Inception – a cerebral action flick

In the visually stunning and thematically ambitious INCEPTION, director Christopher Nolan’s central cinematic insight is that the mind is an action landscape.

As with many summer blockbusters, INCEPTION is chockful of high-energy car chases, elaborate shoot-outs, and massive explosions, all done in some of the most stunning locales on the planet. But thanks to the movie’s rather brainy context, these action sequences are limned with philosophical, psychological, and even physiological parallels. When is a gun battle more than a gun battle? When it represents the mind’s war with itself. And it’s that war that is at the center of INCEPTION.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a security expert whose specialty is the subconscious. He contends that trained “extractors” like himself can literally steal ideas from the unsuspecting minds of others. How? By accessing those minds through their dreams. (It’s industrial espionage of the highest order.) He then sells himself to clients who want the ultimate in protection: to be trained to make their minds impregnable to outside interference.

Things take an unexpected turn when a client requests an “inception,” that is, not an idea extraction but an idea implantation. This is an extremely rare and difficult operation since it requires delving not just into someone’s dreamstate but travelling three and four levels deep into that dreamstate. In other words, a dream within a dream wthin a dream of yet another dream. As explained in the movie, that deep space entry makes for a highly unstable environment within which to work.

Clearly we are in the realm of science fiction, but much like in THE MATRIX, everything in INCEPTION is presented with hyper-realistic detail. Conceptually, it’s very “out-of-this-world,” but it’s meticulously grounded in a very recognizable reality. The film may be full of dreams within dreams, but within those dreams, those mental projections carry machine guns.

Thus, when DiCaprio and his cohorts journey inside this dreamworld, they are constantly confronted with physical manifestations of a psyche’s defense system. To the intruders, the bullets flying their way are every bit as dangerous as their counterparts in the real world, even though they’re more likely neurons firing off warning signals. As the extractors venture deeper and deeper into their subject’s subconscious, more fiercely does the subject fight to deny access and correspondingly, more troublesome does their environment become.

The complexities of the situation increase exponentially when it becomes clear DiCaprio may hold the key to others’ psyches but he doesn’t have a handle on his own.

Nolan’s ingenious framework also allows him to play with time almost as cleverly as he did in his earlier MEMENTO, which told the story of a man with no short term memory … backwards! In INCEPTION, each dream stage has its own internal clock, so that what may take 5 minutes in real time takes one hour in the first level of dream time, one full day on level two and maybe a week, say, in level three. These separate timeframes allow Nolan to operate with three tempos of suspense and provide him with three cascading climaxes, all edited together superbly.

INCEPTION is smart, stylish, imaginative and ambitious. It’s certainly not without flaws – it feels the need to explain everything, for instance, and it’s not as profound as I think it’d like to be. But in a year with a remarkable dearth of great films, INCEPTION shines brightly as a beacon of hope for Hollywood.