Christopher Nolan's Newest Dream is Far From a Nightmare

Rating: 10/10 (17 July 2010)

How could Christopher Nolan possibly follow up The Dark Knight, one of the most important movies of the past decade? The answer to that would be Inception. It was an ambitious task to take on and Nolan proves that the only man for this task was himself. In one of the most unusual and complicated movies ever made, Nolan succeeds in thrilling the viewer while holding the viewer in a vise, never once letting a person's eyes leave the beautiful, dreamy images displayed on the screen. Though Nolan proved himself a master of cinema three times with Memento, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige, he has once again provided regular movie-goers and film buffs alike with a movie that will be remembered for decades to come as a classic.
Summarizing Inception is not quite as easy as it seems. From the very beginning, the viewer is dropped into Nolan's imaginative dream world in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, the Extractor. The Extractor's job is to perform inception, that is, plant information in someone's mind via his dreams. And this is exactly the job that Cobb is trying to perform in the beginning when he is double crossed by Saito (Ken Watanabe). Saito then asks Cobb to aide him in getting a business rival named Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to disband Fischer's father's empire. Cobb takes the job and assembles a team to help him perform the inception including Ariadne(Ellen Page), who takes a job as an Architect, the person who designs the dream worlds. Cobb's job is made difficult by Mal (Marion Cotillard), his dead wife who is now reappearing in dreams and wreaking havoc for Cobb. Other cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Caine.
As one can see from my "brief" summary, the film is extremely complicated. But this is far from accidental on Nolan's part. Dreams are commonly blurred with reality, making it hard for the viewer to distinguish what is real and what is dreamed. After all, Cobb does say that "Dreams feel real when we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange." As the characters delve further into the visually stimulating dream world, the plot becomes even harder to follow, but not necessarily in a bad way. The film culminates in five plots occurring simultaneously for about an hour of the film. Yet the viewer stays interested in the film. Nolan had me thoroughly engrossed for the entire two and a half hours that the movie lasted.
But the film's beauty lies not in its impressive cast or original plot, but rather in its rich technical work. The special effects in this film are very realistic and certainly fun to watch. When Ariadne is first introduced to the dream world, Cobb proves that the world she is currently in is a dream by letting Paris explode. The scene is useless to the plot, but it does not matter for the sole reason that it is gorgeous. In another scene, two characters fight in a hallway that has no gravity. The scene is thrilling, but what is most interesting is that it looks so real. The film's cinematography is equally arresting. Nolan uses slow motion multiple times throughout the movie, each of which involves water. The slow motion is completely unnecessary, but it is unbelievably beautiful, so it really does not matter that it is presented to us for no apparent reason.
Forget the acting. Forget the special effects. Forget the plot. Inception boils down to Christopher Nolan. Nolan is the reason why the film works, why it is so visually arresting, why it succeeds in making a viewer think hours after watch it. For a year in which very few great movies have come out, Nolan's Inception sticks out because it is original--it is an idea that is entirely new, and for that reason alone, it should be highly commended. But Nolan has superseded this. Inception rises to a new level because it has great acting, a twisted web of a plot, and ornate special effects. It may not be better than some of Nolan's previous work, but it sure is great. This is the stuff dreams are made of.