Christopher Nolan won himself a great deal of opening weekend cred thanks to The Dark Knight; he is likely going to need it for Inception. It’s not that Inception is a bad film—the movie is actually one of the most original major releases to come along in ages—It’s that the film feels too cerebral for its invariably massive budget. The trailers have made the film out to be a summer actioner in the mold of The Matrix, which is only half true. Inception does share some of the same concepts as The Matrix, but where latter film was a pseudo-philisophical, kung fu hodge podge, Inception is actually a clever psychoanalytical heist movie. No matter what you think you know about the film, viewers should prepare to have their expectations dashed. Can we have smart blockbusters in 2010? I guess we’ll find out on Monday.
Spoilers to follow.
In the near future, massive corporate conglomerates have power rivaling that of nations. The world of corporate espionage has evolved to the point where agents can now enter a mind to steal the secrets it holds, a process called extraction. Experts at extraction sedate their targets and enter their mind through dreams, shaping their thoughts as if they were clay and tricking the target into revealing information; One such extraction expert is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). When Cobb and his team botch an extraction job they are offered an opportunity to make amends by their target, Saito (Ken Watanabe). Instead of extracting information, Saito wants Cobb to insert an idea into a target, a process called inception. Inception is believed to be impossible because in all cases the target is never convinced that the idea being incepted is their own. The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of a dying energy mogul, whose company is the primary competitor of Saito’s corporation. With the help of a brilliant young architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page), Cobb and company must enter the mind of Fischer and convince him that the idea to dissolve his father’s conglomerate, the implanted idea, was his own.
