SCI FI PI

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cottilard, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas,
Director Christopher Nolan
Released July 22
Rated M

Why is everyone so excited about Inception? Because it's a mega-budget ($200m) Sci Fi movie that doesn't insult the audience whilst trying to sell them toys. In fact, it provokes thought - ironically enough, as provoking a thought is the central plot point (or MacGuffin) of the film.

Herein lies the question that hasn't really been asked: through all the layers of reality described in the film, is the film about reality at all?



Er... they were like that when I got here!


That's right. After all that. It might all just be metaphor, sitting aside The Devil's Advocate, Naked Lunch, Jacob's Ladder, Lost and the new version of The Prisoner.

But that's an interpretation that can only be discussed with people who've seen the film. This review has one point - telling you to go see the film. Go see the film. It's highly entertaining.

After you've seen it, let the discussions/arguments/rants/flamage commence.

The film's 'protagonist' is Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) a skilled thief whose job is to enter the subconscious of his targets and steal their thoughts. This is done though the use of Dream-Share technology, where all the participants are linked up to a briefcase connected by i/v tubes. This technology isn't explained in great detail - it just works. Briefly, it's chemicals that allow us to share our brain states.

What is explained in the film is the way that conscious shared dreaming works. A dreamer hosts a dream, and other people can walk around in it. The dream itself is created by an architect, whose job is to make it as lifelike and believable as possible, by making it as complex as possible.

Herein lies one of the fascinating 'handcuffs' of the film. In a $200m dream world movie, the dreams have to look as real as possible. The flights of fancy of the like that you saw in 'What Dreams May Come' don't occur - anything truly beyond reality is only the result of error or pure fantasy world creation. Things are only dreamlike and mind-bending when things go wrong.

Luckily, this is a heist movie. In heist movies, something always goes wrong. The results are logical, well thought out, and visually amazing. You've seen the 'tilting world' and the 'folding Paris' in the trailer - it gets better, more complex, and more enjoyable.

Back to Dream-Share 101. The people who don't belong in the dream become noticeable to the subconscious of the dreamer if the dream no longer is real to the dreamer. It's like a con. If the mark sees the policeman's wearing sneakers, the jig is up. The people that populate the cities in these dreams are in fact subconscious projections of their mind. When things start to get upset, these projections attack intruders like white blood cells attacking intruders in the blood stream, and tear them apart.

That's when the fun really starts.



The spinning top falls over - then this is all real. Right?


There are several ways to get out of the dream - but they're lots of fun and we won't ruin that here.

What's most bold about Inception is the sheer complexity of the plot and the heist itself. The point - place an idea in someone's mind. The way - not just do it in a dream, or a dream within a dream, but a dream within a dream within a dream. With a cherry on top.

Pulling this off in front of a mass audience is pure genius. Taking us on a Bond-like adventure with plenty of Matrix-style dollops along the way, is something we thank you for, Mr Christopher Nolan.

If you wanted to strip away all the 'dream' stuff and just see three cobbled together action movies, you'd still walk away from this happy.



Tell Nolan to explain the damn plot to me or I'm NOT going back on set!


One of the other reasons why the film works - the cast. It can be described as a very solid batting line-up, with all sorts of Oscar winners and nominees all over the place. It adds depth to a film that needs to be smart without banging on about it - a film that is essentially all plot, but is only, really about one thing - the mind. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy are given plum parts and pull them off brilliantly. Hardy, in particular, gets to shine. It will be interesting to see what he does with Mad Max.

Hans Zimmer's muscular score is one of the other pivot points to the enjoyment of the film. Its foghorn style builds tension and emotion until the triumphantly dark blares that reach a crescendo with the emotional apex of the film. Truly one of the great scores in recent film history. You won't hum it, but your bones will remember the vibration of it as you walk out of the theatre.

So, are the fanboys correct? Is this the greatest movie of all time, Oscar certainty and all that?

No. Sorry, but it's not. It's a good, beautifully complex story well told, but it's not. It suffers from a fundamental flaw in the finale's denouement that means this is just a journey movie, not a journey that has a truly, deeply, satisfying ending.

Miles apart from the ambiguous ending that you may have already heard about, is the very concept that the film has an ending at all. A journey has a beginning, middle and end, and for us to walk out of a theatre completely and utterly satisfied, we need an end that justifies the journey we just took. The problem for Inception is that the film's journey is so extraordinary, so much of a tense, multi-layered drama, that when you get to the end, you need the plot equivalent of a nuclear bomb to go off.

This doesn't quite happen. The phrase 'too clever for its own good' may not be entirely applicable, but it's not too far from the mark. If the film's ending had been several wow factors higher, then yes, this would have been not just one of the greatest Sci Fi films of all time, but one of the greatest films, period.

Even as it is, it enters the pantheon of storytelling near the top. People talk about 'Rashomon'-style stories, where people tell the same tale from their differing points of view.

If other filmmakers can emulate this adventure (and they will), then the 'Inception'-style story will become a part of popular culture. It's doubtful that they'll do it as well.



Pre-e-e-tty sure you said we'd split the cheque.


It's not a new device. It's actually quite ancient. The stories that gave birth to Aladdin and the 40 Thieves, in One Thousand and One Nights, were told by Scherehezade recounting tale after tale each night to postpone her execution. They weren't so much 'tale after tale', but actually told 'tale within tale'. A character within a story will start a story, and so on, creating a framing device very similar to the 'dream within a dream' of Inception.

