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For centuries, mankind has evaluated and discussed what dreams truly mean to the human race. Clichés have been created, bumper stickers followed and suicidal killers come and gone. From “Follow your dreams” to “Go for your dreams,” humanity has gone to extreme measures in order to capture and explain what dreams truly mean. However, with Chris Nolan’s masterpiece “Inception” moviegoers now have the answer to the power dreams have. A dreams power falls somewhere in between two famous quotes “Don’t let your dreams kill you” to Robin Williams famous poem in Dead Poets Society: “Only in their dreams can men be free/ Twas always thus/ And always thus will be.” Essentially, in the movie Inception dreams can destroy us because they are created by a mind that has enormous power over ones soul and we cannot separate dreams from emotions. It is our experiences that shape us, but our mind traps us in the past.
Christopher Nolan is not only the heir to Scorcesse, but he is literally on a “5 movie win streak.” From Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, Nolan knows how to create characters we care about, and stories that make us think. In nearly all of his movies, the special effects (while excellent) are secondary to excellent acting and story. As Christian Bale said in The Prestige, “It is a man totally devoted to his art.” Inception is without a doubt, the pinnacle of a filmmaker that is continually getting better—and audiences are respecting his work by filling up seats at local theatres. Unlike the clichéd directors (Bay or Buckinheimer spring to mind), Nolan takes his time on projects (it reportedly took Nolan 10 years to write Inception) and fills them with good ideas and structure that enhance the solid special effects. While Avatar had an epic feel to it, the ideas and characters of Inception easily surpass Avatar’s special effects and naturalist worldview. Inception will have you staying up late at night, afraid to go to sleep because someone may be “out there, in your mind.” This is what The Matrix should have been.
The movie Inception follows the story of a man named Cobb, who can infiltrate anyone’s mind and steal ideas, objects, codes, etc—for the right price. Cobb continues to steal and work in the “dream world” because he wants to see his children again, who are in America, a place (land) he cannot enter because of an alleged crime and charges against him. Dicaprio not only has earned my respect as an actor, but he has increasingly gone out of his way to try different roles. While his role in Inception is eerily similar to that of his work in the great Shutter Island, no one can blame him for at least attempting (yet again), to remove himself from his Titanic boy image. And yes, he succeeds handily and with great emotion. He is not just a character, but a man audience members care about because he goes out of his way to do anything he can to get back his children. But here’s the rub: Cobb will not steal something for his next mission; no, in order to be reunited with his children, Cobb must plant an idea (a “virus” his associates claim) in his next victim—the term and title of the movie “inception.” Yes, this movie is ultimately in the genre of a “heist movie.” However, the movie deals with so many fantastic themes that I will try and explain its emotional themes, which has nothing to do with the now clichéd “Reality vs. Dreams” as “The Matrix” has beaten to death: “How do you define real?” Morpheus asks Neo in the Matrix. No, the vital theme of this brilliant movie are our ones emotions and there connections to our lives.
The idea of one’s emotions is not difficult to see in this movie. What makes Cobb’s inability to deal with the emotion he faces-- visually symbolized by his late wife—is the fact that she is in nearly every “job” he pulls off. Cobb originally created worlds with his wife, where they lived and played for years. While A.O. Scott criticized Inception, he describes Cobb’s true struggle in his review of the movie: “Cobb, whose life depends on suppressing emotions and memories that he cannot control, is thus a typical Christopher Nolan hero. His air of guilt and sorrow — the sense of unfinished psychic business pushing against his conscious intentions — marks his kinship with Christian Bale’s Batman, with the detective played by Al Pacino in “Insomnia” and with the anguished amnesiac played by Guy Pearce in ‘Memento.’ ” Yet, this is where Scott misses the point. We connect with Cobb because he cannot control the past, i.e. his memories. He cannot control the regret he feels, no matter how many memories he preserves or manipulates, thus making him a tragic figure; all audience viewers have regrets, past failures and suppressed emotions we struggle to control. We struggle, just like Cobb, with moving on in life, of letting our minds deal with things. For all of his bragging, (“I am the best extractor of information”) Cobb cannot outrun his tragic past—that he may or may not be responsible for his wife’s death. No matter how hard we try, memories from the past very rarely leave us; they come to define us and effect those around us. And when something or someone truly close to us dies or is hurt, that memory stays with us…effecting how we react to the future. Thus, this movie’s brilliance: Our dreams cannot save us, because they are the very thing that haunt so many of us. Even when we “deal with them,” there is no guarantee that things will be okay, no validation that things will go back “to the way things were,” a truly haunting message. Yet, it is a message that makes this movie brilliant, unique and haunting.
Roger Ebert writes that “movies today come from the recycling bin: sequels, remakes, franchises. Inception does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes total sense.” Ebert is right, except for one small detail: This movie tries “Inception” on its audience. The movie plants the idea in us that this is in fact Nolan’s masterpiece in a young and growing career, but that we choose daily what we believe is reality—an idea that haunts all of us. Webster’s dictionary defines “inception” as “an event that is a beginning; the first part of a stage of events.” Watch this brilliant film and see the continued “stage of events” that is Christopher Nolan’s breathtaking career.
Student Critic
