Huddled together in a darkened auditorium, the communal experience of seeing a newly released film at the cinema is something akin to that of a shared dream, especially if that film contains the limitless worlds afforded by digital special effects and their attendant unshackling of aesthetics from indexical reality. James Cameron’s recent Avatar pulled the audience into the lush and bioluminescent world of Pandora through the device of the human protagonist effectively being put to sleep, his dreaming self let loose in new body into a strange world. The Matrix, ten years ago, pulled the same trick. Perhaps such dream-zones are the most pertinent space in which to explore the alienating same-but-different world of global hyperspace, in which our minds can alter our surroundings at will, our projections of ourselves are limited only by our imagination, but in which the rules and dangers are never fully explicated.
Christopher Nolan, director of puzzle-thrillers Memento and The Prestige, has taken this conceit in his latest film Inception and turned it into a device to cause as much havoc as possible. The Freudian diagnosis of dreams as evidentiary expressions of subconscious clutter is used as the basis for what would, if it were not for the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream madness of it all, be a pretty straightforward heist thriller. If our secrets are hidden within our subconscious, the logic of the film goes, why not create a world in which these secrets can be stolen by teams of “extractors”, skilled in entering the dreams of others, navigating the immune-system of mental mazes, and stealing the guarded secrets of the most powerful people on earth.
The frisson of describing a potential target as having a “militarised subconscious” is unfortunately undercut the further it becomes evident that Nolan’s conception of dream-theft is going to rely on a prevalence of automatic weaponry, and deploy massive explosions the same way other films do jump-cuts. It is fitting that all the psyches entered in the film are male, as the ensuing mental constructs are reliant on weaponised conflict and hulking, crashing machinery. Offering the suggestion that this is intentional, the only women in the film are either “architects” (a kind of dream interior decorator), air stewardesses, or demonic interstitial shades (the depiction of the last, admittedly, entertainingly playing on the ‘mad-woman-in-the-attic/basement’ trope).
The film is a two-hour long action sequence unfolding across various levels with different rules, goals, and characters on each, like playing several computer games at once. A genuine first, Inception may be edited together faster and be considerably louder than its own trailer; composer Hans Zimmer is a Wagnerian talent, but his free-associative, thunderingly loud, and literally non-stop contribution here is wearying. In Nolan’s previous film, The Dark Knight, chase and fight sequences proliferated to the point of ceaseless crescendo, but this was all in the service of a story about the terror of arbitrary action and the morally dubious deeds undertaken at times of frenzy. This, by contrast, is a world of rules and limitations which are repeatedly expressed to ensure the audience is aware of how the game is played: when the fact that death in a dream makes the dreamer wake-up is bluntly explained once again I realised how much I craved for the tension of a set-up like that in, say, Pontypool, in which the fascination with remarkable goings on stems from the necessity for the rules to be discovered through desperate inquiry.
Inception is remarkable at times in the skill with which it orchestrates the grandiose, often unique, and occasionally (but only occasionally) mind-bending action spectacle (a single-take fight in a rotating corridor is coordinated with – pardon the phrase – Kubrickian genius, if only the vehicular catalyst for it were not so lazy). The casting of Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are also particular successes, but it was a shame to see Ellen Page forced into the role of exposition-prompter. Continuing the conspicuous consumption of the near $200 million budget beyond the sets and effects, even the minor roles are filled by name actors (Pete Postlethwaite gets one line, Michael Caine’s role is in the trailer in its entirety, and it turns out that Lucas Haas is still working).
The film is similar in intellectual register to Tony Gilroy’s underrated spy thriller Duplicity, but where that film was unwilling to give the audience very much beyond the occasional frozen pizza joke, Inception wants to give the audience everything it can. It is certainly stunning, but there is a hollowness to the exercise. Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist Cobb and his guilt-ridden psychology are given pride of place, but this is at the expense of all else. Say what you will about stories that revolve around guilt-ridden protagonists pining for redemption and middle-aged men seeking reconciliation from their fathers, these elements are not fresh. Never mind that here they are less the subject of the drama than the subjectivity of them is the subject of the drama, but nonetheless their predominance is a disappointment.
Possibly the lack of surprises towards the third act is itself intended to be a surprise, but personally I would have enjoyed an increased tension between the heist players, or more shades to Ken Watanabe’s bankrolling corporate benefactor who inexplicably (in a logical, rather than narratological, sense) accompanies the team into the mind of their target. Duplicity had similarly impermeable characters, but their heavily guarded personalities were the subject of a bravely medium-oriented enquiry into trust and the inability to ever know what another person is thinking. Despite all the time spent within mindscapes, there is little of note to the way anyone in Inception thinks: the characters are ciphers, and reduced to gun-toting grenade-throwers before too long.
Nolan is a very giften director, and he and his team are impeccable at their craft, although the editing of Lee Smith remains too scissorhands for my liking. But in their eagerness to create a well-ordered world of rules, levels and action they have lost sight of the charm, freedom, and bizarreness that are the lasting pleasures of both good dreams and Blockbuster cinema.
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