Review: Inception

On walking out of Christopher Nolan’s most recent masterpiece, Inception, I found myself tragically plunged back into reality as the sticky floor of the cinema foyer reminded me exactly where I was. It was the pain of this realisation which verified for me that Nolan had achieved the primary goal of the filmmaker, to entirely envelop your audience into your own imaginative vision. Nolan’s film is not only a fantastic bit of Cinema, with its slick aesthetics, clever and well executed dialogue and edge of your seat action sequences, it is the accompanying thoughtfulness which sets him apart from his peers. Nolan’s conception of dreams and reality in the film become a self reflexive meditation on the nature of cinema itself, as it goes about allowing the audience to completely escape reality and slide into his own seductive and exciting dreams. After all, what is an audience but a group sitting together in room and sharing a dream, receiving a message, an idea, from the creators of the film?

In the build up to its release Nolan told The LA Times that he was influenced by the school of science fiction films which sprung to prominence in the 90’s. With the popularity of the Matrix setting off a trend of movies which ask the audience to question their conceptions of reality and the veracity of the world around us, Nolan goes about asking us: does the spinning top ever stop?:

“I think ours is of an older school, ours is more of The Matrix variety and the concepts of different levels of reality,” Nolan said. “The whole concept of avatars and living life as someone else, there’s a relationship to what we’re doing, but I think when I first started trying to make this film happen it was very much pulled from that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.”

In terms of the film itself the cast are as good as they look on paper. The emerging talents of Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy and the ever well dressed Joseph Gordon-Levitt match up well with the more established big hitters of DiCaprio, Nolan’s increasingly ever-present lucky charm Sir Michael Cain and the hauntingly beautiful Marion Cotillard. Page and Murphy especially seek to break typecast as the former exudes a new maturity in an attempt to escape her quirky roots and the latter bringing a new vulnerability to the screen which is distant from his previous Nolan role of the Scarecrow.

By now there is little need for me to review this film in a traditional way as everything that can be said about it, glowing or critical, already has. However, one thing which has really irritated me in a lot of reviews of Inception and of Nolan himself is the comparisons with Stanley Kubrick. They are both vastly different filmmakers who deserve to be regarded independently for their achievements in the field (although Nolan’s career is still a fledgling one). Kubrick was a master across genre, with each of his films warranting a seminal place in their respective genres, for example 2001: A Space Odyssey as sci-fi and Full Metal Jacket as a Vietnam War movie. Nolan’s films fit more into a genre which is indefinable in their originality and imaginative breadth, allowing for him to leave a legacy entirely of his own. It is truly sad that these two directors have to be compared simply on the grounds that they make big budget, Hollywood movies while maintaining artistic, emotional and intellectual integrity. Nolan has embraced and utilised the technology available to him to create stunning special effects that bring something exciting and also cerebral to his pictures. This can be opposed to the cheap thrills of most big budget Hollywood films being made today which seek only to distract their audience with more loud bangs and bigger explosions (Yes Bruckheimer I am looking at you). These two directors seek to maintain the pillars of what cinema should be, entertaining AND thought provoking and many in Hollywood should look at their example. Christopher Nolan is producing films which maintain my faith in the Hollywood model of filmmaking and in Cinema on the whole as it looked to be declining into an endless cycle of remakes and adaptations of already established material.