the mind's subconscious, delving into questions of reality versus illusion, are as unique in Hollywood as the word "dream" is in poetry. E.g., the brainwashing of The Manchurian Candidate, the alternate realities of The Matrix, the unstable psyche of Donnie Darko, the thought-sharing of Brainstorm. What is unique to Inception, however, is Nolan's particular eye candy: the Escher-esque buildings folding on top of each other, the visual metaphor of a brain's stored floors of memory, a hotel room that is impervious to gravity. But without a substantial story to support the whole, the piece is as weightless as the somnambulists themselves, floating through the multiple levels of dreams within dreams.

And who are these dreamers? We learn nothing about the second-in-command Arthur, other than the fact that he steals a kiss from Page's Ariadne. While the name "Ariadne" gives us some clue (her Greek mythological counterpart guided Theseus out of a labyrinth), she joins the team last-minute, untrained, yet is expected to virtually construct castles in the air. Though Page gives a credible performance, Nolan forgot to write her a personality. She's stuck playing little sister, a mouthpiece for our collective confusion. However, in the last act when her brilliant team members suddenly come down with a case of the stupids, and she alone comes up with a plan, it is completely out of character.

As for DiCaprio, his Dom is frozen in the same loop, visiting and revisiting the memory of his wife (achingly played by Marion Cotillard). Given that this is his third film in a row in which he deals with a wife who’s unbalanced to some degree (see also Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road), this loop looks to be spilling out from the frames of this feature. Back away from the unhinged women, Leo, before it's too late. Maybe try a role addressing an alternate lifestyle for a change? Something like, um, J. Edgar Hoover? (*Note: the Hoover project, with Clint Eastwood directing, is supposedly DiCaprio's next project.)

In a telling moment at this reviewer's screening, after a character asked, "Whose dream is it this time?" the audience chuckled in unison. Our thoughts exactly.

Rating on a scale of 5 sleepwalkers: 2.5

Paul: Yeah, whatever. After the acres of hype and all the story speculation, Christopher Nolan comes up with a film which - while certainly not bereft of merit - is still surprisingly limited in terms of the enjoyment on offer, being saddled as it is with an unnecessarily saggy running time and a host of unengaging, semi-formed characters.

Let's kick off with one of the big pluses: as with Cameron's Avatar, it is an undeniable cause for joy that we, the oft-abused movie-going public, are being treated to a proper no expense spared blockbuster which is not based on some pre-existing property. With the Warners top brass having granted him entry to the executive crappers in the wake of The Dark Knight's huge success, Nolan refrained from using that clout to push some thick as pig-poo graphic novel or semi-baked remake into production, instead gamely attempting to create something that audiences would find both challenging and original.

Even if the trajectory of the main mission undertaken by Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb and his crew is more straightforward than you might expect, there is intellectual ambition about some of the ideas informing the dream worlds entered by the slumbering heisters. The depicted distortions of time and physical reality are reminiscent of the Chew-Z realm from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, as is the posited dilemma about the point at which the dreamer can be sure that they have awoken – though Inception's vision is a much more po-faced take on these ideas than Dick's.

At the most basic level, this allows for some nifty action, such as the gravity-warped fight scene involving Joseph Gordon Levitt's Arthur. But although that sequence exemplifies Nolan's skill as an action director, it must have offered pretty bare consolation to Gordon-Levitt that he, even more so than any of the other big-name cast members, was given a character lacking anything you might deem fit to describe as a personality. If those 'Gordon-Levitt as the Riddler' rumours are going to harden into actuality when Nolan comes to shoot his third Batman movie then the Brick actor will surely be holding out for something more substantial to sink his teeth into than the scraps he feeds off here.

As you would expect, Cobb is fleshed out to a greater degree than those around him, although DiCaprio must have found it as odd to be playing a part which so closely echoes his Shutter Island character as those who have seen that Scorsese movie will find it watching him do so. The sole actor to really light up the screen is Tom Hardy, who gives everyone else a lesson in making something out of very little, as he injects flair and humour into his role as dreamland master of disguise, Eames.

Nolan set up a compelling dichotomy in The Dark Knight, with the acts of terror by Heath Ledger's Joker prodding the Gotham populace – and its de facto champions, Batman and Harvey Dent – towards embracing the selfish instincts which reside in every human being ever to draw breath. In contrast Inception never cooks up anything as dramatic or gripping. Cobb's desire to be reunited with his children is strong motivation, yet the route to achieving this is simply via successful execution of the corporate skulduggery desired by Saito (Ken Watanabe, again saddled with a character who never develops beyond the initial impressions), which is hardly a cause to really get empathetic about.

The Hans Zimmer score is excellent, delivering top-notch action movie pulse without sacrificing any individuality (once he's heard Zimmer's work here, Danny Elfman should feel even more embarrassed about his phoned-in Alice in Wonderland music than he did previously). But Inception is unnecessarily lengthy, with the first hour proving a real drag as the exposition is piled on to the detriment of the entertainment levels, leaving you in danger of – appropriately enough, I suppose – drifting off to the land of nod.

