Inception (2010) Movie Review by Jyan
This is a guide created for those who want to understand more about the sci-fi movie, Inception.
This article will help you understand some of the main concepts of Inception and its film theories. This includes: The nature of reality/dreams, shared vs personal experience, subconscious dreaming, levels within which we exist. It also includes a breakdown on when and where each scene in the movie takes place and what it's meaning is in relation to real life or dreams.
Inception is a 2010 American sci-fi action spy film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. The movie follows Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an international thief who infiltrates the minds of others to obtain information that is considered impossible to extract using traditional means.
Nolan has described Inception as a "dream within a dream within a dream". The film was released worldwide on July 16, 2010.
Inception has been positively received, with critics highly praising its story, screenplay and visual effects. It grossed over 800 million dollars at the box office against a budget of $160 million.
This article provides some insight about Inception film theories . It also includes the film's plot (with a list of characters), to help you understand the Inception movie review better.
Inception – Plot: A Short Summary
Inception is about a person named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team who can steal valuable secrets from a person's sub-conscious mind. In order to successfully plant an idea in someone's mind, the team must travel down different levels within the dream world.
The main characters of the film:
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a professional thief with an innate talent for stealing expensive artwork and other valuable goods. Dom Cobb was born poor but grew up to be wealthy through his hustle. Cobb is a master thief that specializes in corporate warfare. His job is not only to steal from the rich but bring them down as well. From his past experience, he knows what happens when people become too greedy for money. He refuses to lose his soul and get caught up in that kind of lifestyle again. He believes that greed is the root of all evil and he lives by a code of honor when it comes to stealing from people. Cobb has a strict moral code which is why he does not steal for himself. He steals for others. His father raised him to never steal from his mother and that's something he has never been able to break.
Mia (Marion Cotillard) is a professional thief and part of the team that executes the heist. She works with her husband, Yusuf, and has been doing this for years. She main goal in life is to be paid well for what she does. While she lives by a code of honor, she is very dangerous when provoked.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an extractor who can infiltrate the deepest levels of sleep to extract information from a target's mind. He is a skilled and experienced dreamer and his abilities are unmatched. Arthur is the only one that can create the architecture which helps them move in and out of someone's dream world. Therefore, he makes sure that he builds a perfect maze so that they can successfully take what they want without the victim noticing it.
Eames (Tom Hardy) is an architect who specializes in forgery and deception. He is not afraid to go into someone's mind to change their perception of reality to their favor. Sometimes, people's conscious can be a little too strong and it takes an expert to change it.
Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is an extractor who can create substances from someone's mind. He doesn't have any special abilities but he makes up for it with his master chemist abilities. Yusuf has extensive knowledge of which chemicals match certain reactions. He is able to create a great many different special effects that help them achieve their intended goals in people's dreams.
Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the newest member of the team and she was brought on as an architect. She is the key to finishing their final mission (the inception) successfully. As an architect, she is able to build a perfect maze to enter someone's mind because she understands how a mind works. Ariadne is also able to design other special effects needed for their final mission.
Saito hires Cobb's team to steal secrets from Robert Fischer Sr. (Pete Postlethwaite). Fischer is the CEO of Fischer Corporation and is considered a genius. His company has advanced technology that allows them to produce clean energy. In order to keep his business up and running, he must transfer his company's new technology to Saito, hence the reason for their inception mission.
Saito's son Robert (Malcolm McDowell) is also on Cobb's team but he doesn't know how it all works. He just knows he's playing a game. If he wins, he will be able to use the money to go back to school and finish his education to become an astronomer so that he can follow his dreams.
They successfully steal Fischer's secrets but Saito is killed in the process by a police officer. This angers Cobb because they needed more time to get the information they needed to finish their mission. (Cobb knew that Saito was going to die but it still took Cobb by surprise when it happened. He could have taken Saito's place or he could have used the information to kill all the other people in Fischer's organization.)
