Wonderful complex film, almost perfect!

A review of "Inception" directed by Christopher Nolan

Another of my favourite movies, Inception takes a complicated plot idea and makes it work brilliantly on the screen. It's a gripping SciFi action movie with strong computer science basis that an old programmer like me cannot resist. It's also beautifully made with superb acting, cinematography and direction and was a big hit world wide. For a long time I gave it 10/10 but on my last viewing of this wonderful movie I realised that it had several plot flaws which sadly cannot be dismissed.

Locations and Colours

Firstly, the film LOOKS great, both in terms of the colours and the locations. There are many locations and they are all carefully chosen to contrast with each other so that you never have time to get bored with the same scene. Only a reduced palette is used however and most scenes are variations on the 2 predominant themes which are: a warm sepia with another accent to distinguish, and a bleak concrete grey.

The core of this film is the process of inception itself, which requires a stack of 4 levels of dreaming. The action cuts back and forth through this stack and it is important that the environments are strongly contrasting so as not to confuse the viewer anymore than necessary. Much of the trick here is to use contrasting colours and this is done quite well:

Level 1 - Rainy City, DARK GREY, natural light. The use of the taxi is very effective here as it is virtually the only thing that is not sombre grey and stands out wonderfully. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the white van.

Level 2 - Hotel, WARM SEPIA, artificial light. The predominant colour of the movie, in this environment it is accented by gold in the bar and red in the rooms.

Level 3 - The Fortress, WHITE, natural light. The white of the snow has great impact, jolting you as change down from dream 2 to 3. The concrete grey of the fortress is perhaps a little close to Level 1 though.

Level 4 - Limbo, GREY, natural light and WARM SEPIA, artificial light. These colours do not contrast well, which is a little confusing, but perhaps it is intended to be confusing... Outdoor scenes here are readily distinguishable however by the FAKE look of the buildings. Obviously even 50 years is not long enough to design all the details in every building in a city so most of them look like basic outlines that have not been filled in.

There are various other scenes, such as the Japanese countryside, grey and overcast, the Tokyo skyline, grey, the warehouses, grey, the Moroccan streets, sepia and white, the Chemist, brown and gold, his dreamers' room, true sepia, the Cobbs' last hotel room, brown and cream.

Looking at this list I see that the scene colours were not as well contrasting as I had thought. I would have thought that another colour, especially in the dream scenes would be appropriate. BLUE for example for Limbo, or RED for the hotel, or GREEN for the Japanese restaurant... Sure, cities are not generally these colours, but rooms can be any colour and grass is GREEN! I think an opportunity was missed here and although the scenes look good and contrast pretty well, they could have been done better. Perhaps Christopher Nolan was looking for a consistent feel to tie the film together, but I think that this material requires sharp contrast rather than subtle consistency. If the Dark Knight films are any guide though I guess he just doesn't like bright colours...

The locations themselves are great and provide good contrast: from a Japanese train ride, to the interior of a plane, to a hotel, to a van on a rainy street, to a snowy wilderness, to a Parisian cafe, to a crowded Moroccan street, to a concrete warehouse. Perhaps one too many warehouses and hotels though... Why not a tropical resort or night time bridge?

Direction, Cinematography and Acting

Inception won Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards and no wonder: Many of the dream state set pieces are jaw dropping: Paris bending over into the sky above you, a train ploughing through the middle of a city street, fighting weightless in a modern hotel... Fantastic!

And it's not only the signature special effect pieces, even simple dialogue scenes in hotels, warehouses, cafes etc are beautifully shot. No irritating 1 second cuts, nor hand held jerkiness, this is classic cinematography from the old school and the film loves it.

Cast a bunch of body builders and swimsuit models and you get wooden characters that no one can believe in. No such mistakes here! Without exception every character is well played, with plenty of depth and believable emotion. There is also a good variety of cultural roles amidst them which I found enriched the film: Various Americans, two Englishmen, one French woman, An Arab and a Japanese man.

The two main characters: Cobb and his wife Mal, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard were superb. In particular Cotillard brings an intense and desperate love to the role that can only be found at the height of a great sexual relationship. Acted her arse off you might say! The desperation in her portrayal make her actions almost believable and almost forgivable, a big ask when you consider the script. Fantastic work! Also she is very beautiful in this film. Hard to imagine that she can go up from here.

Cobb is obviously the centre of this movie and DiCaprio has been playing lead roles for so long that he is clearly not fazed by the prospect of a film standing or falling on his performance, indeed, one can only imagine that he relishes the challenge, and even thrives on it. He does not disappoint and brings a believable precision, thoughtfulness and professionalism to the character, with just enough undercurrent of deep emotion to give Cobb substance. Excellent!

Can't fault Nolan's direction here either. Every scene is tight, relevant and watchable. I never felt the desire to wander off and have a coffee... He gets the actors all firing, the film is compelling, the ending satisfying... What more do you want from a director?

Screenplay

It is the FANTASTIC plot that makes this film and the tight, credible and compelling way in which the screenplay presents it. Christopher Nolan can take credit for both these and I have to take my hat of to him for that. Marvelous effort on the whole.

