a complex looking movie with a simple concept underneath

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2010)

Inception is a movie that works outside our logic. We feel like our mind had been played all along, it's like the movie contains some puzzling, undeciphered codes scattered all over places. The moment we walk out theater, our mind process the movie, we interpret things, looking for many many possibility of answers over the questions we've just experienced. And this is why Inception works outside our logic; because no matter how hard we think and discuss this movie, we won't go anywhere. It's a decent analogy of a tricky labyrinth.
Like a discourse that some elements - I would say some key - had gone missing, or simply were not even there at the first place, Inception is a piece that Christopher Nolan as a director creates and how he wanted it to be: To create questions in our head. While I think these questions aren't supposed to be vital, but this makes Inception special on a very intriguing level.
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief who works with stealing another person's mind. He used a special method by letting himself into a person's dream, hence explored those dreams while in the same time took a very important information that those persons won't share to any one. Once, a billionaire named Saito (Ken Watanabe), whom supposed to be his victim, offered Cobb a very interesting idea about doing his work differently. Instead of stealing thoughts, Saito asked Cobb to plant idea, to incept something in a person's mind. The logic is - according to this movie - if it's possible to stole any thought, it would also be possible to embed a whole new idea into a person's subconscious.
To make it all happen, Cobb needs to recruit a bunch of people with their specialty. There're Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt); a guy who always worked with Cobb all the time, Adriane (Ellen Page); a brilliant architecture student whom able to create dream's environment, Yusuf (Dileep Rao); a chemist whose drugs are able to provide a powerful sedative, and Eames (Tom Hardy); a forger who stands like an actor on every person's dream. These experts has one objective: to incept an idea into one mind: Robert Fischer Jr (Cillian Murphy).
The film rolls with how these experts trying to deliver this inception. Later on the movie, we would have a perception about how complex and intricate this inception method is, and how dangerous a dream could be. Apparently Cobb is keeping a dark thought on his deepest subconscious, this one includes Cobb's two children and his former beautiful wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). Mal has been disturbing Cobb's mind, it's almost impossible to get rid of her from his dream. Every time Mal appears, his work and life are in a great danger.
Without giving too many spoilers, I would continue my review concentrating on how I perceive Inception holistically. Inception goes in a way that it looks very complicated and confusing, and it'll makes us believe that we have to think hard in order to understand anything this movie delivered. While the truth is, in my opinion, Inception is a complex-looking movie with a very simple concept underneath it. The movie looks very confusing at some point, and then later on it'd become clearer, and then it looked like it's very surprising and mind blowing at the ending scene, it's something that Nolan creates on purpose so the audience would think like they'd been mind-tricked.
And that preceding paragraph would come to my early statement: Inception works outside our logic. No matter how 'ambiguous' the ending is, no matter how detail the script looks like, we as an audience simply won't solve this puzzle because Nolan won't let us do so. It's impossible to conclude a research if we miss some data, so to speak. I'm not implying that Inception is a waste of time, or saying that this is a movie that doesn't have a true meaning. On a contrary, Inception is a work of genius. Instead of making a movie that goes over every one head, Christopher Nolan produced something simple that would be taken very seriously with the audience.
I believe, on the first 30 minutes of Inception, lots of people are trying too hard not to get lost. While the story is going to automatically solve its puzzles on the next two hours, we as the audience is preparing ourselves hard to understand it. Once the ending came, the movie ended, we felt satisfied and intrigued. We felt smarter. We opened our interpretations, threw some insights and reasons, while the truth is actually been there all the time. I myself don't count the ending as ambiguous, since to be ambiguous the story needs to support its ambiguity. And in my opinion, while there are hints here and there, it's not enough to make it ambiguous.
We don't need an extra intelligence to understand this movie. What we need is to relax, throw away our preconceptions, and let the next two and half hours entertaining you on its own tricky way.