Inception (Archive)

all of Christopher Nolan's films. Let's do a Christopher Nolan over review, as we called it, look at all of Christopher Nolan's films in order, which we did. Inception was part of that.

film spottingfamily dot com from July twenty twenty. Then here is that Nolan ooverview review of Inception.

It was Nolan's third highest grossing film still is behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises made eight hundred and thirty million dollars globally, and maybe after The Dark Knight, it's Nolan's best loved film. One measurement here is to look at letterboxed, where The Dark Knight and

Inception come in at one and two. Now, one of the things that I mentioned was that I wanted to trace at the beginning of our Christopher Nolan overview Adam the evolution of his characters as human beings rather than placeholders for ideas or chess pieces that he could move around these elaborately constructed game boards. Following his first film, I think we both agreed didn't exactly provide fully rounded characters.

There were other things we liked about it. While Memento was a significant leap forward in that direction, especially considering Guy Pierce's Leonard, still, Nolan's reputation with some as a cold filmmaker would follow him through his subsequent movies, and it had been so long since I had last seen twenty ten's Inception that I couldn't remember how it struck me.

In this regard, I certainly remembered Ellen Page's dream architect folding cities in on themselves not long after she joined Leonardo DiCaprio's team of dream thieves, these corporate spies who enter business people's dreams to steal their secrets. I also remembered Joseph Gordon Levitt inside one of those dreams in a fistfight in a Hotel Hallway where gravity had disappeared. This is one of the handful of instances where Nolan relied on a practical set and effects to twist our minds.

But what of the movie's emotional resonance and the human element connected to it? I wasn't sure, And this is what made me wonder back when we were running through our tentative rankings of his films if Inception might fall after this overview from my number two slot. Well, here's what I forgot. How good and crucial Marion Cotillard is as Ma, the late wife of DiCaprio's Cob, who appears throughout the film in those dream sequences as a projection

of cobs subconscious. I'll make my case for her as the emotional lynchpin of the film, but first I want to hear what you made of this aspect of Inception, Adam. Is this still one of your favorite Nolan's And if so, is Courtyard part of the reason for that.

what's so great about these movies. And he's constantly picking at all the open questions and all the holes in the plots, and the way that Nolan seems to establish all these rules and they don't all fit together, maybe as cohesively as they should in his mind. And I'm always countering this. Somehow, without me being aware, he connected me to some machine in spring Green, Wisconsin, and he infiltrated my subconscious as I watched Inception. What is Cobb's

line early in this film? He says, once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate. And that idea that that got planet in my mind, that Sam didn't really put there was. This House of Cards is kind of flimsy, and it's shaking under the weight of the spectacle, and it almost crumbles because of a weak foundation. This is how I'm going to get to the answer to your question, in a little bit

of a roundabout way. If you take everything that makes a Nolan film, certainly elements and attributes that we were both aware of before we embarked on this series, but have maybe even crystallized even clearer now. The genre elements. This is a heist movie right at its core, the philosophizing the preoccupation with memory and time, which is inextricable from the form of his movies right and their metadness.

We see it in the nonlinear structures, but I think the most applicable example here the same way in Memento, we as viewers are linked to Leonard by not being aware of how we got into each scene. Inception throws

us into this bizarre, convoluted scene immediately. And I am not exaggerating here, Josh, I didn't remember how this movie opened, and I checked the display on my Blu ray player three times in the first seven minutes to confirm that I hadn't accidentally started the movie on a different chapter somewhere in the middle of the film. I really had

thought I had done something wrong. I forgot that it opened just dropping him on that beach, and that he's in conversations with Cyto and you have no idea kind of what's going on.

the people watching it. And these films are all all of Nolan's work are artistic creations that are commenting on the act of creating art, and they're engaging in this dialogue with a viewer at the same time making us confront how our day to day experience of life is like being in or watching a movie or vice versa. And honestly, that's spiral image, which is such a key

image to this movie. That's a perfect metaphor for how dizzy I get when I even try to articulate what I just expressed, And all of that is what makes Nolan's films really fun to consider, really fun to discuss. But it is a hollow experience without the humanity, which doesn't mean necessarily what you might think of emotion, a certain sentimentality, or compassion, even the kind of things that maybe get attributed to humanist filmmakers that we lump together

like Capra or o Zoo or Satugate Ray. It's maybe a more cynical type of humanism, But for me, it's seeing the humanity in his character in the form of recognizing their flaws. It's their guilt and the struggle with that guilt that we see in Will Dormer, in Bruce Wayne, in Leonard Shelby in The Rival Prestige Magicians. It's their grief, it's their obsessions and their choices, usually misguided and tragic,

