I saw Inception today and now I'm kind of weirded out about going to sleep and dreaming... will I wake up or continue to dream? I should be so lucky!
The film is grand to say the least, yet the CGI doesn't intrude, it quite serves the story. Generally speaking Inception is a feast of a film. I enjoyed the lavishness, I must say, there is nothing better than filling the eye with massive sceneries, fights that defy the force of gravity and fast paced action sequences. I thought the human story behind it was also good, although the whole concept of what Inception is and does recalls the Matrix a little too much to make me go wow.
The main character Dom (Di Caprio) tells us about this indestructible virus called an "idea" that once planted will grow and grow and cannot be erased, cannot be changed and will spread until it materialises into whatever it is aiming for. Which reminds me of The Matrix Agent Smith's bee in the bonnet of a virus that spreads and spreads: humans. I guess in The Matrix things were a bit more black and white, good guys (humans = virus) vs bad guys (Agents = the future or the Matrix), which translates: chaos and individuality vs order and uniformity.
In Inception the virus is both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on what side of the idea you find yourself on. It's a bargaining chip, it's the Mac Guffin of the story, it's what the good guys want to contain, crack, beat, implant and steal, the virus is just an idea. It's a film with no clean cut bad guys, it's not the FBI, CGI Agents or the Mafia, it's not an evil genius or his twin brother. The bad guys in this case are an imaginary force that give chase loaded with heavy weaponry, an enemy without a face or a calling card. But even if the bad guys don't have a name, since the action all takes place in the realm of dream then imaginary becomes real. So gun fire is real after all, it can hurt badly and also kill (or rather make you lose yourself in "limbo"). If you've seen The Matrix you may recall that whilst inside the Matrix bullets don't kill, but believing to have been shot would convince the brain that the bullet should kill and so one would die not from the bullet wound but from believing that there was a bullet in the first place. Now, in The Matrix we were dealing with two realities: one real and one believed to be real, and once you digested the fact that the reality we called home was actually a malicious and foreign creation, then it all made sense. In Inception we have one reality, ours, the real world, and the reality of dreams. A dream can be layered, or made into different levels of depth, so that there can be a dream within a dream, and another one within that, like a Russian doll. Nice concept. We can indeed have multi-layered dreams in the sense that naturally we can have as many dreams as our brain can muster whilst we sleep. Some people can even manipulate the dreams whilst asleep and make it unravel as they wish to. It's not an easy thing to do, but I know it can happen, it has happened to me a couple of times, by chance I should add. Inception's concept of a multi-layered dream is that one can sleep and dream and in it dream to sleep and dream and so on. I'll suspend my disbelief and go along with it. But there is a confusing way of how they keep tracks of time inside a dream, some mathematical formula that scales how time runs in a dream in proportion to the time passing in the real world (that is one concept that made my suspension of disbelief quiver if not quake). But let's say I take that for a fact and continue to play along, what else does Inception do? Hang on, I'm not sure at this point. Inception by definition is the start of something. I may feel a little confused right now, but I guess it refers to the basic principle that the film revolves around, i.e. the idea. Everything starts with an idea. So you plant the seed and then watch it grow. But how do you know it's going to grow the way you want? You don't. That's what Tom discovers as his wife's death comes back to haunt him. He planted an idea in her head, he hoped that it would do just what he planned for it to do, instead it spiralled out of control and he lost his wife as a result. So Inception is a dangerous thing, it cannot be controlled and now our hero is being asked to do it again, just this once, to save what's left of his life and I think there is also a veiled (not so veiled) concept that by performing this trick he'd also save the world from a Corporation ready to turn so global that it would swallow the world.
I have a few points, or rather questions to share:
1. Why does Ellen Page's character follow Di Caprio's character in a mission that he describes as "illegal" before even explaining what it is about, what's in it for her and in fact even before showing what cool things she can do once inside a dream? He's a perfect stranger to her, yet she doesn't even blink and follows him in an illegal mission. It's a carrot without a stick and she follows it? Disbelief trembling slightly here.
2. IV tubes with sedative stick out of a machine in a briefcase. OK. I understand that's how the characters fall asleep, the machine has a timer to wake them up, but how is one person's subconscious linked to another's to share the same dream? That's not explained, just go along with it. Disbelief quivering here.
3. An idea cannot be erased and it's so strong it will just not go away, it will grow and grow until it has reached whatever aim it set out to reach. Well, I can tell you that ideas DO go away. If I remembered half of the ideas I have on a daily basis, right now my head would be bursting, but I'd have plenty to write about. Sure some ideas stick with us for a long time, even a life-time. The most topical. Fixed ideas. But they are the exception rather than the rule methinks. So my disbelief is flipping and falling off a hammock here.
4. Fischer is the heir to an empire of a corporation and victim of the Inception. Saito is the head of another corporation, a rival, who commissions the Inception to make Fischer destroy the empire. Surely Fischer would know what Saito looks like. He tags along with our heroes and shows his face to Fischer (in a dream yes, but there is no indication that in the dream faces are changed, save for one character who morphs on purpose), so why doesn't Fischer ever recognise Saito? Even if he believed him to be a figment of his imagination, he'd still have to think that it was a bit odd and suspicious to have a rival tycoon walk around in his dream. My disbelief here is quaking so bad it's expecting to see the floor topple and become the ceiling.
Did I enjoy the film? I can't wait to fall asleep and let my neurons go wild and take me away.
Enjoy a couple of youtube videos on Inception vs the Matrix (which is still the daddy as far as I am concerned)
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