“We all long for reconciliation”-Dom Cobb, protagonist of “Inception”. In a year of movies that are nothing more than sequels, reboots, and based off of books and games, we get an oasis in the middle of a desert of unoriginality. It’s been 2 years to the month that we last saw a Christopher Nolan movie (The Dark Knight), and the wait is finally over. Is “Inception” over-hyped, or does it deliver a solid movie-watching experience? Read on to find out, and don’t worry about it being spoiled, I won’t give anything away, plus as Roger Ebert recently wrote: “Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a breathtaking juggling act.”
The movie begins with DiCaprio’s character, Dom Cobb, waking up on a beach, seeing two young blond children playing nearby and is greeted by a rifle and the Japanese guard holding it. He is brought into the “throne room” of an old Japanese man, who after seeing the two things Cobb brought with him, a handgun and a spinning top, instantly remembers Cobb from a faded dream many years ago. From there the storyline flows in a somewhat straight line, though it is broken up by different levels of dreams. It sounds confusing, but it makes sense when you see it unfold.
Cobb is an extractor, he uses a technology developed by the military that allows people to share dreams, in a way that helps discover their secrets. The purpose? Mostly he and his team are hired by corporations to steal company secrets. But this movie isn’t about extraction, it’s about inception, creating an idea in a person’s mind. Cobb and his partner, Arthur (played brilliantly by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, TV’s “Third Rock from the Sun”, “500 Days of Summer”), are hired by Saito (played by Ken Watanabe, “The Last Samurai”, “Batman Begins”) a Japanese C.E.O. to perform inception. Saito is the only remaining competition of a worldwide energy conglomerate, whose CEO is dying and leaving his empire to his son. Saito’s hope is that Cobb and his team can put it into the son’s head that it’d be best to split the company up, so Saito and others can have some hope of staying in business.
In exchange for Cobb’s help, Saito promises to use his connections to get Cobb pardoned. Why? The moment Cobb goes back to the US, he will be arrested, though falsely, for his wife’s murder. It’s hard to explain because it’s such a huge part of the entire movie and I don’t want to ruin anything. Cobb longs to return home and see his children, so he agrees. The team plans out the mission- the detail of each level of dreams, the way to motivate the son in a positive way, in hopes to do the impossible, to create an idea in a person without the person knowing it came from someone else.
That’s about as much as I can give away of the story. It’s better that you don’t know much else. Details about the content though, are ok. It’s big, the movie feels larger in scope than “The Dark Knight”, both emotionally and physically. The action sequences are suspenseful and original, without being over-the-top. The acting is superb. The dialogue is interesting, and the story compelling. In fact, the story, the heart of the movie is what makes all the rest of the components so good. Cobb’s longing to see his children, his guilt at what happened to his wife, even the mission of inception-trying to give the son who had a father who didn’t like him, a form of reconciliation with his father, all of these make for a movie with Oscar-caliber human drama, that also flirts with the sci-fi geek in me, and dazzled me with it’s brilliance. In fact, I was so caught up in the lives of these people that I don’t think I drew a single breath for the final hour of the movie.