but understandable no matter how stylized or heightened. The circumstances are we're seeing ourselves and our conflicts and our crises reflected back to us in those obsessions and those choices. And I've connected to that humanity in every one of these Nolan films so far until Inception. At no point, at no point was I invested in what was at stake for Dom getting back to his kids and reconciling as it were, with his wife, forgiving himself and moving

on with his life. And minus that investment that's spinning totem at the end, whether it falls or not, whether it's all a dream, real it just it just doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. This is the first Nolan film that didn't leave me with more questions, more exciting questions to ponder at the end, and for what it's worth. As I was preparing for this, I did go back and look at my notes from twenty ten, and I

discovered that I felt this way originally too. I didn't buy Mall or their relationship beyond her being one of those chess pieces you mentioned, beyond being a convenient antagonist

and complication. But I was so wowed by the scope of the movie and the audacity of those multi layered dream sequences and the technical precision and imagination of yes, that anti gravity hotel hallway scene in Paris folding in on itself, that I was able to dismiss that nagging idea ten years ago, this time it spread.

an idea placed in your head. I think the reason that I didn't remember Inception as being this moving is because it does have those critics who call it cold and maybe, you know, for good reasons. I do want to hear more about, you know, exactly why you think it didn't connect with you this way beyond just that

it didn't. Maybe people have good reasons for that, but I have heard that over the years and again didn't revisit it, and so I thought, well, you know, maybe that's a missing link that I too should have given more credence to in twenty ten and maybe would have judged the film more fairly. So after watching it again and just being wowed on every level by this movie.

I'm not saying it's perfect, can return to the ski chase scene in the final sequence, the final segment, but just being so thrilled by the experience of this movie again, including the emotional resonance and this marriage at the heart

of it. I went back and looked at my twenty ten review and sure enough, there I say that the supporting characters give the best performances beyond DiCaprio, and that as I'd agree with that as a matter of fact, that really the heart of this film is Marion Cotillard as model. It was something that did resonate with me at the time and just either faded from my memory or kind of got beat out of me by other ideas. And I guess we do have to acknowledge and maybe

this was part of the issue for you. This is another dead wife, right, and you're starting to wonder if it's like a crutch that Nolan is landing up on.

Think about the challenge of this role. She's only really ever mostly I should say, a projection of Cobs, right, and so you know, unless you trust his flashbacks to their time in Limbo and their other time together, Cotyard has to play this projection element. That's one thing she has to do is be not Mal but a projection of Mal, who isn't a real person. But at the same time, she's going to have to give us moments where we do sympathize with her as Yes, this is

what's so fascinating. A victim of Cobs, of the decisions, all those things you were talking about in his previous films, the bad decisions due to the obsessions that his male characters have, the victims of that. That's what she is too. And I do think Coatyard gives her her own inner life. That gives us a sense of that think of all the things that my in this film. She's malevolent, as you say, and I love that about her, like there's allowed to be this side where she is someone to fear,

but she's also Lovelauren. She's a partner in their dream thievery. I also love that she's not just like the wife's stuck at home, but we establish it that she was a partner in this business with Cobb. She was a partner in their marriage, and I think Coachyard gives us all of that. And ultimately, you know she's a victim of Cobb's attempts to save her. This is the sort of thing he has to forgive himself for. But she's

also a woman with her own agency and ideas. Again, if you pull out those flashbacks where she's not a projection, but we're ostensibly seeing her, and I think the performance gives us this as her own woman. So for me, the tragic relationship between Cobb and Malay, it's kind of the center of the film. And one more thing I'll just say about it again, I think tying back to the mechanics that do blow us away that do wow us.

It's directly woven into those things. I think about the Totem, this whole idea about Totem, that it comes from mil and that the spinning top is Hers, so right there, that's not just like, of course it works at the end because it's hers. It carries so much emotional weight, because we've learned how it's tied to her directly. It's just not a chotchkey that Cob has pulled out just so he can know if he's in a dream. And

then think about that opening sequence. I think this is all set up from the beginning by Nolan when Cob uses Mal's chair as an anchor in that dream while repelling from the window, that captures everything about them, how they're literally tied together in ways that are romantic, in ways that are dangerous, and then the action implies, you know, just the layers of their relationship that make us curious

about it. And really the rest of the movie, with everything else going on, is peeling back that relationship, giving us the implications what it means for Cob within this mission that he's undergoing, and comes absolutely to fruition in that final scene, which is not so much about whether he pulled off the job for Cyto, but what it

means for his relationship with his late wife. So I just I thought it was it was important to me in twenty ten, and revisiting it, I found it to be even more important now.

other films that we've seen so far. In the films that I've appreciated more, which, like I said, it's not because they're giving me a mind blowing twist about Wow, how did he pull that off? They're giving me a twist that makes me think about my world and how I relate to people. And that's what's fascinating when I have that personal connection to it. I'm just saying I never believed it here. I never did. And part of

it is DiCaprio's performance too. And I love DiCaprio, and I'm with you completely that every other supporting performer.

his comments on Letterbox. He said, literally two full hours into the movie, DiCaprio is still explaining the rules of the dream world to Ellen Page, I do feel like it's gratuitous, and even more than that, it feels arbitrary.

