"It was only a dream..."
The number one movie at the box office last weekend wasn't a comic book movie. Nor was it a remake, a reboot, a sequel, a prequel, a port or a re-imagining. No, it was an honest-to-God original idea from one of the most highly-regarded writers and directors in Hollywood. Yes, Christopher Nolan has provided the vehicle for the restoration of my faith in humanity with his landmark movie, Inception. I saw this opening night, and I was very impressed with it.
Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!The movie centers around Tom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team of "extractors", which includes his right-hand man Arthur (a very debonair looking Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who go around using the practice of "shared dreaming" to steal secrets from unwitting marks. Think of it as espionage of the subconscious.
One of their marks, Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) is actually hip to their game and intercepts the team to do a little work of their own. However, he doesn't want extraction, he wants to try a fairly controversial and heretofore unconfirmed technique of "inception", or planting an idea in someone's head. Arthur is skeptical of whether it can work, Cobb knows that it can for reasons that are revealed later on in the movie. Saito seals the deal by promising Cobb, who is wanted in the US for the murder of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a way home. They take the deal and assemble a new team, including a new "architect" in Ariadne (Ellen Page). The movie takes off from there.
A huge part of the movie deals with Cobb's inability to let the specter of his wife go. He's not guilty of murdering her per se, but he still feels immense guilt for her death. This is absolutely central to the plot as well as to the interactions between Cobb and Ariadne. In fact, this really isn't a movie about shared dreaming or even inception, but it's a very powerful story about letting go with this novel and unique plot device of shared dreaming as a backdrop. It's why the movie works despite the minimalist way that shared dreaming is laid out. You don't get all the mechanics; you're just given enough so that you're not totally lost in all the science fiction that's unfolding before your eyes.
Don't get it twisted though; the originality in the plot enhances the underlying story and makes this into a sublime movie that is like nothing else that has come before it. It combines intelligence with action and raw emotion to create what has been the best movie of the summer to date.
Believe the hype. The dream is real. See this movie.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Photo Credit: IMDB
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