Inception

Director: Christopher Nolan

How wonderful it would be if people watch our movies with the attention they give while watching Inception. Gone are the days where people become restless and scream whenever dialogues take prominence & complexity sores to greater heights. It is intriguing how the people at WB had incepted the idea to make the audience digest every word uttered (& even the unsaid ones) and to process them. Is it peer pressure wanting to know it all – like a challenge to prove that they are intelligent enough to be esoteric; which is becoming the order of the day. Inception works on this aspect of the audience. It works only if you are willing to surrender to the idea. What we get from that is something as uncontrollable as a character in the film wants the heist to be. While movies are being made to entertain us through the viewing experience, inception treads a different path (which Nolan tested with his Memento) where the entertainment is by making our minds race to the speed of the dreams created on screen.  Sure it tries to be convincing by making characters carry a briefcase containing a machine which allegedly can make people dream together the vision of one a many. But that just remains as a tool to get us into the dream after we all are abreast with the grounds rules. And there in lies the delivering part of Inception, the universal appeal; it challenges us to reprimand the dreams using those ground rules only to be invigorated, on being satisfied seeing the laws adhered to.

For a film that goes into dream, inside a dream and goes further more, like the two opposing mirrors concept envisaged by Ariadne (Ellen Page), the staggeringly simplistic depiction helps in not losing the audience anywhere. But in order to be understandable, the multitude of layers limits itself to the layers of dreams and doesn’t go beyond the “anti-bodyguard” concept. Wish they could have at least explored the fact that different minds act at different speed.

In Prestige (another offering from Nolan), Micheal Caine says that, the trick doesn’t lie in the disappearing act alone; what brings the applause is the reappearing act. In Inception, the ambiguity of the reappearing act (finale) works wonders for the film during the screening time but as the fog clears the complexity takes a toll on the ingenious screenplay as it tests the ground rules again letting the feeling hang in there unless Nolan comes up with a sequel. What do I mean by that? Before we get to what I intend to say let me brief you few things. While instructing Ariadne about a trick that needs to be employed while architecting a dream, Arthur (Joseph Jordon) says that, the complex maze of a setup should always have a back door in the form of a paradox which only the creator can sense. Similarly in a radically different method, Cobb (Leonardo) uses a spinning top theory to ascertain that he is in reality by setting a rule that it will continuously rotate when set to motion only in the dream – indicating the shift from laws of physics again. It can be called clever delusion by showing the spin of the spinning top only twice, but even for the conceit driven Cobb, reassurance of his reality never occurs by using the spinning top. Then again when in dream laws doesn’t matter when you don’t need them and does when you want to create a stunning stunt sequence. It is the power to mend the rules while making us believe that everything does fall in place, that idea incepted in us makes Inception a grand art.