What Inception does is take this one step further, introducing an architecture that layers dream states and the subconscious, and creates a time dilation as you go 'down'. The deeper you go, the slower time passes. Five minutes in reality, an hour in dreams, and so on. The sheer brain power to work out the architecture and logic of Inception is impressive, to pull it off as a story, amazing.

It's a very well thought out film, which brings us back to the point of it all. If it is so well thought out, the question we want to ask is this - after all that - is that it? Is this just a $200m thrill ride? If yes, that's fine. Enjoy it. It's great.

But we think Christopher Nolan might be smarter than that. Perhaps there is more. Spoilers below.



Disco Fever in Four Dimensions. Awesome.

SPOILER ALERT - THE ENDING OF INCEPTION, AN ALTERNATE TAKE, AND WHY

Here's our take on the ending of Inception.

As the film comes to its conclusion. Dom gets what he wants and settles in to live happily ever after. He resolves his issues deep in his subconscious and emerges purged of the ties that bound him into a dream world of recurring guilt and pain.

Here, perhaps, is the key to the film. It's not about anything.

Heists, whatever. Inception. Dream-Sharing. Nothing. It's all made up. NONE of it is real.

It's actually the story of Dom Cobb's mind dealing with the pain of his wife's suicide.

His wife, played by Marion Cotillard - her name is 'Mal'. That means 'bad' in French. An unusual name, to be sure. Highly doubt that the short form of 'Malvina' would be played by a French actress. Perhaps this coincidence is a bit too rich to ignore.

The guilt and pain that Dom endures after her suicide death is the hurdle that he must overcome. The entire film is about getting him to that point, from within his subconscious.

The hero of this story is no hero at all. All the heavy lifting of the actual heist is done by support characters. Cobb is pretty much along for the ride. His ultimate journey succeeds in only one thing - a clear pathway back to his children. The way in which a mind clears away what has been dragging it down to see what's most important in life.

There are lots of clues that can support this interpretation, apart from 'Mal'.

In the scene where Mal jumps to her death, she is sitting on the ledge of the hotel across from him. Yet Dom is in the room with the signs of violence. Behind her, it's the same room. But across the street. The suicide,therefore, with him watching, is bogus. He's dressed up and natty, a la our first Dream-Share sequence experience. This is not a memory, but a projection in a dream of a husband witnessing the death that he missed. He wasn't there. He missed it, but he plays the experience in his mind as part of self-inflicted guilt torture over and over again, trying to stop the inevitable.

She jumps to his death, and following along with Dom's dream logic, we accept that somehow the cops are after him for murder. But a small amount of analysis says - 'still dreaming'.

No matter how many letters you wrote saying you were worried hubby was going to kill you, and that you are sane and not likely to commit suicide, it doesn't change physics. The fall from one building never looks like the fall from the building across the street. The fear of possible imprisonment and missing out on being with his children is solved by running away and not being with his children. The running away may have a references in physical reality, as shown by the multiple locations in the film, but the emotional departure here is the most likely interpretation. Dreams, like Eames, are not necessarily what they appear. They are the subconscious projecting within the conscious.

Perhaps the central moment of the hotel room isn't in fact her suicide at all.

The freight train, for example, gives another image of her death (and contains the weight of it) but not the manner of her death. The kitchen, the hearth of his home, the one he could not return to, where he could not face his children, may have been the place where she, in reality, took her life.

Why the lingering shots of her playing with the knife? Is she merely contemplating suicide, or is she preparing for it?

Other clues and suggestions abound. In the film, Dom's dad asks him point blank to 'come back to reality'. The person who helps Dom do this is a character called Ariadne. In Greek mythology, Ariadne helped Theseus escape the Minotaur's maze by giving him a sword and a ball of red fleece - the tools to defeat the monster, and the means to escape the maze within which he was found. This is exactly what Ariadne does in the film (metaphorically speaking, of course).

The beginning and the end of the film, the bookended statement, of not becoming an old man, filled with regret, applies to a man who distances himself from his children after the death of his wife.

Yes, but what about the spinning top?
I can dream that a spinning top falls over, reinforcing my belief that THIS is reality. But it's still a dream. The one 'anchor' of reality, the 'totem' is just as much of a mirage as everything else. We're screwed. The totem idea can be taken even further, and be seen as what they represent in the person (or character facet) holding them. Ariadne is a mere 'pawn'. Dom Cobb is an eternally spinning top, a man stuck in his own momentum, using the thing that kept his wife stuck in HER reality. He, literally, picks up her guilt and uses it as his excuse to stay in her world.

Other clues for this interpretation are in the final moments.

In Cobb's 'memories', his house and children are unchanged from the film's final moments, when he finally gets to see them again. His children haven't aged, their hair hasn't grown or been cut, nor has the furniture in his house been rearranged or collected dust. This, apparently after years on the run doing heist after heist.

It would make sense if these years were inside a dream state, created by a man trying to escape harsh reality, dealing with his wife's suicide by dissolving into a booze and drug-fuelled state. The i/v use, the trips to seedy dives and empty warehouses, all point to subconscious clues of a man hitting the skids. Or, it could, quite literally, just all be a dream.

In this way, then, the emotional truth and clarity of Cobb finally seeing his children's faces again, the faces that remind him of his dead wife, is satisfying conclusion to this extraordinary journey of the mind. The question of the film isn't 'what is real?' - it is 'what is most important thing in your life, in any reality?'. Dom finally answers that question at the end of the film. You don't have to be a globe-trotting super-spy dream-thief to figure that out. Just a dad.



If I dream that this top will fall over, proving I'm in reality, then I'm still dreaming.