Inception: An Astonishing Exploration of the Mind

Early in Inception, one character remarks that pain is in the mind. She means it in a literal sense, but her movie ironically seems most interested in probing the emotional wounds we carry around and refuse to tell anyone about. That’s a strange thing to say about a movie in which deep and mind-bending psychological storytelling is so deeply ingrained, but Christopher Nolan uses his spectacle to explore touching and even painful emotional realities, weaponizing endless visual metaphors to vividly show us how his characters feel rather than just telling us and leaving the rest up to our imagination. In so many ways, he understands that emotions and thoughts go hand in hand in ways we don’t give them credit for. His movie is a mind-blowing maze of warped realities that somehow finds its way back to the truth that something as impractical as emotions can still exist in something as practical as our thoughts or opinions.

Nolan spent about a decade developing the screenplay for Inception, and his care and attention to detail bleed from every frame. He’s asking you to keep up with a movie that has to explain itself, because of course a movie that folds Parisian streets on top of each other like some visionary, architectural waffle-maker is going to need to indulge its own concept just to make it make sense to us. It is about dreams and what we do in them, and all of this exposition works because everyone has dreamt before and knows what it feels like, even if they don’t know how to put it into words. While watching Inception, you won’t be learning new things about dreams so much as having the dots of concepts you already knew about connected to each other. Ohhhhh. Do you ever feel like you’re falling in your dreams? Don’t you always wake up whenever that happens? Inception knows this, too. Sometimes, it doesn’t bother to connect the dots, preferring to let you make up your own mind about both what actually happens and what it means.

In the simplest terms, this movie is about Dom Cobb, a thief who is known as an extractor. These extractors steal not objects, but thoughts. They drag their would-be victims into dreams before extracting sensitive information and selling it. If this sounds really complex for “simplest terms,” believe me, I did my best. This is one of the most high-concept movies I’ve ever seen, and it is equally satisfying to watch and decrypt. On paper, it is about dreams, that and dreams within dreams, or dreams within dreams within... you get the idea. Nevertheless, what it’s really about is Cobb’s bad memories of the people he used to love, memories invading his dreams and causing the people he’s working with to ask questions he's not emotionally prepared to answer.

Cobb wants Ariadne, a college student architect with a knack for building the worlds of these dreams, to design some so that he and his team can interfere with the plans of a soon-to-be energy tycoon named Robert Fischer. However, the more Ariadne learns about Cobb’s dreams, the more she begins to unravel the trauma he’s buried down there. Like I said, the more we learn about these characters’ thoughts, the more inseparable they become from their feelings. The plot to disrupt Mr. Fischer’s plans is really just a backdrop to the more interesting ideas Inception cares so much about exploring, ideas planted deep in Cobb’s mind that he’d prefer to forget.

Nolan makes the excellent choice of using the concept of dreams for character exploration, preventing these people from getting lost in the sheer complexity of the concept they invented. We know that Cobb is tortured by something, something to do with the wife he once had, Mal. We’re just not sure what that something is right off the bat, and this story slowly evolves from a mystery into a tragedy as Ariadne unearths the truth buried deep within Cobb's memories. What starts as an exploration of a concept that could have become self-indulgent slowly turns into an exploration of the characters who created it. The movie grows more interesting and emotionally charged the longer it runs, transitioning from a story about what you know into one about how you feel.

Inception feels like a cross between the heady concepts of Memento and the down-to-earth blockbuster-ness of The Dark Knight. Its soundtrack – also by Hans Zimmer – has a similar booming feeling to Zimmer’s work on Nolan’s Batman trilogy, but with a trippier, dreamier edge to it. It sounds like his half-formed memories of what The Dark Knight sounded like. It fits the complexity of this movie perfectly, and what’s so amazing is that none of its disparate parts feel disconnected from one another or break the logic of the world in spite of this complexity. It’s like watching Nolan put together some mind-bending puzzle and knowing where every piece fits on the first try.

There is a wonder to this movie, one that takes the very real environments of the world and uses dreams to do things to them that you could never do in real life. Nolan uses more CGI here than in his other movies, but because he’s Nolan, it still ends up being much less than your average AAA blockbuster. This is a very complex movie, and watching it sometimes feels like Nolan is flexing on you, but never in a way that feels out of place or inappropriate. Nolan causes fruit carts and vehicles to explode in flashes of color. He folds entire city streets like a piece of paper. He rolls a real freight train down the street. Nothing here looks fake, only like real objects doing things that they never could in the real world, and it’s a truly marvelous thing to experience.

Inception is like a sandbox of bad memories and the good ones that we use to cover them up. Because it’s about dreams, anything is possible, both the good and the bad of it. However, Nolan’s ambition never outruns his movie’s emotional core, and he always manages to tie its intellectualism and even mere playfulness back to the way it feels. For example, there’s one scene where Cobb’s team uses a dream to impersonate a man who worked with Fischer’s father. It’s a neat trick, but Nolan uses it to probe Fischer’s mind and the suppressed emotional trauma it harbors rather than as a mere plot device. Come to think of it, it’s remarkably similar to the ways in which Inception explores Cobb’s mind and his memories of the life – and the dream he built in it – that he shared with his wife. This is ultimately a tragic movie. Oh, is it ever a tragic, tragic movie. It thinks, and thinks a lot, but it also knows how to feel, too.

Many try to separate thoughts from emotions, and sometimes for good reason, but Nolan understands that both come from the same mind. He explores how these complexities can turn some people into fish out of water, or in this case cause them to question their very realities. He explores the complex emotions that are always a natural result of thinking too much, and watching him work is like watching someone slowly paint a bigger picture, weaving together what we think about with how we feel about it. The only reason I would be reluctant to slap Inception with the M-word (masterpiece) is that Nolan has created films that are arguably better than it, and that is very high praise, indeed. This is a movie that gets better with every viewing, like some bizarre carnival ride that makes more and more sense each time you ride it. Sharing the ride are people with loves and regrets just like yours, wondering when they'll get a chance to get off and, when they do, whether it would really be worth it. 

Inception - 10/10

Colossians 3:1-4