Film Friday: Inception (2010)

Inception is a well-made, thoroughly enjoyable movie, but it’s not a “great” film like so many people say. In fact, I suspect this is yet another in a long line of films that seemed special at the time, but will quickly be forgotten. The reason for this is that Inception offers nothing new and, ultimately, it makes no sense.

** heavy spoiler alert **

The Plot

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) can enter dreams and extract information. He and his partner are caught entering the mind of a man named Saito, who makes them an offer they cannot refuse. If they agree to place an idea into the mind of a competitor, Saito will clear-up a murder charge which keeps Cobb from returning to the United States to see his children -- the murder charge is the result of his wife’s suicide, for which the police blame Cobb. The concept of planting an idea into a mind is called “inception,” and this is supposed to be impossible, except Cobb has already done it once. Saito wants Cobb to cause a competitor to break up his own corporation. And while this sounds rather undoable at first, they come up with a very plausible way of making this idea take hold.

To plant this idea, they drug the competitor and force him into a shared dream controlled by one of Cobb’s team members. Once inside the dream, the team causes him to enter a second dream state and then a third to disorient him. This also has the benefit of giving the team more time, as each additional dream state feels an order of magnitude longer than the prior. Thus, a minute in the first dream feels like five minutes in the second and days in the third. But there’s a catch. To create three dream states requires a sedative, which makes it nearly impossible for the team to wake themselves from the dream and will cause them to fall into a limbo state, should they die in the dream. In this limbo state, they would spend a lifetime all by themselves before they awake in their current bodies -- this happened to Cobb and his wife, who now intrudes into his subconscious and creates problems. Also inside the dream, the team will be chased by trained killers from the subject’s subconscious. Despite these challenges, the team completes the mission successfully. However, as the movie ends, questions are raised as to whether or not they succeeded or whether Cobb is actually stuck in a dream state.

Before I discuss the problems, let me be clear. I enjoyed Inception very much. I thought it was well written, well acted, and well directed. Director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) does an excellent job of walking the tightrope between keeping the mystery alive and confusing the audience and he provides a compelling, fast-paced story that keeps you guessing what will happen next and what will happen at the end of the film. He found excellent locations and he made the smart decision to keep the special effects shots to a minimum; this film contains only 500 such shots compared to an average of around 2000 for other similar movies, which gives the film a strong sense of realism. The acting was also quite good. Indeed, I find DiCaprio to be an excellent actor and he again delivers a solid performance. The supporting cast did a great job as well, except for Ellen Page, who is miscast as anything more than a teenage girl. Thus, I happily recommend this film.

But there are problems, and these are the kinds of problems that prevent the film from being memorable over the long term.

There’s Nothing New Here

The first problem strikes you the moment the film ends: this film offers nothing new. The concept of a dream world within a dream world has already been done in films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix. And while there is nothing wrong with repeating a concept, you need to offer something new to keep the concept fresh -- either a new twist or an examination of some new aspect. Inception doesn’t do that. In fact, it offers nothing that wasn’t already in The Thirteenth Floor.

Why does this matter? It matters because great films always spark the imagination. Inception offers nothing to make you think. Compare Inception to The Matrix, both of which deal with the concept that the “real world” is not “real.” Unlike Inception, The Matrix is packed with shocking twists, philosophical conundrums, and a fascinating religious analogy. Thus, when The Matrix ends, you are left with a massive puzzle with many layers, and you can spend hours contemplating how the ideas in the film relate to our world. That’s not the case with Inception. Inception leaves you with only a single question: “was Cobb dreaming.” Once you’ve answered that, the film offers little else. It doesn’t even delve into topics like exploring the nature of dreams or what this limbo state would really be like. It tried at times to talk about how a kernel of an idea can change a person, but that was never developed. And that makes Inception forgettable, except as an action movie.

The Film Makes No Sense

The second problem arises because the film’s central mystery makes no sense. There are three possible states for Cobb: (1) he succeeded in his mission and woke up, (2) he could not wake up from the mission and remains in a dream state, or (3) the entire movie was a dream. But none of these can be true.

Cobb cannot be dreaming throughout the film because we can see what is happening to people who are not within sight of Cobb. Why does this matter? Because if this film was Cobb’s dream, then we are seeing what Cobb is dreaming, and he would know that he is dreaming because he can see plot points happening which he could not actually observe. But Cobb doesn’t realize he is dreaming, thus either Cobb can’t be dreaming or the story makes no sense. Yet, Cobb must be dreaming. Why? Because the film tell us he’s dreaming. The ending in particular indicates he’s dreaming. For example, he sees his children in the same poses and clothes he’s always seen them in throughout his dreams. They have not aged, despite the years he spent outside the country, and not a speck of dust has changed in his home since he fled it years before.

So maybe he’s only dreaming at the end, right? Except there are clues in every scene that Cobb is dreaming throughout the movie. For example, scenes start and stop suddenly, like in a dream, something Cobb himself notices. We are similarly told by numerous characters that his entire life has the quality of a dream, and it does -- faceless people try to kill him, people shoot at him at point blank range but somehow miss him, he has implausible run-ins with main characters like Saito in Mombasa, there are no transitions (bamo you’re in Paris, now you’re in Mombasa, now you're in Paris, now you’re in Sydney), and people act in ways that are entirely Cobb-centric (what exactly is his team being offered to do this? and doesn’t Saito have a company to run? and why would Cobb’s father in law pimp his illegal scheme to his best student?). These things only make sense if you accept that he is dreaming. Moreover, consider his children. When he calls them in the real world early in the film, the children are seen playing outside, again in the exact clothes and positions they exist in during his dreams, and again they haven’t aged. Secondly, who is the guy who gave him the ticket to escape the country? And why couldn’t he take his children with him? Or why can’t he be reunited with his children in another country? These are questions that can be overlooked in a dream, but not in reality, and they are overlooked here.

So he must be dreaming, but he can’t be dreaming, and that’s a contradiction which calls into question the entire storytelling technique. If he is dreaming, why are we shown things that can’t be part of the dream? But if he’s not dreaming, why does so much happen so conveniently, so impossibly, or so nonsensically? The answer is that we’re being tricked and manipulated to generate a mystery and that’s an unforgivable sin in this kind of storytelling. Manipulating the audience to hide the truth would be acceptable, because people see these kinds of stories as a mystery to be solved, i.e. they want to dig for the truth. But manipulating the audience to give two distinct impressions (dreaming/not dreaming), when neither is actually possible, is egregious. It would be like Agatha Christie giving you hints that Person A or Person B was the murderer and then concluding that the victim was murdered but no one could have killed him.

It is the nature of the insolvability of this story that will keep it from being remembered with other science fiction stories that have crossed into the “must see” category. Stories like The Matrix present us with mind-opening thoughts about reality. Stories like Blade Runner make us question what makes us who are. And to achieve that, they give us a genuine mystery to solve which requires us to question our own realities. Inception give us nothing of the sort. It offers nothing new and it never manages to call anything into question because the mystery is fake, we are simply being offered two choices, neither of which is real, in the hopes that we mistake the two choices as some sort of philosophical depth.

Thus, all we’re left with is an action movie. A good action movie, but an action movie nevertheless. Hence, while I enjoyed the film a good deal, I don’t see it having any significance nor do I see it lasting very long.