“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
Aside from James Cameron, Christopher Nolan is perhaps the only director working in the era of sprawling franchises and reboots who can pitch an original idea to a major studio and get a $100M+ production greenlit on a regular basis. He can do this because he’s developed a reputation for consistently delivering whip smart, technically ambitious blockbuster spectacles that are critically and commercially successful.
It feels obligatory to follow that statement with an acknowledgement of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, which obviously qualifies as a franchise/reboot. However, if you read some behind-the-scenes stories on several of Nolan’s grandest non-franchise works, you realize that he approached his run of Batman movies as an opportunity to hone his craft before taking on the projects that truly excited him. To wit, he first began working on a script about dream-trespassers when The Matrix and Dark City were fresh in his mind—all the way back in the late 1990s. He initially pitched his idea for Inception to Warner Bros. in 2001 but decided to wait until he had more experience with large-scale productions before making it. After the runaway success of The Dark Knight, Nolan struck while the iron was hot, taking a blank check from WB and bringing his passion project to life.
All at once Inception entertains with drama and action, strikes awe with technically impressive sequences, and engages the intellect with a complex plot and cerebral ideas. Its story is best described only loosely, else we run the risk of following myriad interwoven strands that double back on themselves, peter out into vaguery, and cumulatively form a mesmerizing tapestry contained by intentionally blurry edges. In a sense, the film itself is structured like a dream. As our leading man Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) tells us, the dreamer doesn’t typically remember how their dream begins. They remember how it ends, and if they awaken slowly, they may be able to trace it back aways, but usually find that it originated somewhere in the middle of a situation. Inception follows suit, beginning with a snippet of its own ending then launching us right into a dream-heist in which Cobb and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are trying to steal ideas from another man’s subconscious by using an experimental technology that allows them to share a dreamworld.
Their target, Saito (Ken Watanabe), thwarts their efforts but offers them a new job. He wants them to perform “inception”—instead of stealing an idea from a target’s subconscious, he wants them to plant an idea so deeply that the target will think it developed organically and then act on it in the real world. In return, Watanabe will make a call and have Cobb’s criminal record cleared so that he can return home to his children. The nature of Cobb’s crimes are only revealed in bits and pieces, but it is clear from the start that he is haunted by a mental projection of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a malicious strand of his own subconscious that regularly intrudes on his dreams.
The rules of dream-sharing are explained to us through the eyes of Ariadne (Elliot Page, credited as Ellen), a bright architectural student working under the tutelage of Cobb’s father-in-law (Michael Caine). She joins the team to create dream worlds so convincing that their mark (Cillian Murphy) will fail to see through the artifice for the extended lengths of time required to perform inception. The crew is rounded out by Eames (Tom Hardy), who can impersonate other people in dreams, and Yusef (Dileep Rao), a chemist who works magic with sedatives. The ins and outs of the process are carefully considered. Time moves slower in dreams than in the real world; an effect that is compounded as Cobb and co. traverse from a single level dream into a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. We learn how a dreamer’s subconscious can be trained to resist intruders, how dreamers must be “kicked” awake, and how one may become trapped in limbo if the kick isn’t timed correctly. All of these elements are precisely arranged into an enthralling climax in which five timelines moving at different speeds crescendo at the same time.
The overarching achievement is the juggling act. Few viewers entered the theater in 2010 (or would watch the film now) without knowing it’s something of a mind-bender. Nolan delivers on this front, but, much like The Matrix, he matches his cerebral themes with human drama, high octane action, and stunning effects work. The script walks a fine line between over- and under-explaining the background complexities of the scenario. Thankfully, it never becomes too exposition-heavy; although missing only a few minutes might be enough for the viewer to lose hold of various threads. But even if you only glean the gist of the premise, there’s a weightiness to Cobb’s ongoing struggle with Mal and an action hero camaraderie that develops between the dream intruders that are quite compelling on their own.
If there’s a fault here it’s that Nolan is too mathematical. His film is whip smart and taut and intellectually stimulating, but for the attentive viewer it is ultimately decipherable—I think. While concerns about the plot having a clinical feeling to it are partially allayed by Mal’s tragic story, the utter surreality of many dreams is left almost untouched. There aren’t any weird, idiosyncratic diversions that would feel totally normal in a dream but completely bonkers upon waking. However, having seen the film several times since that first late night screening in 2010, I cannot tell if Nolan made his film slightly too accessible or if his biggest trick is so subtle that almost no one got it.