Friday, August 20, 2010

Review of Inception

Yes, I had heard the hype before I seen the movie. “Inception” is a great movie; a classic in the making; has the team dream of director Christopher Nolan and Leonardo DiCaprio; is destined to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars etc. After seeing the movie, I must say this;

Believe the hype.

More of a science fiction movie than a heist movie, “Inception” was written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan and the man knows what he wants to do. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, an extractor. He is a thief who extracts information from the mind of his victims while they are dreaming and his latest target is powerful businessman Saito, played by Ken Watanabe.

The theft failed and Saito reveals he is auditioning Cobb’s team to perform an inception; a very difficult act of implanting an idea into someone’s mind while he is dreaming. In return, Saito will use his influence to cancel Cobb’s crime record which will allow him to return home back to America and see his children. It was a deal Cobb couldn’t say no to.

Due to the difficulty of convincing their target that the idea belongs to him and it wasn’t implanted by an outside source, it is necessary to force their target, Robert Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy), to go into a dream-state while he is dreaming. After that, the team will again need to force Fischer to go into another dream, a third level of dreams before they can implant the idea. Cobb then went about recruiting a new, bigger team for the inception.

If you are confused by the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream idea behind the movie, be afraid because the movie twist and turns even more once the team entered Fischer’s dream. The movie is a twisty, mind-bogging sci-fi action movie…and it makes no apologies for it. I have to applaud Christopher Nolan for having the guts not to dumb down the movie. As it is, Inception has a smart, innovative and risky story, which in a lesser hand may have left audiences leaving the theaters in confusion.

Despite the twisty nature of the movie however, director Christopher Nolan managed to keep everything in line through good pacing and good performances from his stars. Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer was especially good in this movie. I won’t say everyone will get the twist and turns of the movie but Nolan keep everything going and there’s no slowdown of the action. This helps as there will be times in the movie where people goes “Uh?”, but by keeping the action going, the director push the story through and at the end, everything makes sense. (The ending is deliberately vague so that doesn’t count)

I’m not sure if Inception is a classic in the making, but Warner Bros. need to screw up pretty badly for it not to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year. It’s that good. Watch it and you can see it for yourself.

3 comments:

Brett Gerry said...

It's about time we had a sensible reevaluation of this film: http://bit.ly/9xBJSz

Gar said...

Good review! I loved the movie as well. Keeps you visually and mentally entertained.

Ghost said...

It was an entertaining movie. I especially liked the idea behind the movie.