Once you start noticing those things, when you start asking a lot of those questions, then then you're derailed from that central story that I agree with you, is supposed to be the central story that's supposed to be pun intended here I guess or metaphor intended the train tracks that holds this whole thing together. But once you start diverting from that path, you start noticing the holes in it. You start noticing the holes in how believable their relationship is.

And I think that exposition is a key is a

key distraction here. Let me say this, if there's any actress that's up to the challenge and she almost pulls it off, it's certainly Mary and Kotar and I love how Nolan does use point of view and those sequences so that we're aligned with Cobb when he's walking into those rooms with her, and when we arrive in a space where maybe he slash we shouldn't be and she's waiting there for us, that turn of hers to the camera we get a couple times that's a really frightening jolt,

like a legitimately catches you off guard and makes you gasp a little bit, like we've been caught like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. So I do really appreciate some of those aspects of it without a doubt. But I think the evolution for me Josh ultimately isn't in Nolan's ability here to maybe tell a more emotional story. It's in the meta layer. It's that this feels like the culmination of his preoccupations in terms of using the language of cinema and wrapping that around the actual the content

and the substance of these films. The way that people even communicate with each other and the way we as viewers experience their world is it's equivalent. It's like we're in that spiral, right of this dream, this dream experience, we're unified with them in a way that I do think is an evolution for him. And we can talk about that a little bit more. That meta aspect of this film is what fascinates me. It's not the relationship.

here is there's two things about it. For one thing, it is necessary. Some of it it's TALKI I agree, but some of it we do need to know just to get the ground rules. The other thing is, and this may be is an argument against it, but whenever we're getting those ground rules, we're getting visual cues as well. So the Ellen page training sequence, however you want to describe, that,

is the perfect example. Right while we're getting talked to we're seeing this imagery of this city folding in on itself and all these other insane things happening, And so you could make the case maybe you didn't need both. But I think here where it's not based in necessarily reality to kind of and it's this concept that we've never even understood before. It's not like we have a vague notion of outer space and just tell me we're going out fire and outer space. I'm good. This is

a sci fi movie. That's all I need. Right, this is different. We need a little bit of the architecture to use a word that applies to this film. So I do forgive it a little bit more for that. And the other thing is there are a lot of instances in this film where Nolan does not bother to do that at all. And again I'm going back to the opening sequence where to make us understand and how

these worlds are connected. When Cob has to wake up, he's they push him his chair right into the tub, and then we cut to a shot of the dream that Cob is in and the water just comes again. Practical effect, right, the set just gets flooded with this water and like that, without needing anyone to explain anything to us. We realize how the real world and the

dream world are connected. So I guess for me, there is a lot of exposition in inception, but it is almost always backed up by visual information as well, which makes it a little bit less tedious.

level and also an intellectual level. If you're on that journey as I was with Interstellar, then that exposition all feels really necessary to me, just like it all feels necessary to you here because you were bought in to that mal dom relationship and wanting to see how that played out. So I think you are in those circumstances willing to willing to forgive things a little bit more. And I certainly wouldn't point to those early sequences where

that stuff is getting explained as a problem. It's more as we get the second, third, fourth time that someone says, yes, but things work like this in the dream world, and then someone says, but no, not this one. No, it's different, It actually works like this. Like that just happens repeatedly in this film, and it did feel a bit gratuitous to me.

I'll move you into the dream within a dream. No, this movie starts, That's what I was saying, with a dream within a dream, So already things are complicated. So I feel like it's not arbitrary because the escalation in this film is so thrilling. It is just like we're what now, We're where now? And I Am not going to begrudge because I'll just say it like I was grateful for a little reorientation along the way because then I could appreciate where I was a little bit more.

I didn't need the map exactly laid out for me, but I need a little bit of that sense of why things different at this level where these characters had never been before, or most of them to keep up with them.

creating some of these worlds together. And there's that great moment during that first run through the dream world with Ariadne where she says, why are they looking at me? The projections start to turn on her, right, and he explains it it's because you're changing things. My subconscious feels that someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections convert John you And he says that they feel the foreign nature of the

Dreamer and they attack it like an infection. And I think that is such a perfect explanation of the idea and ultimately my experience with this film, Josh, But I'm trying to kind of articulate, and it's any viewer's experience when they are no longer able to suspend disbelief in the way that they want to and should with with any film, And that's once you become aware that you're watching someone else's creation, that you start to see the creator, which can be thrilling in its own ways too, don't

get me wrong, but you are inherently pulled out of that world and sometimes that can make you really angry. And I love that description, and I love Cobb and seeing him as.