Rating on a scale of 5 dream homes: 3

Emma: Inception is going to make a lot of money. It’s already getting killer reviews. Personally, I’m a lover of sci-fi narratives and I’d been looking forward to Inception since the first breath of the internet rumour that announced it. So why did it leave me cold?

Don’t mistake me here. If you’re going to see a blockbuster this summer, I’d recommend this over Predators, or any of the other reboots, remakes and rip-offs whose posters are slapped all over the place right now. But my (perhaps unreasonable) expectations were already clearing space in my top ten favourite films. I was imagining Memento with kick-ass effects. I was imagining full-colour, big-screen Philip K Dick. I was imagining way too much.

In the office, we often talk about the way that high expectations negatively affect our ultimate enjoyment of a film. But when studios dish out shiny trailers and mouth-watering little promos, how are we supposed to resist?

So, I went in to the cinema expecting to be dazzled and what I saw was a pretty decent film. Half an hour or so too long, a tone-deaf performance from DiCaprio (full disclosure: I’m not a fan. He just seems to furrow his brow a lot, as though this abbreviated form of acting is enough) in the lead and some pretty reedy characterisation all round. In fact, the most likeable character in the film was Cillian Murphy’s Robert Fischer Jr, AKA the mark – basically, the poor bastard getting shafted by Cobb’s crew.

If, for a moment, we ignore the context, the plot (Cobb and his team attempt to trick a grieving young man into destroying his legacy, so that they can make some money from a shady business rival who’ll help Cobb circumvent the law and go home without being arrested) wouldn’t be good enough for a regular heist movie. Why should we side with the con-artists over their victim? Why would we sympathise with DiCaprio’s plight, especially when it begins to emerge he’s to some extent the architect of his own misery?

The effects in Inception are every bit as wonderful as you’re hoping, though. The Parisian neighbourhood that folds over itself is beautiful. The Escher staircase is a cool trick. Cobb’s compartmentalised memories – each one on its own floor, accessible by lift; the scariest secret hidden on the basement level, of course – are brilliantly realised.

And in a way, the loveliness of the visuals mitigated against any engagement I might have with the film. Some of the concepts within are downright hellish: imagine being trapped for decades in a malleable, shifting world created by your unconscious. But onscreen, it’s not terrifying. It’s all quite picturesque. More than that, it’s a world in which you eat dinner in your own home and walk on solid ground and basically forget you were ever anywhere else. To me, that’s just a missed opportunity. And it’s not much like any dream I’ve ever had. On the other hand, Nolan’s own Memento, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Sophie Bathes’ Cold Souls – none of which are overtly about dreams – captured so much more eloquently the feeling of a dream state.

In Inception, everything comes second to the effects. Whether or not they hurt the story, or shove the characters out of the frame or turn an apparent hell into a very attractive place for a holiday home. Here’s a paragraph from the film's production notes:

Nolan and his crew also brought a freight train down the middle of the street. The director says, “The sequence with the train was a particular element that was important to get right because it’s a surreal image, but you want it to feel real. So it was a question of balancing the peculiar nature of a train running down a city street with the reality of it smashing into cars and the like. It is the kind of grand scale physical effect that I think can take an action film to the next level and make it jaw-dropping for the audience. No matter how big the action is, it has to be based on things people can relate to. Then you just have to exaggerate it about a thousand times,” he laughs. Being miles from the nearest train tracks, it was obviously not feasible to drive an actual train down the street, so Tom Struthers came up with the idea of configuring a train engine on the chassis of a tractor trailer. However, the largest wheelbase they could find was still too short. Picture car coordinator Tyler Gaisford says, “We stretched the frame and drive train and then added a steel decking and bolstered the suspension to hold the extra weight, which ended up being about 25,000 pounds.” The train was crafted as a replica of an actual freight train. Dyas says, “Parts of our train were manufactured from fiberglass molds taken from real train parts so that everything had the correct look and texture. Then it had to be matched in terms of color and design.” Building the train was one thing, driving it was quite another. Gaisford clarifies, “Any time you have a vehicle that’s 60 feet long, about 10 feet wide and 14 feet tall, you’re going to have problems with handling, and the turning radius was notably absent. Also the driver had very little visibility because we built the structure around the cab, so we ended up putting little screens inside and we had cameras, front and back and on either side, which the driver could use to navigate.” That driver was Jim Wilkey, the same person who drove the truck that did the famous flip in “The Dark Knight.” “He’s just the best,” Struthers puts it simply.

All that effort on the train and yet none on the characters?

Rating on a scale of five floors of memories: 3

Release date: US & UK: 16 July 2010

Written and directed by: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas, Pete Postlethwaite
Rating: US = PG-13; UK = 12A
Running time: 148 minutes