Director and writer Christopher Nolan came up with a great idea for this sci-fi movie. It is set in a world in which espionage is done by slipping into people’s dreams and influencing their subconscious minds directly (a bit like advertising, some cynics might say). A good idea, and quite a watchable film, but what could have been a great movie ends up being only OK. The execution suffers from the same weaknesses Christopher Nolan has displayed in other films of his, for example The Dark Knight.

Inception Movie Poster

First of all, it suffers from too much realism. Most of it is supposed to be happening in people’s dreams, yet apart from the odd bit where the ground heaves up (which was also entirely incidental to the plot and not repeated after the one occasion it happens), the dream worlds are almost entirely anything but surrealistic. They could be happening outside your front door right now. Surely people’s dreams (going by my crazy night-creations, anyway) should be quite fantastic, fluid and with a weird logic all their own, such as the magical worlds depicted so brilliantly in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus? But no, these could be any city, anywhere, complete with all the hassle, clutter and obstacles of everyday life. The Director did the same thing in The Dark Knight, imagining Gotham City using modern-day Chicago: a completely ordinary, even boring, setting. Compare this with Tim Burton’s vision of Gotham in his movies and you will see what I mean.

There were problems with consistency too, especially as DiCaprio’s character Cobb kept breaking his own rules. The usual Hollywood rebel character maybe? No, I think it’s just an excuse for bad writing. Sure, in real life, rules have to be bent now and then if things are to get done, but it becomes a bit tiresome when the heroes always do it, and when it is logically unnecessary anyway.

Philosophically speaking, the film is asking the age-old question: how do you know if you are awake right now, or if you are dreaming this life? Well, one clue I have given above is that real dreams are more chaotic and less mundane than everyday life, but that doesn’t apply in this film, of course.  In the film, the characters carry a ‘totem’ – an object that they know and understand very well, so they can watch its behaviour closely and determine if it is behaving properly or not and thereby tell if they are dreaming or not. In Cobb’s case, it is a little spinning top. As it turns out, this is his dead wife’s totem, in fact, and that has implications for the meaning of the very last scene in the film, which I will not spoil by telling you about it here. But you will have to have your head working when you watch it as you can easily miss what it implies…

Cobb’s wife is dead because she killed herself, convinced that this was indeed a dream world. In the film, killing yourself is the only way to make yourself wake up, so she did. Cobb is guilty about this as he planted the idea in her subconscious mind that she needed to wake up from a previous dream life they had shared for many years – only the idea persisted into this life. As a result she becomes something of a villain in the dreams of whoever’s mind he infiltrates, because his own subconscious guilt projects her into the other person’s dreams along with whatever Cobb is trying to do consciously there. These ideas are all very interesting and are pursued pretty plainly in the plot.

There is rather a lot of verbal explanation of what is going on (rather than showing things visually), but with such a complex plot involving dreams within dreams, perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. It was in fact quite hard to follow the nesting dreams and action, but if you’re paying attention, I think it all hangs together in the end. Some of the fight scenes were a bit hard to follow too, as I couldn’t make out who was who some of the time – the camera didn’t show people’s faces long enough for me to keep track of them as they booted each other about the rooms, especially as most characters were wearing pretty dull business suits. It was clear who won in the end, of course.

Ellen Page did a good job as a university student co-opted onto the team to be Cobb’s dream architect (designing the dreams before they plunge into them), and DiCaprio himself seemed convincing enough in his role given the flatness of the writing. I don’t really have any complaints about the other actors either; their characters were a bit under-explored, perhaps. But then, the film was long enough already, at 2 hours 12 minutes (on the DVD version that I have). I have not watched the special features yet, so can’t tell you about them, but I do plan to watch the one about dream research, at least.

Overall, this film is a good idea for a sci-fi movie, and is thankfully more complex than the usual Hollywood so-called sci-fi (but really action) movie as well. Indeed, in my mind, it actually does qualify as real sci-fi for once: the technology is crucial to the story and it is not just about some hero or bad guy with a grudge, for a change (even the Star Trek (2009) movie came down to this, unfortunately). The execution is a bit flat, but the film remains watchable. I give it 6/10: worth watching but don’t expect too much.