Sorry for the extreme delay in publishing this review. Before I begin, I'd like to update my readers on what's been going on behind the scenes. First off, I came up with an interesting idea for this review, but it just never took off, so that got abandoned. Secondly, Hurricane Harvey struck the Houston area back in August. This threw me off, of course, and I scarcely had time to sit down and work on reviews, much less any of my delayed ones. However, a sense of normalcy has long since established itself so I'm getting on to publishing these dreadfully delayed reviews online ASAP. Reviews you can expect to see in the near future include a Triple-R for Interstellar and Throwback Thursday Reviews over Stand By Me, The World's End, The Shining, the 1990 It miniseries, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Risky Business (1983).
'Inception' Review
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Original Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Original Score.
Won: Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing.
Inception follows Dom Cobb, a thief who utilizes shared dream technology to enter people's minds and steal secrets from their subconscious. This skill makes him incredibly useful in the world of corporate espionage, but has also been accompanied by substantial personal consequences for Cobb. While on an assignment, he's offered a chance at redemption so that he can finally return home and see his children again. All Cobb has to do is assemble a team to infiltrate the mind of a CEO and implant an idea in his mind. The task seems inconceivable, but the reward far outweighs the risk for Cobb, so he accepts and the quest to pull off the most impractical mind heist begins.
Inception was written and directed by auteur filmmaker Christopher Nolan, standing as his seventh feature length film and first follow up to the massive success of The Dark Knight. I think every successful storyteller has a defining point in their career where they prove themselves capable of more than just making remarkable movies, but also expanding exceptional, original ideas into fantastic feature length projects. For Nolan, I believe Inception is his quintessential film.
I'm not necessarily stating Inception is his best work, but I believe it to be one of the defining points of his phenomenal filmography. I still haven't seen Following, Memento, Insomnia, or The Prestige so I can't quite speak on how those films impacted his career trajectory, but I do believe Inception exemplifies all the aforementioned points.
For starters, everything originated from one of the most unique ideas ever brought to film that presents infinite opportunity for elaboration and development. What if people were able to infiltrate one-another's dreams? What would the implications of that be? What are the rules? Nolan knows all, and the fact he thought this all up still astounds me. It's wonderful world-building from the group up, and Nolan realizes he's gotta break it down for the viewer so he cleverly incorporates exposition in an incredibly interesting way. He shows as he tells, explaining the fundamentals clearly and concisely for those providing their full attention and willingness to think.
Nolan doesn't forget that the human mind is complex though. He remembers that the past haunts us and our personal trauma will always trail behind, so he brilliantly pushes that idea forward as the driving narrative for our protagonist. The base premise of Inception centers on a heist, but at its core the film is all about letting go of the past. The way Nolan integrates this thread with the overarching story is utterly exceptional. The stakes in Inception remain personal in spite of elevated spectacle. Rather than focusing the film's climax entirely on the heist at hand, Nolan pits Cobb against the personal demons of his past, and forces him to confront them in an intense, emotionally charged resolution.
Like nearly all of Nolan's other films, Inception is a masterpiece on a technical level with splendid cinematography, impressive editing, proficient practical production design, absolutely authentic visual effects work, superb sound mixing and editing, and a booming score from Hans Zimmer. There's not a single technical category that slouches amidst Nolan's especially ambitious magnum opus, and absolutely all of these involved elements have gone on to be incredibly influential (just look to last year's Doctor Strange for evidence of that).
Time is a reoccurring element in virtually all of Nolan's work. Though the way Nolan compounds time within the layers of dreams in Inception's pivotal dream-heist is simply astounding. Every talked-about technical technique accentuates the tension and importance of the cerebral stickup, but the sense of urgency is only emphasized and amplified by these filmmaking instruments, not fabricated by it. This perception that time elongates within each layer is best communicated through the slo-motion sequencing and tempo fluctuations in Zimmer's score.
As for Inception's illustrious ensemble, the all-star talent bring their A-game. Accomplished actors including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, and Michael Caine each provide sufficient substance to their respective roles and make especially favorable impressions with every moment onscreen.
However, it's Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard who practically run away with the movie. DiCaprio absolutely authenticates Cobb's struggle to distinguish fiction from reality, and the fact his mind is constantly responsible for undermining his plans only strengthens the struggle. One outburst from him, in particular, is so powerful that you can feel Cobb's pain resonate through the screen. It's one of DiCaprio's few performances that exemplifies such a poignant balance between intellect, emotion, and subtle nuance. Cotillard is able to match him emotional beat-for-emotional beat though, demonstrating a strengthened resolve and etherealness to play Mel as a faint shadow of the woman Cobb remembers loving. She finds a strange sweet-spot between seeming real and unreal, so the viewer (like Cobb) will also have difficulty differentiating the hallucinations from flesh and blood.
Aside from expanding audience's minds in 2010, Inception stretched the limits of efficiently executing and innovating a director's most inconceivable abstraction. I realize I've used adjectives like "brilliant," "exceptional," and "astounding" quite often in this review, but there's simply no other way to describe Nolan's craftsmanship. He continually pushes the boundaries of every element of filmmaking to consistently deliver intellectually-stimulating entertainment. Inception remains to be ample evidence of just that, and so much more!
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