DOWN (Dining Out With Nerds) report: Inception

I have never before paid to see the same movie twice in three days. Inception is worth it.

Inception was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also directed Memento, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige. It is most similar to Memento in its altered approach to the story line. But where Memento was chunks of storyline in an almost random order, Inception is very clearly and logically structured in layers. (For you programmers, actually as a pushdown stack.) The characters mentally descend from reality into a shared dream... and from that sub-reality to a deeper one... as time runs out and their mission and their very minds are at stake. It’s even been suggested that the entire movie is a dream: unlikely events happen, characters jump from one city to another without visible transition, and the audience has no “totem” to test reality.

Oddly, this movie most reminded me of Shutter Island, another DiCaprio film (but directed by Martin Scorsese). The always-present question of “What is reality?”, the threatening music, the quiet but effective acting by DiCaprio suffused both films.

Like Avatar and The Matrix, this is a gorgeous film. The cityscapes and seashores are unconventional and beautiful. A good architect could design a fantastic city (in both senses of “fantastic”) over fifty years, and the movie manages to show it. The second time I saw it we sat much closer to the screen and it was awesome. The music fits perfectly, with the end-of-the-world thrum that you heard in the ads repeated again and again at almost threatening volume. The action sequences could be right out of a James Bond or Jason Bourne movie (hmmm... those really do involve some coincidences right out of dreamstate unreality), and the hallway free-fall fighting was wonderful homage to some of the most outstanding scenes from The Matrix.

You will need to pay attention to every bit of the movie. It’s complicated, and important explanations of how things work are often explained in a single line of dialog. Plus, the movie has multiple simultaneous layers; if you can keep track of three things at once, you’ll follow the movie better. It is not a simple action-adventure film: it’s a psychological heist film — in fact, a reverse heist film! (And it’s science fiction, in my opinion, but don’t let that scare you off.)

Leonardo DiCaprio does a very good job as the dreams expert with a huge psychological scar. Ellen Page is decent as the newbie who necessitates explanations for the audience. The rest of the cast works well, no one outstanding, except that Michael Caine is almost distracting because he’s so famous. Roger Ebert gave this four stars, his highest rating. And only days after this opened, IMDB has over 800 user reviews.

Inception will keep you thinking for a long time: it plants fascinating ideas in your mind.