Film Review: Inception

Inception: “the beginning of something, such as an undertaking, commencement etc.” Now, Inception is also a movie.

Inception an intriguing movie of corporate espionage taken to a new level. Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the best in the dangerous art of extraction, which is the not so gentle science of stealing secrets during the dream level of sleep, when the subconscious mind is most vulnerable to penetration.

This 2 hour 22 minute film from writer/director Christopher Nolan requires almost total concentration throughout its lengthy running time. The special effects, the mysteries, the puzzling presence of Cobb’s wife, Mal, who appears only in ‘dreamtime’ sequences and the often confusing juxtaposition between dreams and reality amply reward the focused viewer.

Inception is a film best seen at least twice, - either at the cinema or on video: the more times you watch it, the more layers of meaning are revealed.

By using a combination of drugs, wires and other Matrix-type methods, Cobb and his team penetrate the minds of their sleeping targets, usually to extract buried information. This makes Cobb an attractive proposition to large companies eager to find out what corporate rivals are up to. But a wealthy client, Saito, convinces Cobb to try the much more difficult trick known as inception, which involves planting an idea in someone’s mind that will bear fruit in the real world. “Impossible!”, not quite. It requires a larger team taking a powerful sedative: if something goes awry, the dreamers may not awake. Cobb doesn't tell his team that his past nurtures feelings powerful enough to bring on this comatose state for all of them.

This is — in ‘technical‘ terms —pretty way out. And the team of mind-probing technicians is also way out. Yusuf is the shaggy, anxious nerdy one. Eames and Arthur are a pair of wisecracking dudes who specialize in something-or-another, and Ariadne is the architect. She designs the physical environments in which the dreams take place, and asks the right questions and spells out both the obvious connections and the less obvious pitfalls. Ariadne notices that Cobb’s personal issues are affecting his work. As the only fresh face in the group, she comes to realize what the others don’t: that the persistent dream presence of Cobb’s late wife, Mal — whom he’s accused of killing—is more than just a harbinger of impending doom for everyone. It’s a giant, flashing-billboard, warning that Cobb is on a slippery slope to a full-blown mental meltdown with dire consequences.

With: Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer Jr.), TomBerenger (Browning), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Pete Postlethwaite (Maurice Fischer), Michael Caine (Miles) and Lukas Haas (Nash).