Warning: Kind-of Spoiler Alert (I don't ruin anything, but if you haven't seen the movie you probably won't be able to follow; this is not a review, just my raw thoughts on the film)
I have seen Inception twice now, and each time left the theater utterly mind-blown and in awe, bursting with questions, insights and observations. After feasting my eyes on this masterpiece two nights in a row, I have concluded that the beauty and genius of the movie Inception lies in its manipulation of the simple.
The constructed complexity of simple ideas that makes the movie a psychological maze for viewers is a direct reflection of the concept of “inception” created within the movie, which involves planting a basic idea in a person’s mind through manipulation of dreams. With this film, form equals content. The technical production of the movie mirrors the themes that are revealed in the plot. For example, director Christopher Nolan plants a simple plot into the creation of the movie, and layers it with incredibly powerful and effective cinematography, action, symbolism and music that combine to make Inception a mind-bending experience instead of a mere film.
The basic sequence of events in the movie relies on the concept of a dream within a dream. Simple enough? It gets complicated when a dream becomes a dream becomes a dream becomes a dream, and all of a sudden the viewers in the theater, along with the characters in the film, have lost any concept of the real, or at least what was supposed to be real from the beginning.
Time is also toyed with. In the movie, 5 minutes becomes 1 hour becomes 6 months becomes 10 years becomes 5 minutes again, and I am walking out of the theater 3 hours later wondering where I am, what time it is, and how long I have been sitting inside staring at the screen.
A simple spinning top becomes a “totem”, a clue into real versus subliminal, which becomes a symbolic motif, which becomes through Christopher Nolan’s manipulation a clever choice of movie prop that will inevitably draw viewers back to see Inception a second, third—dare I say—fourth time, in an attempt to catch a slight subtlety of its spin, a nuance in the angle of the top in its trajectory, which will reveal the state of Cobb’s mind and life.
Inception is a movie that rewards viewers who come back to view it again, through an intense buildup of slight details that, only with the sharpest eye and most focused mind, can serve to confirm or deny any sound conclusions drawn in the end (ah yes, do you detect a paradox? Remember, form equals content).
A simple musical scale serves as the main score to the movie, haunting unsuspecting viewers with the sinister dissonance of the C minor scale. A simple succession of 8 consecutive tones (C major) is disrupted by two half-steps thrown into the otherwise pleasant scale, and all of a sudden, an 8-note scale becomes a repetitive and drawn-out melody, a crashing and gloriously sinister tune layered with an entire symphony orchestra, which appears in each of the most tense and suspenseful scenes of the movie (the spinning hotel hallway fight scene, the white van suspended in freefall inches above the river, the door to his father’s hospital room opening at Fischer’s command to reveal his last words and final will).
Even the structure of the movie—a framed tale—is a classically simple concept that Nolan manipulates to the max, so that the majority of the action in the plot is actually just layers within a few moments during an all-important revelatory scene with Cobb and Saido that sandwiches the plot events.
And I don’t even really understand Inception completely. That said, I can’t wait to see it again tomorrow night.
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