A complicated yet enjoyable sci-fi:: New Age Xtra

This movie review was originally published in New Age Xtra on August 20, 2010

A complicated yet enjoyable sci-fi

By Syed Tashfin Chowdhury

Leonardo Di Caprio, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Tom Berenger, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Michael Caine and others pulled most of the audience into the theatres for the movie ‘Inception’, one of the recently released summer blockbusters.

While the premise deals much with our conventional idea of dreams, it revolves around a group of scientific geniuses that can trespass into other people’s dreams and, while moving through the person’s dream-world, can also extract valuable information from the subconscious, that can be used in real life for more dubious purposes. This process is called ‘extraction’. ‘Inception’ is just the opposite of this process, where the thieves inside the dream plants an idea into the dreamer’s psyche, which has the potential to change the individual’s life entirely, even after he/she wakes up. 

The dream trespassers, in this case, are the duo of Cobb (Caprio) and Arthur (Gordon Levitt) who is eventually assigned by Saito (Ken Watanabe), a highly influential Asian corporate sort, to conduct inception into the subconscious of his rival, Maurice Fisher’s (Pete Postlethwaite) son, Robert (Cillian Murphy), in return for having his (Caprio) criminal charges wiped clean in the USA so that he can return to his children. Through inception, Saito wants Cobb to place an idea into Robert’s mind that will eventually drive him into breaking the empire his ailing father had built.

So, Cobb and Arthur begins to recruit members for a team, who are geeky version’s of the ‘Ocean’s 11’ bunch. The training procedures, preparation for the inception and the plans has combined the sci-fi with elements of the heist genre. These parts of the story, along with minimal comic-relief and mind-blowing special effects, will excite most.

However, the interconnecting subplots and the extensive details are the bummers. There are lots of flashbacks and details in the script regarding mental projections, embedded subconscious elements, levels of dreams and even tokens, which aids one to realise that they are in a dream world.

There were some great performances by Gordon Levitt, Murphy, Page, Watanabe and Rao while Caprio’s lead character, Cobb, resembled his gloomy, brooding lead roles from ‘Shutter Island’ and ‘Departed’. Caine was not given much of a chance.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie is good. However, due to these elements, ‘Inception’ is a movie that will make you concentrate on every single line in it. While watching it, you will have to think like you probably have never thought before while watching any other movie. Most of my friends, watched it twice…because they did not get the story entirely the first time.

Christopher Nolan had worked on the script for over a decade and began work on developing the film after being appreciated for his work in ‘Memento’, ‘Batman Begins’, ‘The Prestige’ and ‘The Dark Knight’. That was definitely a good move on his part. If he did make this movie back in 2000, it would have probably not done so well, eventually suffering a fate like the 2002 Christian Bale-starrer ‘Equilibrium’.