Downside Up: A Review of 'Inception'

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.

Anarchy Loves Company: A Review of 'The Dark Knight'

The Hollywood Blockbuster equivalent of James Joyce in narrative style, The Dark Knight is a mad, free-association assemblage of moral quandaries and spectacular destruction.

In superhero fashion, dark is the new black. Mood and introspection are the accessories of the now. The backlash has already begun, and films like Hancock and Iron Man actually appear ‘niche’ because of their insistence of lightweight fun. It’s tempting to blame Tim Burton for all of this, his Batman and Batman Returns revelling in the demented grotesquery of the circus freaks who populated a wildly over-conceived and dangerously top-heavy Gotham City, itself an ornate architrave beneath which combatants duelled theatrically. Burton’s films fed upon the yuppie consumer malaise of Reaganomics, depicting a fear subverted by fetishism and all but eliminated by societal apathy; in Christopher Nolan’s fresh take on the franchise the fear, like the hallucinogen in Batman Begins, has infiltrated the bloodstream of the social body and is ready to explode at the flick of a switch.

That 2005 reboot told the story of a simple billion-heir punishing himself in various ways in order to understand why bad things happen to good benefactors: Bruce Wayne, his parents killed, learns lessons both martial and moral, then unleashes both on a cabal of assassins attempting to destroy the city. Batman Began, but seemed unsure how he was going to get to wherever it was that he was going: the plotting could only be considered anything other than a complete mess if one read the film as an externalised Jungian nightmare, which was a stretch at the best of times. The same confusion affects the sequel, only this time reveals itself to be an intention rather than a vice – in The Dark Knight, the word to spread is most certainly panic, but it spreads beyond the schemes of the villains and the reactions of the citizens, infecting the performances of the actors, the composition of shots, the musical score; the very texture of the film.

Gotham City, evolved from a composition of urban environs into a Chicago-inspired (and shot) dystopia of political aspiration and mob rule, is attempting to haul itself out of the mire of corruption and depression. Hot-shot D.A. Harvey Dent is giving the ordinary people hope against an empowered criminal underclass. Newly-minted Batman is thwarting drug deals and gaining co-operation from the police, particularly Major Crime Unit commander Jim Gordon. Bruce Wayne remains a pompous, over-sexed jerk. Before any of these elements are established, however, Christopher Nolan and his co-writer (and sibling) Jonathon Nolan have introduced the match-head which threatens to burn down this particular urban forest: standing half-hunchbacked on an intersection in the sunlight, clown mask in his hand, the Joker begins his reign of terror.

Cut loose from the time-shifting opening acts of Batman Begins and The Prestige Nolan initially seems to be floundering, his drifting narrative lacking the excuse of warped chronology. Events in this first act notably fail to cohere to one another, creating less a plot and more an incredibly high-sheen superhero soap opera. This fractured, shard-like style never lets up; where its predecessor eventually jettisoned the fragments for a linear roller-coaster (the frenziedly elliptical editing notwithstanding), The Dark Knight has no choice but to revel in its own chaos, sub-plot proliferation and jaunts to Hong Kong abound. The Joker arrives as an almost extra-textual element to the film, a demented punter setting fire to the auditorium, causing the performers on screen to desperately utilise celluloid means to extinguish a corporeal flame.

And what a flame it turns out to be. Not since Robert Duvall turned the volume up on Ride of Valkyries has so much destruction been wrought over such a wide area with such panache. Like the characters of Michael Crichton’s Sphere, the Joker seems to need only to conceive of some malevolence than the barrels of gasoline appear and the clock starts ticking. The gleeful nature with which Nolan instantaneously manifests such chaos puts shame to Batman’s silent appearances and vanishings. These moments begin to transcend their earlier incarnation as plot-holes, following as they do the logic of a nightmare. The Dark Knight is in awe of such power: even composers James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer seem cowed by the Joker’s mere presence onscreen, their normally bombastically ominous score becoming nothing but a shrill whine as some fresh horror of his making unfolds.