Cobb is angry at Mal for not being able to retrieve all of the information they needed and he is still angry at her even though she has done nothing wrong. Cobb leaves Mal behind at the hotel and goes off on his dream journey alone. (The team has just successfully completed their inception mission, now they must go back into the Fischer Corporation headquarters and finish their job by breaking into Fischer's dream world. Cobb has to steal Fischer from his own dream world so that he can bring Fischer's entire company down. In order to do this, he needs to go into his own past and change the reality of what happened. This is where the inception movie review begins.)
Inception – The Story
The story takes place in the future where a man's entire body can be controlled, moved and acted upon by his brain. And this man is no ordinary person. He is Cobb. His goal is to steal information from the mind of the world's most powerful man, Robert Fischer Sr. (Pete Postlethwaite). If he succeeds, he can destroy the world's clean energy technology and bring down capitalism as well. It's up to Cobb to get Fischer and they go into his subconscious to achieve their mission because they don't know anyone that has done this before. They have to use the laws of dreaming to do this. Cobb must build Fischer a special world within his subconscious, one that he can easily manipulate and control, one that he is intimately familiar with so he can plant ideas in Fischer's mind. Once that is done, Fischer will never know what has happened or how his company's secrets got stolen.
Once Mal realizes what Cobb is doing, she demands to come along so she can finish her part of the job. That's when things get serious for Cobb because now he has an emotional tie for Mal. This means that she will be living in his head during this mission and anything she does will affect the way he acts and thinks throughout this mission.
Cobb's job is more difficult than they thought because he has to get Fischer out of his dream world and into the real world without Fischer knowing it. In order to do this, Cobb must go through all of Fischer's memories in order to find the exact right day, hour and minute he wants. Once they get that, Mal knows exactly how long she needs to be able to leave Cobb's body and reach a particular point in time. (Mal is an architect so she can build a perfect maze for them to journey through). Finally, Mal must create certain effects that are needed so that they can move from one place in Fischer's dream world into another.
Once Cobb starts building Fischer's dream world, he notices that a lot of his memories are too real to actually be dreams and they must be real. When Cobb realizes this, he begins to question if everything he is doing is actually necessary. And then a moral dilemma presents itself. Is it right to go into someone's subconscious and change their perception of reality and if so, for what reasons? He has taken an oath that states that he will never build a maze that will make someone harm themselves or others. But now, he is building such a maze because there is no other way for him to complete his mission without doing so. If he doesn't pick a day to build Fischer's dream world, they might not be able to do their job. If that happens, they will never be able to get to the day and time he has chosen because Fischer's subconscious will become so dangerous that Cobb won't be able to allow them in there.
Mal questions if what they are doing is right. She knows that the last thing Cobb wanted was for someone else in his life but she needs him now more than ever and it means too much to her to let go of him now when they have come so far together. Cobb must now choose if he is going to keep doing this job or turn it over to his team so they can take care of Fischer and all of the people that are dependent upon him. He must also decide if he is going to do this for himself or for Mal.
The story is well-written and the cast pulls it off to perfection. The storyline has one big problem, though. In order to get Fischer into a dream within his own mind, Cobb must first put himself into the same dream state as Fischer so he can do his job in the very beginning of the movie. That means that Cobb will have to go into a dream world with his team while they are in Fischer's subconscious in order to finish their inception mission because they need to use his dreams as a starting point when building their maze inside his subconscious.
So the question remains, is it really necessary for Cobb to get inside Fischer's mind in order to complete his mission? And did they really have to go through all of Fischer's memories in order to get him out of his subconscious because he could have just left Fischer there and accomplished his goal without having to come back and change all of the other things he did when in there? As tempting as it was, Cobb should have been a little more sneaky with this job.
Inception – Special effects
The special effects are amazing through-out this movie. The computer graphics and animation are spectacular because they seamlessly blend the computer generated images with real-time photography by director Christopher Nolan.
Inception Movie Review: Conclusion
The movie lives up to all of the hype for it. There are hundreds of reviews that have already been written for this movie so I don't think there is really anything that I can add to the majority of those reviews except for maybe my opinion on what they thought about the ending. The ending was a little bit confusing in a way but once you sit and think about it, it makes total sense. The whole point in doing the inception job was to get Fischer out of his subconscious so Cobb could do his job and get him out before he could create any damage in there.
Comments
Post a Comment