Inception is definitely the cure for the Hollywood summer movie blues of remakes, sequels, reboots, and remakes of reboot sequels. Bucking against the studio exec’s idea of a movie goer with a limited IQ, Christopher Nolan crafts a film that satisfies all the rubrics of an action blockbuster (beautiful stars, exotic locales, chase scenes, explosions, guns and bigger guns!) while daring to push the audience to think its way around the multi-layered labyrinth created by the characters and filmmaker.
Some immediate comparisons come to my mind while I was watching Inception and the most immediate one was that this is the true sequel to the Wachowski Brothers groundbreaking The Matrix, a movie so right on the cusp of the social networking age that it became prophetic and obsolete in almost the same breath in its commentary on how our interactions between the actual and virtual world can become so blurred that the definition of “the real world†has become a continuously complicated point of debate. Unfortunately, the Wachowski Brothers couldn’t push the envelope any further and instead of adding to their initial mythos, they fell back and let The Martix become allegory for older philosophies.
With Inception, Nolan grabs the baton and doesn’t stop at creating a dual version of reality but blazes forward and forges layers and layers of reality that fold into themselves. Staying true to the title, Inception is the creative process brought to cinematic life where the primary actors create subworlds with characters crafted with such vivid details that the subcharacters create their own agency and write themselves into the story that is both limited and freed by the vision of the original creator. Trippy, yes. Mystic, sort of. Fodder for adventurous storytelling, definitely.
Continue reading “Viewing: Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)”
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