The destruction mounts, and Nolan stages particular sequences with a verve and tension that at times beggar belief. A three-way cross-cut sequence leading to an assassination (but whose?) is edge of the seat stuff, despite two of the imperilled characters being mere bit-parts. The most cohesive fifteen-minute stretch – a street-chase involving an armoured convoy, a bazooka-wielding Joker, some monumental stunt-work, and very little music – makes the film worth the price of admission no matter what the cost, playing out with vintage Michael Mann precision rather than comic book bedlam.

This sequence aside, the film suffers the similar (albeit enviable) fate as its forbearer and remains a collection of grand and fantastic ideas under-executed and swiftly departed from. Floated relatively early is the plot-point that the Joker’s reign of terror will cease only when Batman reveals his true identity; a few scenes later this is effectively dropped, so that later still when the two come face-to-face the Joker fails to even suggest that the bat has an alter ego. While this is an intriguing way of suggesting the growing synergy between the two characters (i.e. as the Joker has no past or alter ego, neither does the man in black), it flits past so quickly, and is surrounded by so much flying debris, that it is in danger of being lost to the cacophony. So too is the concept of an ontological sonar-based CCTV system which Batman uses to hunt down his nemesis, the thrill and danger of one man being able to map in real-time the movements of an entire populace becoming just another piece of visual bombast in a sequence already full of it. The most resonant idea being heard above the din is that there is just no point to it all, and that if – as the final act suggests – the expected moral norm that an individual is more ethically sound than an endangered mob can be inverted, then anything is fair game and the very concept of heroism is meaningless.

The Joker’s schemes affect not only other characters within the film, but the very texture of the film itself.

With the vision of a city in chaos, hospitals exploding and bound hostages being used to deliver messages via the nightly news, The Dark Knight is at pains to be fiercely contemporary. It becomes impossible to speak of the plot in a vernacular that does not reflect Western political anxiety; even the characters within the drama give up halfway through and identify the Joker as the terrorist that he is. Beyond these aesthetic lifts the most original expression of the new normal within the film is the uncertainty which grows with every minute. Every character can be killed, every building can be destroyed, and every good man can become a ruthless murderer. Beyond this, the Joker’s insanity infects even the plotting: whatever framework of control the characters or the audience attempt to impose (It’s the story of a superhero in crisis! It’s a love triangle! It’s about an imperilled political operator! It’s the story of an alliance between the mob and a madman!) is literally blown to smithereens almost in the very moment at which it is conceived.

The cast, for the most part, are as unhinged by this randomness as the viewer. While the aforementioned lighter summer films of Hancock et al were designed around central star personalities, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne neglects to command such control, ceding it instantaneously to Heath Ledger’s fluttering psychotic. Much praise will be given to Ledger’s performance (much of it entirely deserved) and all I would attempt to add here is that – for all his violent audacity – the character is beautifully anchored in some miniscule way by a bittersweet sense of something lost (sanity? history?) which could never be regained. Bale himself deserves praise for making his Bruce Wayne as casually dislikeable as possible, and his dark Knight as monotonous as possible – just as Wayne himself would play the Bat. Other actors seem pleasingly frazzled by the chaos around them, Gary Oldman being a particular stand-out, elevating his Jim Gordon from the one-note idealism of the first film into a living, breathing, middle-aged criminal investigator seemingly way out his depth in this particular sea of madness. The casting of the bit-parts, meanwhile, goes beyond the mere stunt and into an inexplicably euphemistic realm – witness Eric Roberts playing, effectively, Eric Roberts, and the in-joke casting of former ‘Batmanuel’ Nestor Carbonell as the new Mayor of Gotham.

At two-and-a-half hours the film is certainly long, and with its extended third act and constant state of frenzy, it is easy to feel wearied. However, the brilliance of the craftsmanship (the brooding score, Lee Smith’s flash-point editing, Wally Pfister’s granite-like cinematography) makes the elongated running time welcome. While others have termed it the greatest superhero film of all time, I hesitate to apply that label, for the principal reason that I do not feel it is a superhero or comic book film: the pleasures on display are for the most part divorced from the sorts of thrills that are contained within that generic label. The Dark Knight is far more notable for its social theory, emotional tone, and (most of all) the originality of the narrative-style than for its duels or its scenes of caped crusaders flying through the air. As such, it represents a director pushing the boundaries of his craft in the most literal way possible, and demands viewing on the biggest screen you can find.