It is an intricate web he weaves and there are many threads that must stick together to keep the whole shining structure cohesive and functional. Most critical: The matching of the emotional levels for the target's idea inception to the stacked dream states is detailed and plausible and gives the main plot of the film its drive and shape. Most plot writers wouldn't have bothered to get this right, but the benefits in taking that extra trouble more than repay the writer, as Tolkien demonstrated, by creating a solid basis that can be drawn on, again and again, for extra detail or plot structure. When you build on a rock you don't need to worry about pieces falling down or pieces not meshing. If the basis is solid so are the details.

Sadly however, there are several flaws from a etiologic point of view:

The weightless section in the hotel might look great and gives the opportunity for some creative and different activities but it isn't plausible in my analysis: Putting a sleeper into a weightless state, say while falling, may perhaps wake them up but I don't accept that it removes gravity from the dream the sleeper is having. My dreams are entirely separate from my sleeping environment. If I am cold in reality I don't dream I'm in the Antarctic! If I'm hot I don't dream I'm in the Sahara! Sure, the van is falling in Level 1 and the passengers are weightless but that doesn't mean their dreams are.
The business of waking up is problematic: For the purposes of this movie let us accept that there is only one way to force a dreamer to wake up before the sedative has worn off and that is through weightlessness or the "kick". A dreamer at any level feeling the kick from any level above him will wake at the level where the kick is administered. All deeper dream states are reliant on the indulgence of those above them, so if a dreamer is experiencing a dream stack 3 levels deep and someone tips up his chair in the real world, he will simultaneously snap out of all three 3 dream levels. You don't need a separate kick for each level.

A computer metaphor is appropriate here and in a von Neumann architecture we can think of a dream state as a context being pushed on and popped off the stack. The stack may be many layers deep but each context will have an interrupt routine accessible from a higher level, forcing all lower contexts to pop themselves off and return focus to the calling level. This is not a perfect analogy since the dream states execute simultaneously rather than sequentially but it provides a useful framework. This is missed by Chris Nolan who makes a big thing of the need to kick out of EACH LEVEL of the dream stack.

But even this is not stuck to rigorously. The dreamers are kicked out of level 1 by the van plunging off the bridge, fine. They are kicked out of level two by the explosives in the lift shaft. They leave level 3 in various ways however, there are explosions, shooting, abduction... Nolan must have lost the plot by this stage. As for Limbo, Ariadne falls but we don't really know what kicks Cobb and Saito out since they miss the kick at the bottom. Who cares hey Nolan? Consistency? Pffft!

The fact is that you just need one kick: The one given in the real world. You just need to inject the dreamers with the antidote and give them a shake. Simples! Presumably Cobb and Saito woke naturally as the sedative wore off. Works for me!

Anyway this flaw has little impact on the film so I regard it as just an irritation, the following one however is much bigger.
Inception is a rich film plotwise and like all great films has more than one plot happening at one time. The central plot is the process of inception with all its complexity, special effects, action and visual variation, but simultaneously there is also the story of Cobb and Mal. Many might see this as the MAIN story but I would disagree, even if it came from Chris Nolan's own mouth. Still, it is a large part of the film and without it the film would lack that vital element of depth that we need before we are fully satisfied.

Cobb and Mal were committed lovers, fine. They had two children, fine. They shared their dreams, fine. They stayed in Limbo 50 years, fine. She was possessed of an implanted idea, fine. She killed herself, fine. What is NOT fine is that she keeps cropping up in all the dreams and making a nuisance of herself.

Mal can only exist in this movie as a projection from Cobb's subconscious. That's fine but projections ONLY appear in dreams where the projector is the TARGET or primary dreamer. None of the main dreams in the movie have Cobb as the primary dreamer yet Mal keeps appearing. Sorry Chris Nolan, you fucked up here and here is the flaw that stops this great movie getting a 10 from me.

Mal and Cobb is a great story and it gives the film life and depth but you just need a rational way to allow her into the dreams.

One such way would be for all the dreamers to own the dream equally. But then you would get an unpredictable mess with each dreamer's projections appearing left, right and centre. Plus it is explicitly disallowed in the movie.

Another way might be to employ Jung's idea of the collective unconscious where all consciousness is shared and communication exists on a primal level. This could also explain the idea of Limbo, although since it is shared by all conscious beings it would be very crowded, seductive and dangerous. A long way from the private intellectual paradise realised in the film.

Conclusion

I love this movie. I own it on Blu-ray and have watched it at least 3 times. Each time I saw a little more but unfortunately the last time I saw the faults. I know that perfection is hard to obtain but considering the wonderful effort Chris Nolan put in over 10 years on the almost perfect script I am left wishing: "If only he'd gone that extra mile..."

If only he'd given Mal an etiologic basis for appearing in all those dreams where she shouldn't be. If only he'd added another colour to his palette, especially in the critical dream stack. If only he'd been consistent with the "kick". If he'd done all this I would have given the movie 10 instead of 8. It's a shame really, because there are other movies I've scored higher that lack the plot depth, intellectual interest and rich characterisation of this movie. But they don't have a great flaw in their plot that you can drive a truck through. Sad...

score 8/10

Warren Mars - March 19, 2015