Inception

Nobody understands dreams. Freud tried his hardest to find meaning in dreams but none of that is really definitive. That is to say sometimes dreams don’t mean anything at all. For all the symbolism and surrealism, dreams may just be a side effect of your brain organizing information while you sleep. They may have no significance what so ever. I don’t know about you but my dreams are very weird. I could never confuse a dream with reality because my dreams don’t obey any of the laws of physics or the universe. Sometimes I’m not even in my dreams. And while the movie “Inception” goes into the territory of dreams, it’s really just a device not an accurate representation of them.

In “Inception” Leonardo DiCaprio plays an economic hit-man who steals information in your dreams. Through the process of shared dreaming he is able to go into peoples minds and engage in corporate espionage. He is hired this time not to steal information, but to plant information. He assembles a team and the existential heist begins. However, DiCaprio has been descending into madness over the death of his wife, and his subconscious continually sabotages him. I was very afraid that this movie was going to be terrible just because the hype on it was so great. And if expectation theory holds true, the more hype there is the more disappointed you will be even if the movie is actually good. So I tried very hard to temper my expectations, and luckily for me I found that this movie was totally awesome. Chris Nolan is a great director, but an even better writer. Yes, the world he created was visually stunning, but the best thing about the film is the complexity of the story. Also there was one scene in a hotel hallway, in which for the first time since I was a kid I thought “how did they do that?” and I didn’t automatically assume it was with computers; that is a mammoth achievement by my standards. The acting in the film is fine, but the draw is really the last half of the movie, when they begin to implement the plan to plant information in Cillian Murphy’s dream. It is suspenseful and dramatic and complicated and intense, and really is the reason to see this movie. It combines the espionage of a Bond film with a heist film, it kind of reminded me of Mission: Impossible in that way (the first one, the only good one). It also manages to tackle some existential questions about the nature of reality. I often think reality is an illusion, because we each have our own reality and if we weren’t here to perceive it then it probably wouldn’t exist at all. But Nolan goes a different way with it which is satisfying to the story.

Here’s the deal: In order to like this movie you have to believe one of its most central premises right away. You must believe that dreams are fairly concrete and static, and follow the rules that are laid out in the beginning of the film. If you find it too preposterous that peoples dreams aren’t totally surreal as they are in real life, then you’re going to have a bad time watching this film. However, if you get over it and just accept the way in which dreams are presented in the film, then it become a wild ride you are sure to enjoy. I think it was a very calculated and smart decision on Nolan’s part to make the character that creates the dreamscape an architect and not an artist. This creates structure and rigidity to the dream, as opposed to hiring Dali and having Leonardo DiCaprio running around a desert full of melting clocks. We all know dreams don’t really look or feel like they do in this movie, but hell, just go with it and you’ll have a good time and you’ll see a good movie.