they destroy the whole process and the whole project. And I thought that was so fascinating that that corollary here where maybe you know, this crew and the cast and the audience, even we've all made a d with the director. We've all struck this bargain, and we hope that he's going to hold up the filmmaker is going to hold up his end of the bargain. But maybe you're so compromised, and maybe you're so corrupted that you can't.

simple than that, and it's just a warning. It's this kind of personal warning where he's saying this, this is what happens. This is what can happen. The perils of telling personal stories, of mining your subconscious too deeply. If you go too deep, it can all unravel on you.

point ahead to doun Kirk. Now you can also say that they point back to Memento, right, which is probably is that you're still your favorite?

minutes or whatever of screen time. I mean, it's it's just brilliant how that is laid out, how it's envisioned, how it's executed, and how so much of it I know there, you know, is computer generated imagery in this movie I don't want to overblow that, but how much of it is done as practically as possible and made us to feel like this is all happening in the

real world. So yeah, just another through line of the plane of time, which again we mentioned in following it was right there from the start, right It wasn't purely chronological, it is somehow here becomes to this culmination of the crucial element of the climactic sequence here.

And then you get to a ski slope, right. It's just like we're expecting him to ratchet up to a new level of really a physics is what we're expecting, and instead we get back to James Bond. So there's a sense of deflation there that I completely agree with, and I think it also falls into an element of this movie that you know, there's too much gunplay. This movie does not way too much that's gun play, and there's way too much of it.

this film this time. Josh, I'm thinking about the mechanics of it. I'm thinking about the timing that they set up and how the way it plays out doesn't match the time they establish at all. And I'm thinking about how they are all such badasses all of a sudden, and did they get military training? Are they doing in dreams what they can't do in real life? And like

I'm asking all of those questions. And again, when you're asking all of those questions, then then you're distracted, turn in and you're projecting on the filmmaker and you're getting angry, I don't know, getting angry watching this film because of that.

But when he goes into that room, that like two thousand and one style of room with his the projection of his dead father, his dying father, and opens the safe and sees in that safe the pinwheel, which is the same pinwheel that's in the photograph of him as a child with his son that he keeps trying to put by his dying father's bedside, and the father doesn't notice. Like, these are all emotional elements that have been laid throughout the film. I don't care if this guy still gets

to be a billionaire. I don't care if he breaks up his companies. But in that moment, I cared if he felt some sort of resolution with his father. And that impressed me that I actually cared, because it really had no bearing on the rest of the movie, but it showed me that the emotional work had been done in the performances by Killian Murphy in the previous scenes that Nolan had embedded to establish the relationship. And it's almost like, I mean to go bring it back to

the meta thing you're talking about, Adam. How often does Tom Hardy's emes talk about what we got to get to is the relationship. It doesn't matter like to make this heist work, this is the meta thing for me. Okay, to make the heist work, we've got to connect on a human emotional level with this billionaire son who cares about secrets, mechanics, all this other stuff. That's the same thing with Inception. If this movie is going to work, and obviously it didn't for you, it's going to have

to also function on emotional human level. And I think there is so much attention given to that. It's something Nolan knew. It's something he cast the right actors for, it's something he wrote the right scenes for. And it follows through for me all the way to the end. And I think it comes back really to the spinning top. It does matter if the top falls or not, because the goal of the movie, the goal of this team, the goal of Cob, It's only achieved if he genuinely, authentically,

consciously forgives himself. And so for me, the top's got to fall. It's got a fall to have that emotional resolution. Now, Nolan may be playing games by not showing us that's the trickster in him, right, But I don't know. I think it's it just has that sort of oomph for me at the end of this movie, and I'm curious, I don't know where, like where you are on the hole did the top fall or not? Things that you probably say, as you probably say it doesn't matter, you don't care.

That's Nolan again engaging with his audience the same way the Magicians and the Prestige are openly talking about filmmaking and the process of creating art while they're talking about their lives and talking about the choices they make at the end of that film. And so when he says that you're right, he has Eames expressed that I think he's being very knowing and winking in what the endeavor

of this film is. But as with every artistic endeavor, the intellectual process that goes into it and what you want to achieve and what you do or what you execute and how the audience reacts to it, those are often very different things. Now, one last meta touch that I like speaking to all of this and openly using the language of cinema, putting those words in the voices

of these characters. At one point in the explanation to I think Ariadne again, he explains that when you dream, your mind functions more quickly, so time seems to pass more slowly. And all I could think about is Nolan winking at us a little bit, because how do you shoot something in slow motion on film? You don't slow the camera down right, you speed it up. It's achieved because it's a faster frame rate. You project that faster frame rate normally, and when you do that, it seems slower.

So that's him again, I would say, potentially subconsciously putting those types of words and ideas into these characters mouths, but maybe very consciously trying to have them speak in the language of movies.