Inception Fails to Plant an Idea in My Mind

Christopher Nolan is known for mastering the art of the thoughtful thriller -- a suspenseful, high budget film that touches upon psychological or salient political issues. In Momento he questions the nature of memory. In The Dark Knight he addresses the side-effects of doing-good by making Batman a metaphor for interventionist America. Inception, his latest film, is a psychological thriller that questions the significance of waking life relative to dream states.

Inception opens with a close up image of the protagonist, Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) washed up on an unknown shore. He gets picked up by guards and presented to an extremely old looking Asian man. The next scene flashes to some unknown time before, revealing the old man to be Saito (Ken Watanabe). Dom and his sidekick, Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), seem to be trying to steal something from Saito. But just when you think you're getting the hang of things, the scene shifts yet again to images of the same characters sleeping in an entirely different setting. The next few scenes dart between images of the same characters in one of three different scenes: a decadent Japanese palace; a sketchy apartment in an politically unstable city; and a train. Despite the suspense, the writing manages to situate the viewer well.

We learn that Dom is an extractor who is paid to perform the illegal job of entering people's dreams to discover their thoughts and ideas. Extraction is usually done for corporate espionage purposes. When Dom fails on his mission to steal from Saito, the Japanese business man offers to let Dom work for him, but to perform a much trickier task than extraction. Saito wants Dom to do an inception--to place an idea in someone's head. Specifically, Dom is to plant the idea in an energy heir's (Cillian Murphy) mind to dismantle his father's company once his father passes away.

The idea of Inception is initially mind-blowing and thoroughly captivating as your mind works to find out all you can about this new idea. I enjoyed the expository scenes where Dom explains the mechanics of entering others' dreams to his new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page). Also cool to see pictures of Parisian streets fold up over each other. But as the film continues, and the mind accepts the idea of extractions and inceptions, Inception becomes just another plot-driven thriller.

The entire film is basically centered around Saito's one assignment for Dom. Most of the characters are simply two-dimensional vehicles by which to advance the plot. Dom is the only fuller character. His three-dimensional history is manifested by flashbacks of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), and of his children. We learn that he is so desperate to accept Saito's plan because it would allow him to go back to the United States, which he has been banned from due to a mysterious crime from his past. But even Dom's regrets and secrets become an obstacle to the team's mission when his teammates learn that he brings a projection of Mal into each of his missions. And she's out for revenge.

The lack of depth of characters reflect the lack of depth of Inception's world. Though the world of Inception looks like ours, it's not. It's a world where entering people's dreams, getting addicted to living in dreams, and extraction are all possible. In order to be convincing, the rules of this world simply can't be invented as the story goes along. Unfortunately, Inception doesn't feel wholly formed, in contrast to an Avatar, for instance, where an environment is introduced, fully-formed. Limitations to extraction and inception are randomly introduced throughout. It's apparently difficult to plant ideas because people need to think that these ideas came from themselves. Instead of just going into someone's dream, the team needs to go into a dream inside a dream inside a dream. Like many mediocre thrillers, Inception uses some convenient situations to build suspense. For instance, in normal dreams, one's death leads to them waking up from the dream. But in chemically induced sleeps, death leads to an indefinite state of limbo. This conveniently creates more obstacles for Dom when one of his team members gets wounded in a dream. Too bad the audience just needs to take this for granted and not ask many questions. Unfortunately, the need to take too many things for granted makes Inception a shallow portrayal of a rich idea.