MYST #6: Inception

Everyone has experienced a dream before. It's the one time where your subconscious takes control while you sleep. Dreaming occurs in the REM stage of the sleep cycle, and of course if you've experienced it, you basically see, hear, and live a whole new reality inside your mind. Dreams can vary from insanely strange situations to the worst and most horrific scenes. The concept of dreaming has been questioned and researched for centuries. Psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers have tried to discover the purposes of dreams and their significance in our lives. Is there more to a dream than we anticipate? Do dreams portray our greatest desires, regrets, and fears? Do dreams have the power to influence the very way we think? In a really cool and abstract way, Inception takes the concept of dreams and creates an adventurous thriller and story line that offers a new perspective on reality.

Above is the official trailer for Inception. Inception is a 2010 science fiction thriller about a team of thieves whose profession involves entering the minds of their targets and steal thoughts, ideas, or plans. Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight and Memento) directed and wrote this movie to create another psychological thriller that involves an ingenious story about the mind. Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic and Django Unchained), is a professional dream extractor who is an expert on the complicated method of entering someone's dream to extract certain ideas. However due, to previous complications with this in his personal life, he is forced to be on the run constantly. Soon, a powerful businessman offers him the opportunity to return home to his family if he and his team are able to complete an impossible task to plant an unconscious idea rather than take one. Cobb accepts the dangerous task as he and his team risk their very sanity in the world of the human mind.

The movie was directed by the very clever and well-known Christopher Nolan. If you look at my first MYST post about the movie The Prestige, I mentioned that Nolan was a very good director that likes to focus on complex plot themes and plot twists. His previous movies like The Dark Knight demonstrates the way he is able to create a vivid storyline that involves more than just a simple hero fighting a villain cliche. Nolan likes to focus on sophisticated dialogue and thematic messages that are subliminal within the plots. The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Memento all include this style and of course Inception is no exception. It uses the complex elements of dreaming and mental thought to form a very interesting and entertaining plot. Along with Nolan's use of action sequences and even a dramatic side story, the movie maintains a very solid structured and organized piece with a variety of classic and new styles.

Dom Cobb

What is also interesting about this movie is the cast used. Leonardo DiCaprio is the main character of the movie playing as Dom Cobb. Now DiCaprio was already a very famous actor prior to this movie but Inception definitely help boost his reputations and popularity among the average viewer and film industry. Leonardo is famous for playing the more suave character in his roles that demonstrate class, cleverness, and sophistication. This is exemplified in Catch Me If You Can, The Great Gatsby, and even in Titanic. However, Inception definitely shows a more stern and slightly more grim side of Leonardo since Dom Cobb is a lost yet determined character in the movie. DiCaprio did a phenomenal job with it really portraying necessary intensity, anger, empathy, and sorrow for specific scenes of the film. What I also find interesting is that Nolan likes to use a lot of the same actors and actresses in his movies including this one. Some of these actors include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, etc. All of these actors are at least in one or more of Nolan's other films which kind of shows how much he trusts his cast or how reserved he can be.

Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The cinematic elements of this movie are eye-boggling to say the least. You can tell the movie spent a lot of time and money to nail certain shots, special effects, and creative editing to form a masterpiece of cinematography. First off, the lighting of the movie ranges from bright to dim depending on the setting. Because it mostly relies on dialogue to tell the story, lots of low-key lighting was used to bring focus on the characters' faces. Extreme long shots was used many times to portray the computer generated landscapes and skylines that would naturally bring awe to the audiences' eyes. Also there was lots of use of discontinuity editing for those action-packed scenes of fighting and shooting. Overall there was great use of camera angles and shots to create a mind-bending cinematic masterpiece. Now the editing was very important for the film's visual display especially for the sequences inside the dream states. Whenever anything "impossible" would occur, the movie used well-made CGI and sometimes even real special effects to express the movie's action. It was used very appropriately and made the movie visually entertaining and fun to watch which is part of the reason why it was a great success.




The scene that I'd like to focus on is the hallway fight scene where Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer and Looper) is fighting one of the dream's projections, people the subconscious creates that kill invaders, in a hotel corridor. In the movie, the team has already entered the 1st level of the dreams be in the back of a moving van, and then move into the 2nd level which is in a hotel. While they are in the hotel, the team moves into the 3rd level while Arthur stays behind to wake them up in time. However, he is interrupted by a projection and the fight between them ensues in the hallway, but because of the car chase in the 1st level, Arthur and the projection find themselves fighting each other in shifting gravity making the scene that much more intense and entertaining. The scene involves a lot of back and forth shots between the 1st and 2nd level letting the audience know that the two sequences are occurring at the same time. Camera angles include quick shot changes and one continuous shot of the choreographed fight. Interestingly, this continuous shot stays with the hallway so it looks like the men are just flying around the hallway while fighting. It's a very cool shot, but what makes it even cooler is the fact that this shot was not computer generated. That's right, the whole fight scene was real including the hallway. Christopher Nolan actually created a massive suspended corridor that rotated constantly and put the actors to fight in there. Then he just rotated the camera with the hallway to give it that unique sequence the audience remembers. Talk about dedication.

I thoroughly enjoyed Inception. I know it seems kind of biased since I give so much appraise to Christopher Nolan before, but the movie was honestly a big hit to me. It had cool action, a great and creative story, fantastic acting, beautiful cinematography, and even the amazing twist that I love so much in Nolan movies. It certainly left a large impression to me when I finished it and is definitely worth seeing more than once. Sadly, I'd have to say that my only problem was that I did find some plot holes where no Inception fan could explain. However, I can't say I'm that surprised considering how already complicated and complex the story line was in the first place. It was bound to have some kind of technical error. So having said that, the movie was good and it definitely gained my attention even after the ending credits. I'm giving this one a 9/10.