Inception: The Nightmare Labyrinth, A Film Review

Rating: 9/10 (22 July 2010)

Inception: The Nightmare Labyrinth, A Film Review July 2010, So-Rim Lee
Three hours pass by in a wrinkle of time when a film is visually rich, fast-paced, blended well with arresting music, and, most of all, presents a meticulously structured montage that keeps the storyline intact within omnibus subplots and syncopates the general unnecessary. After seven years of writing and another three in the making, Christopher Nolan's Inception turns out to be a well-built labyrinth that takes the audience through different levels of the "subconscious" represented by action-packed worlds of dreams. Since its opening, the film has received a variety of mixed reviews and a good load of possible assumptions and reader-response theories regarding its rather deceitful ending. The film is open to many interpretations, as its tag line boasts, "Ideas define a person and his world." The audience's demand for a definitive, if not entirely positive, ending, has indeed made possible so many ideas about "what really happened" that continue to live and haunt so many minds after the movie ends and the real world reels back.
Inception does not call for an elaborate, scientific decoding of its seeming mystery; the previsioning part had already been finished by Nolan himself, and, as much as the film seems to scream out for an all-prevailing interpretation, the audience should always be reminded that the primary role of cinema is to deceive, lure, and therefore, to entertain, not to plant philosophical meanderings and other mind-games that far exceeds what it originally offers. In the end, every film is an inception as the film defines the term, or rather, Dom Cobb defines the term. Through two-thirds of the film, a keen viewer should realize that everything that happens on the reel happens from Cobb's perspective, insight, mind and thought. It is Cobb that takes the crew into the world of dreams, into dreams within dreams, and into the "limbo" which, in the strictest sense, is only his generic creation in itself. If the cinema could manipulate the audience within its given time, in this case which is three hours, Inception uses it admirably well; even after the movie ends the audience stumbles back into reality with lingering thoughts that question how the end is the beginning is the end.
All in all, the role of women in the film calls for attention. Ariadne is the designer and the weaver of the labyrinthine dreams the crew risk their lives to jump in for action, in the middle of whose labyrinth is the Minotaur, Mal Cobb. Ariadne, whose identity is hardly revealed throughout the entire journey, is the architect of an infrastructure that proves to be out of her control, as it is ruled by the ghost of a much more feminine identity: Mal Cobb. The fundamental question rolls into the picture; does the weaver come first, or does the monster? It is not easy to answer when each defines one another. Whether Mal Cobb exists in reality does not matter in the film, as is the case with Dom Cobb and all characters, all happenings, all dreams. The only truth to be reminded is that visual and auditory sensations that the cinematic device presents is real, that this reality continues on for a good three hours, and that when they are over, they linger in fragmented visions and sounds.
Dreams are not supposed to be allegorical, or are they? Either way, if Inception gave a good pleasurable three hours, it has accomplished its objectives; we cannot regret having nightmares and dreams, we can only blame ourselves having fallen asleep.
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