* This review is my own personal opinion and does not reflect in any way the opinions of Empire magazine...I took my other half to see Inception on Friday without telling her anything about it, thinking I was doing her the favour of the year. For background, she likes thrillers, which has so far resulted in me successfully surprising her with the likes of Tell No One, Night Of The Sunflowers, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and (especially) Zodiac. She did not thank me for Inception, and I started feeling guilty some fifteen minutes in.
I had high hopes for this film; I was initially dreading a debacle on the scale of The Village, but, after the film debuted successfully at Cine Expo, my interest began to rise. The idea of a VR heist movie was promising, and the mix of The Matrix and 007 was tempting to say the least. It sounded like a big-budget take on Christopher Nolan's pre-Batman films.
What I hadn't factored in was Nolan's increasingly dour style, laborious storytelling and po-faced lack of humour. As soon as the film started, we were in a convoluted set-piece with a deafening Hans Zimmer score and lots of esoteric conversations that I hoped would soon make way for something in the way of exposition. Things didn't quite pan out the way I hoped; I realise that I am setting myself up for pillory by those who see the film as visionary and experiential, but I hope this review offers a crumb of comfort for those whose brains were neither scrambled or in the least bit fried.
My problems start with the premise. When we first meet Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), he is face down in water, on his way to meet an aged Asian (Ken Watanabe) he has clearly met before, since he is wearing the old-man make-up we so often see in these movies. We then flash back to their initial meeting, in which Cobb tries to raid this man's innermost secrets by infiltrating his dreams in search of an important business contract (all the 'secrets' in this film take a very literal, physical form). From here we learn that Cobb is one of the best mind-crackers in the business, but, of course, he wants out. However, he is about to be offered that elusive one last job: if he can reverse his usual function and actually plant an idea in a victim's head instead of stealing it, he will, through strings being pulled by his Asian contact, be able to go home and rejoin his two young children.
The thrust of this point is that Cobb is a man on the run. He is now living in Paris; his wife (Marion Cotillard) died in mysterious circumstances and Cobb has been fingered as the guilty party. In some ways, though, she is not dead. When Cobb is on the job, she blunders through his dream assignments like a runaway train. Funnily enough, a runaway train, also from Cobb's subconscious, blunders through his dream assignments too, which makes you wonder why anyone would think he was so good at this job in the first place. Anyway, Cobb is put on a plane with a crack team of mind-raiders (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy) and a businessman named Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and given ten hours to convince the latter to dismantle his father's empire. If not, Fischer will have a monopoly on the world's energy production, which, to be honest, isn't really the kind of ultimatum that would have me on the edge of my seat at the best of times.
I knew something was (going to be) up when the machinations of dreamworld espionage were left maddeningly vague. It seemed to involve tying a loop round one's arm and lying back. OK, I could buy that. But what about all the in-depth explanations about waking up? There was a lot of that. And I think my main problems with the film completely lie there. Immediately, I felt I was being set up for a cheat ending: there were no explanations, no right and wrong, because this could all conceivably be a dream. And as it unfolded, I really began to resist its attempts to hammer my (apparently square) head down its rabbit hole. Cobb's backstory couldn't have been less human to me; as he struggled with his guilt, all I could think of was Shutter Island, in which pretty much the same story was more strikingly told, albeit even more loudly and, thank God, more excitingly.
The set pieces I had such high hopes for, in particular, left me cold, especially when I realised that the, for want of a better word, 'bullet-time' sequences had their roots in 'real-world' (excuse all the quote marks, but this film is full of them) gravity. The scenes that intrigued me in the trailer actually bored me – Gordon-Levitt's aerial ballet went on forever – and the final, Bond-like assault on a remote iced fortress held even less interest. What were the stakes? Fischer's subconscious is locked inside: will he ever get inside, come back to the 'real' world, or fall into a dreamer's 'limbo' – the plot device that gets tossed into the mix halfway through, changing the rules so substantially that even the other cast members are compelled to say, “Huh?”
By that time, there was no real peril, no real goal, and a very real chance that Nolan would play his get out-of-mind-jail-free card and tell us it was all a dream. Based on that assumption, I tore away all the film's dressing and decided that this was a wilfully tricksy film about a man who missed his dead wife and would do anything in his deluded state to get closure. Then I realised I'd seen this all before in a better, much cheaper, less bloated, more human and much wittier film. It was called Memento, dir C Nolan (2000).
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