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Entertainment for the brain

In Movies, Reviews on 17 July 2010 with 3 comments

Inception (2010)
Directed by: Christopher Nolan

What happens when you cross The Matrix with a Michael Crichton-style of sci-fi story telling minus technologies going awry, multiply with infinite awesomeness? Well, you get Christopher Nolan’s latest sci-fi geeky movie, Inception. Being a lover of both science and architecture (I’m not being silly, it’s my freaking major), I enjoyed Inception so much that I was literally moved in my seat. So the next time I’ll be watching a sci-fi thriller/suspense movie as brilliant as this one, I better stay further to top of the theater than just to sit approximately 10 meters away from the screen.

Inception is about a group of people whose job is to extract secret information from different subjects by going into their dreams. The plot kicks in when Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) accepts Saito’s (Ken Watanabe) offer, a job called “inception” which is instead of getting information from the dream, they will have to inject some ideas into the subject’s mind in his dream state. The target is Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the son of Saito’s late corporate rival, and their mission is to suggestively implant into his mind the idea of destroying his father’s empire by means of complex emotional manipulation.

What I like about this movie is the involvement of the architecture field, or maybe it’s just me since I’m the architecture student here. Nevertheless, the job of Ariadne (Ellen Page), the newly recruited architect in the team, is very interesting because it doesn’t involve technical design construction but merely creating the design of the environment of the subject’s dream by perceiving it inside the dream itself. So while the things regarding the dream state seems complicated, my fellow struggling architecture students have found an alternative. Heh.

But director and writer Christopher Nolan did not merely rely on the science and thriller themes, but he also wonderfully created an emotional side. The interference of Cobb’s tragic past in his job and their mission developed his character and contributed a lot to the plot. Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb’s wife, became psychologically disturbed after spending so much time in the dream state, making her unable to distinguish dream from reality. Her part was presented in a non-linear manner that mysteriously unfolds throughout the story.

Inception is a smart, brilliant movie. Amazing visuals, amazing plot, amazing characters, perfect cast. However, it may only appeal to those who think they’re smart and perhaps not to those who don’t like being puzzled. And while it presents something about reality and the dream state, it also feeds the audience the feeling of being in a dream state or the “non-reality”. The movie itself, I guarantee, is a metaphor for what it presents. It offers the feeling of as though the viewer is the Extractor and they are in a labyrinth of someone’s dream. And for Nolan to create that whole experience is a very well executed masterpiece, in fact, I’m running out of words to describe how awesome it is.

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Read the cool prologue here before watching it.

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