Inciteful Inception

Some actors just cannot move away from their breakout movies. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of many stars who can’t seem to go beyond his role in Titanic. People still remember him as the young Jack Dawson who made an equally young Kate Winslet feel like she was flying.

Unfortunately, I will be the first to say that I still carry that stigma of continuing to see DiCaprio as that young kid on the ill-fated ship. And the problem is that this bias has prevented me from seeing his movies because I always think that I will be seeing Jack Dawson all over again.

This movie cured me of this rather unfair notion of him. And from this moment on, I have begun to look at DiCaprio as a capable adult actor and not a child or teenybopper star anymore.

Story

The premise of the story is that all types of information can be extracted in a person’s mind. This is achieved by entering deep in to a person’s subconscious mind, through their dreams, in order to coax the data out of them.

Instead of just retrieving information, Dominic Cobb, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, has an additional skill – he can plant information inside a person’s mind to alter his actions when they wake up.

Saito, who is played by Ken Watanabe, and Robert Fischer, who is played by Cillian Murphy, have competing companies in the real world. And between the two, it is the latter that is more powerful.

To win their on-going corporate war, Saito hires Cobb and his team for a mission to plant an idea deep in Fischer’s mind that will ensure the collapse of his company.

The problem is that the world of dreams is a dangerous place. And we’re not just talking about the person who is having the dream.

The thieves themselves pose a danger because their own subconscious can become uncontrollable when inside another person’s mind. They can create situations within another person’s dreamworld, such as creating their own characters who can prevent the success of a mission.

And that is the problem that Cobb faces. His emotional past was beginning to catch up to him and as it began to manifest itself during the mission. In essence, his subconscious began to put his team’s lives at stake. While dieing in a normal dream wakes a person up, this mission is different. Someone who dies in during this particular mission will end up being lost in a subconscious limbo forever.

So even if a person is a dream feels and agonizes over pain, they cannot be killed to wake up because they won’t. And that is what made this mission exptremely dangerous; just as dangerous as it is in real life.

And that was just the background. The story is much, much more complex than I had expected and its depth is slowly unraveled as the film progresses. And this is the reason why viewers need to pay close attention to the dialog because missing out on even a small part can be the difference between understanding the story and dismissing it as a collection of thoughts.

Character Development

The character development was very well done as the movie took great pains to establish the personalities of each individual character, as well as what drives them to accomplish this mission.

In the case of Cobb, he is driven by his desire to be reunited with his family. But it is only though the movie that viewers realize that the biggest enemy he was facing for the entire mission was himself.

The team that Cobb has assembled all have their own talents and contributions. Each one’s personality and reactions are consistent throughout the film, that is, in and out of the mind of Fischer.

Special Effects

From the way the ground folds up into the sky to the way they float in the mind of Fischer, the special effects were stunning.

The way one level of the subconscious affects another was very well thought of. The best example of this was when the van fell off the bridge in the first level, affecting the same people who were trying to work in another level of subconsciousness.

The lighting, which tends to be the biggest weakness of many special-effects driven movies, was done right in this one. The shadows and shades of the surrounding landscape made everything very convincing.

Instead of special effects that would overshadow the characters and stories, the special effects where done in such a way as to complement them; to drive the story and characters forward.

Favorite Character

Cobb, as he was played by DiCaprio has to be the best character here. He was driven to the point of being reckless. He was fearful of his past; but the more he tried to hide his fear, the more it would manifest itself during the mission.

What made him my favorite character was that he had something worth fighting. He had the perfect plan, but his flawed character made the implementation far from being flawless.

The acting of DiCaprio was done just right; no overacting or over-dramatic scenes here. This was clearly a much older and wiser actor.

[Kudos to him!]

Favorite Scene

There were quite a bit of scenes that were jaw dropping, particularly those involving the ones wherein the landscape would bend up to the sky.

But perhaps the most amazing ones involved the fight scenes where members of his team would float around. This arbitrary change of gravity that had people floating in corridors and walking or room wall and ceilings as they were fighting was quite a sight.

Final Thoughts

I’d like to think that I haven’t hidden my love for science fiction films. What I probably haven’t talked about much is that I feel there has been a dearth of quality science fiction movies as of late.

Either the story was shallow, the execution was dodgy, or the movie just centered around a bunch of superheroes.

Inception s a breath of fresh air and I will go as far as to say that it is one of the best I have come across so far. And while the premise of people controlling others through dreams isn’t new, the way the movie was executed was different.

Two other touches helped make this movie a pleasure to watch – it provided clear explanations of how things worked in the dream world and the special effects were consistent with those explanations. This includes both the potential and limitation of what can be done in the dream world. Often times, past movies would get the explanation right while the effects contracted the explanations.

[And while other people consider the lack of mystery a letdown, I liked it in this case.]

At the end of the day, it provided a very plausible setting for a film. And thanks to this detail, there was nothing left hanging in the mind of most viewers.

[Well, unless you count the ending.]