Fridae

In his interviews, Christopher Nolan can’t quite summarise Inception in a few words, coming across like a contestant in the All-England Summarise Proust Competition sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. You can’t blame the man: he’s rumoured to have been working on the script for nearly a decade, adding more and more layers of Nolanesque complexity and world-building into the film.

Well, here’s my shot at it. Inception is a high concept heist movie with two twists: the heists take place in the dream world, and the Big Heist of the film involves putting things where they shouldn’t belong rather than taking them out from where they belong. Leonardo DiCaprio is the master criminal who needs to assemble a crack team to pull off that one final big heist so he can get the cops off his back and return to an ordinary life. As with all heist films, the quality of the plan and the team assembled are directly proportional to probability that things will go awry.

Here’s my other shot at it. If you’ve seen The Prestige in 2006, Inception plays pretty much like its predecessor. As with his earlier (and more convoluted) film, Inception exists in a self reflexive structure, explaining its high concepts and premise by deconstructing them via increasingly complex show and tell demonstrations, then asking via various characters, “Are you watching closely?”

If you remember 2006 like today, The Prestige didn’t quite work because the emotional part of the story was overshadowed by a needlessly complicated script whose gotcha twist in the end was too unsubtly foreshadowed far too early in the film. The Prestige feels like a trial run for the masterpiece that is Inception. Despite its mind-blowing concept, Nolan keeps his script simple and uncluttered. The cast works well as an ensemble, with all the players turning in surprisingly strong performances to match Leonard DiCaprio’s intensity – especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, GI Joe: the rise of Cobra) and Ellen Page (Hard Candy, Juno).

While emotions still seem to be Nolan’s weakest attribute in filmmaking, the director plays to his strengths in this film: very high production values, set design, and choreographing set pieces. If you can watch this in IMAX format, do so!