What I Watched -- Inception

I stayed up late watching Inception two nights ago.  Not a good idea to stay up late, since I'm exhausted.  But it's one of those movies that's hard to stop once you get into.

I had heard that it was super complicated, hard to follow, confusing, etc.  The truth is that it was not quite as much of a wild mind bender as everyone said.  Maybe since I had heard so much about it, I paid a little bit of extra attention to the film.  Or maybe it just wasn't as complicated as people thought.  True, a couple spots were a tad wacky, especially the first dream right at the beginning before you start to get explanation, but after that it's okay.  Oh, and of course there's the cliffhanger ending, which isn't so much hard to follow, but leaves you with questions to think about after the crazy special effects end.

And speaking of special effects, they were awesome.  That's one thing that I can say without equivocation.  And apparently the Academy agrees with me; Inception won for Cinematography, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects.

But so far I haven't said much about the movie.  I'll summarize as best I can: Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) has been building a name for himself as an illegal extractor; he and his team infiltrate people's dreams and steal their deepest, darkest secrets.  Dom has been exiled from the US for reasons you discover later in the movie.  One of his victims, Saito (Ken Watanabe), appreciates Dom's skill, and promises him the ability to return to the U.S. and his children if Dom does one thing for him: Saito wants Dom to reverse course and, rather than extracting knowledge, plant an idea in someone's mind.  Doing so is not only very difficult to execute properly, but will also require Dom to face down his own demons and deal with the loss of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, of Nine and La Vie en Rose fame).

Dom assembles his team, including architect Ariadne (Ellen Page of Juno and Whip It); forger Eames (Tom Hardy of Sweeney Todd and Band of Brothers); chemical genius Yusuf (Dileep Rao); and of course his right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of (500) Days of Summer, 10 Things I Hate About You, and - all those years ago - Angels in the Outfield and A River Runs Through It.  Wow, he's done a lot actually!).  The superstar team, at Saito's request, breaks into the dreams of his biggest commercial rival to plant an idea that will destroy the rival's energy empire.  We dive three layers into the dreams of that rival, Robert Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy, who I recently saw in The Wind That Shakes the Barley), learning about Dom as we go.

I hope that summary makes some sense.  Now, a few things I noticed as the movie went along, aside from the great graphics.  First, Ellen Page as Ariadne.  When she came on screen, I thought she had been terribly miscast; she seemed way too young and innocent to play the part convincingly.  But as the movie went on, I changed my mind.  Ariadne is new to the world Dom's team inhabits, so you're learning about the processes of inception and extraction as she does.  She is young and innocent, I was right about that much.  But she is also intelligent and sure-footed.  Her character provides a moral and metaphysical anchor for the viewer to follow through the complicated worlds.

Second, related to the first, is the idea of Ariadne.  Ellen Page's character is named after the mythological daughter of King Minos of Crete, who ran away with Theseus after he slayed the minotaur.  Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus as she slept, and was discovered by and later married to Dionysus, the god of wine, ritual madness, and ecstasy.  Ariadne is often depicted as a woman amongst the Greek gods, and also as the sleeping beauty on the island of Naxos.  Most myths have Ariadne killed in some way or another, but she is rescued from Hades by her husband and taken to Mount Olympus for all eternity.  The details are both important and interchangeable, because any of these depictions can be related in various interesting ways to the movie.  Think about it for a while if you've seen Inception.  In the movie, Ariadne is the only woman on a team of men.  Do the men represent gods, and Ariadne is the woman among them?  If so, are they gods because they can control your dreams, or can they control dreams because they are gods?  Is Ariadne rescued from the dream world by Dom, or does she turn tables and rescue him?  And on and on.

Third, it wasn't until the end of the movie that I realized how little Robert Fischer's character actually matters to the plot.  Even though, in the end, his is a lovely feel-good story, he is really just a vehicle for Dom to achieve his own desires, and for us as the viewer to learn about Dom's past.  That seems both sad and appropriate.  Dom has made his living as a thief, after all, and victims of thieves are often nothing more than unfortunate collateral damage.  That's the story of Robert Fischer as well, although he doesn't know it - that's the genius of inception.  And of Inception.

Bottom line: if you're even a little bit interested in wacky movies, see this one.  It's not a total David Lynch mind-f*** movie, but more in the style of Blade Runner, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Momento, where the characters know that reality is not always what it seems, and have to navigate that confusion.  Worth the price of admission.