Spoiler alert – read at your own risk or maybe you should read it to tempt you into seeing the movie.Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75o-F6ja2IInception is one of the interesting movies I have had a chance to see in a long, long, time. I like what @XIANITY tweeted:
“WEIRD: Last week, for a sermon illustration, my pastor spun a top on the pulpit and this morning it was still spinning. “
(That quip will only make sense if you have seen the movie.)Here is a partial synopsis:
Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) is a skilled thief. He doesn’t steal money, jewelry, or art. He is, instead, the absolute best at stealing valuable ideas from deep within the subconscious during the dream state when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Unfortunately, however, Cobb has a wounded past. And now, when he tries to do an extraction, the wounded past (memories) get in the way of his mission. Cobb is an everyman, a man in search of redemption.A Japanese businessman offers Cobb a chance at redemption, but to price his high. He must do an inception; that is, plant an idea in a client’s mind – inception.. Inception is far more difficult and dangerous.
The movie has many layers of interpretation and is a mental challenge in every sense. Avoid watching it when you are tired or sleepy – that would only confuse you.Nolan told an interviewer that his Inception movie is “shameless…in its plundering of cinematic history”. That’s a good starting point for working with it. Nolan is actually first doing an extraction in that he is stealing ideas from multiple movies – his own movies, an Orson Wells movie, a famous Fred Astaire movie, Matrix, the Bond movies – you name it. No clips – just stealing the ideas. He is also doing an inception on you – planting ideas in your mind as you follow the story.I loved the beautiful scenes of the fortress high in the snow-covered mountains. I instantly recognized the fortress as the restaurant in the Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The fortress scene in that Bond movie was filmed at a restaurant in Switzerland just up the hill from the small town of Interlaken. In 1989 when I was paralyzed from the shoulders down with GBS and in the hospital in Interlaken, I could see the restaurant out of my hospital window. Earlier, in 1984 when I was there with my wife, we took the tram up to the restaurant. The scene in Inception was filmed in the Canadian mountains with a replica of the restaurant as a fortress. Nolan was playing on my mind with his story.At another layer, the movie is a symbol of the movie-making process. It is a movie about making movies. Cobb is the director, Gordon-Levitt the producer, Page the production designer, Hardy the actor, Watanabe the financier, and Fischer (the client) is the audience (you).Go another level and you will see that each character has a symbolic name. Cobb’s wife Mal(French for “bad”) in Inception is the serpent that plays and tries to capture Cobb with his wound. Cobb cannot do the inception because of this wounding. (Be careful, however, that you don’t draw too many analogies here.) Ariadne is named (in Greek mythology), for the lady that was the daughter of King Minos of Crete She aided Theseus in overcoming the Minotaur by giving him a ball of red fleece thread that she was spinning, so that he could find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Ariadne, the primary dream architect, could be a type of Holy Spirit in this story, except that her first attempts at the dream creation fail. Later, however, Ariadne becomes very important in guiding Cobb through his labyrinth. The name of the character “Yusuf” (a team member) is the Arabic form of “Joseph”, the Biblical hero in Genesis 37-50, who had the gift of interpreting dreams. Eames, another team member in this movie, is also the surname of two architects and designers who influenced the art of film-making and also influenced Nolan.Even in the music, Nolan teases you again. You don’t “die” in a dream. The violence in the movie is dreamed violence. If you are shot in a dream or have a car accident, you wake up. That wake-up event in their mission is called the “kill”. For the idea plant to work in the story, it has to be planted deep in the subconscious. So you have a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. To synchronize the “kills” for each level as the person wakes up, they use a piece of theme music. The music of course, is a piece Nolan stole (extraction) from another movie. Near the beginning of the movie, you will hear the music piece again, dramatically slowed down. You won’t even recognize it then. Since everything slows down in a dream, the music is actually the way a person would hear the kill music in a dream; i.e., you are in a dream. (You haven’t met this dreamer yet.). At the end of the movie you will hear that music played again over the credits. Guess what speed it is played over the credits?At every twist and turn of the movie, Nolan teases you on. With two Oscar winning actors in the movie and several others that have been nominated for Oscars before, the acting is unbelievable So is the cinematography, the music, the sound editing, and of course the script. You will want to watch this one multiple times and play with the puzzles over and over again.
