Because of my interest in things of the mind, I like dreams. When I began to see commercials for the upcoming Christopher Nolan film, Inception, I was intrigued by its mixture of action and concept. Apparently, Nolan is a pretty renown director (via The Dark Knight). Also, I liked how Ellen Page(the famous Juno)’s character seemed. And dreams.
Dreams, and here comes a film where the hero (Leo DiCaprio) intentionally invades the dreams of others to “extract” information from them. I found it to be a supernatural, more intense and conceptual movie similar to the Ocean movies with George Clooney. Only more mind-blowing and visually oriented, with a more tender motive behind DiCaprio (Dom Cobb)’s somewhat frantic actions.
I ended up liking every single character in the film. This is such a rare find these days. Cobb was tragic but brilliant. And Arthur. OM NOM NOM. 🙂
Behind Cobb is Arthur, who seemed to be his sort of righthand man. He’s played by the same guy who did the voice of Jim Hawkins in Treasure Planet, which is one of my favorite movies. 😀 Who knew he’d be so FREAKING HOT, too! He did a lot of the best action sequences, too. And there was also this perfectly adorable/funny moment with him and Ellen Page’s character (some weird English girl’s name I can’t spell, but will now IMDB…Ariadne. Yeah. Okay then.), where they’re sitting together and he’s trying to come up with a plan and it goes:
Arthur: Quick, kiss me.
Ariadne: (obeys and kisses him)
(pause)
Ariadne: …They’re still looking at us…
Arthur: …Yeah it was worth a shot.
Ahaha. So, what else can I say about it. Well, I loved the constant involvement of psychological motives in the film. The adorable crazy Australian guy, Eames, kept asking “How’s his relationship with his father?” about the main plot point (won’t spoil anything), and that ended up being, after all, a very important aspect of their plan.
The acting was phenomenal. I believed everything that Cobb was going through. Ariadne was endearing, clever, and curious, and reminded me of Ingrid and thus is someone that I aspire to be like. There were dynamic changes in some of the main characters, namely the awesome Japanese businessman, Saito.
As for the ending, which I won’t say a thing about in detail…I’m not sure I was satisfied. It literally had me holding my breath for the last thirty seconds of the film. Because I was hoping for one particular thing to happen. But the scene stopped before that did. And we’re left never knowing. I’m…sort of okay with that. I think it helped to sustain the dreamlike quality of the film. As for creating closure, well, because of the important part that that last action had played throughout the earlier parts of the film…yeah, not so much.
Lastly, I’ll comment on what inspired the tagline for this. The foundation of the film was the power of an idea. The influence that nursing a concept can have in someone’s life – how an idea can shape you. I loved that. It’s so powerful, and the more I think about it, the more it can even be true on a vast, sort of cosmic scale. The ideas that we believe and the things we know determine our perception of life. This changes everything. It’s what, in the film, leads to the ruination of one of the characters — her perception is corrupted. It’s what can spur the most drastic of actions we know of.
It’s so rare that a film promotes a concept that surpasses the material and ends up promoting something as abstract an idea, and I think there’s great value in the fact that this film did.
It’s the best action/suspense/supernatural thriller I’ve probably ever seen, and I would recommend it for anyone who’s willing to think about the things that they see.
(Ahaha. I just turned on the television. Ebert and Roper are reviewing Inception. (You can read that article here – I think it sums it up better than I do.)
Funny they’re complaining about the explanations that went on between DiCaprio and Page – if those hadn’t been there, they’d been complaining it didn’t make sense.
Although I will agree with them here that Nolan didn’t necessarily capture what I thought really resides within the unconscious. In that way it sometimes fell short of being supernatural, to become more of a simple action thriller.)
