My girlfriend and I went last night and both of us were amazed by the "Phase 2" language that is used throughout. We kept looking at each other when we heard terms that are now so familiar to us, and it was pure delight to see someone else's depiction of how we can get lost in the maze of the Human Game.
The reviews for this movie were fantastic, and exceptionally long because the film is so complicated. Here are the highlights and the movie trailer is below:
True inspiration is impossible to fake,” explains a character in Christopher Nolan’s existentialist heist film Inception. If that’s the case, then Inception is one of the most honest films ever made. Nolan has crafted a movie that’s beyond brilliant and layered both narratively and thematically. It requires the audience to take in a collection of rules, exceptions, locations, jobs, and abilities in order to understand the text, let alone the fascinating subtext. Nolan’s magnum opus is the first major blockbuster in over a decade that’s demanded intense viewer concentration, raised thoughtful and complex ideas, and wrapped everything all in a breathlessly exciting action film. Inception may be complicated, but simply put it’s one of the best movies of the year.
Inception requires so much exposition that a lesser director would have forced theaters to distribute pamphlets to audience members in order to explain the complicated world he’s developed. During my first draft of this view, I realized I had spent three paragraphs simply trying to explain the plot. I will simply avoid this exposition and present the movie’s basic premise. Inception centers on a team of individuals led by an “extractor” named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who, through the use of a special device, construct the dreams of a target and use those dreams to implant an idea so that the target will make a decision beneficial to the individual who hired the team. To say that scratches the surface would be an insult to both scratches and surfaces. But since it takes Nolan about fifty minutes to set everything up, I hope you’ll forgive my brevity.
Why is it so difficult to explain the plot in depth? The film layers dreams on top of dreams to the point where a unique keepsake called a “totem” is required in order to inform a character as to whether or not he or she is still dreaming. Then you have people in particular roles like “The Architect”, “The Forger”, and “The Chemist” in order to pull off the job. Furthermore, dreams have rules: dying in a dream forces the dreamer to wake up, delving too deeply into a mind can cause an eternal slumber called “Limbo”, using memories to construct dreams is dangerous because it can blur the line between dreams and reality. In addition, intruding in the dreams of another will cause the dreamer’s “projections” (human representations created by the dreamer) to attack the intruders like white blood cells going after an infection. And these explanations only represent a fraction of the terminology, rules, exceptions, or details that are necessary for creating the world of Inception.
It tends to be the case that lots of rules create lots of loopholes. Filmmakers can use these to cheat and let audiences fill in the leaps of logics. But Inception always plays fair. It will twist your mind but it’s not a film built on twists. It’s a film built on possibilities and the boldness of pursuing those possibilities. On my first viewing, the film experienced a technical malfunction where a misplaced reel skipped the movie forward by twenty minutes and then played the scene upside down and in reverse. Inception had already sent the audience through such a strange narrative labyrinth that almost everyone in the theater wasn’t sure if something had gone wrong or if Nolan had just made another bold decision.
The film deserves, demands, and rewards repeat viewings, but from your first viewing you can grasp the events on screen and how they interact with each other as long as you force yourself to be an active viewer. But with set pieces so intricate, so jaw-dropping, and so breathtaking, you’ll find that there’s no exertion needed to stay focused. You’ll already be swept up in the whirlwind.
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