The Crosshair

Christopher Nolan is currently on one of the greatest cinematic runs in the history of the medium. From his first feature, Following, he has gone on to make (in order) Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight and now Inception. Even if Inception turned out to be a giant turkey, Mr. Nolan could still rest easy that his reputation is all but cast-iron at this point. Where this might breed complacency in some directors, it seems to only galvanise Nolan in the belief he has in his ideas and his films.

Inception is a hugely ambitious film. It’s also very much an auteur’s film, a film by Chris Nolan – it’s his vision from start to finish. Here, he has writtten, produced and directed a film that is, in his words, a “sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind”. With a budget of $200 million. It has been a long time since Hollywood entrusted an auteur with that kind of cash, perhaps harking back to the era of learnt lessons that ended with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. There is no such self-indulgence here however, but what we do have is a tightly-wound, cerebral, summer action blockbuster.

DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an extractor, who’s job it is to get inside the subconscious of his targets and extract ideas from them, but he has been extricated from his home in the U.S and is unable to return to his children. A shadowy indsutrialist offers him the chance to overturn his extradition as the fee for one last job – inception. This is the art of planting an idea into a target’s head rather than stealing one. Many in the business claim it is impossible, yet Cobb knows that it can be done. He accepts the deal and puts together a team to carry out the mission. The task requires to go extremely deep into the target’s subconscious, three dreams within dreams. The deeper they go, the more unstable the realities become.

The film begins in a bewildering fashion, quick cuts between what you later learn are different realities that completely boggle your mind. However, you just have to accept you are not going to understand some of what’s going on and cling to the bits you do. After that though, the film does slow down for a little section, and the complexity of the plot creates some necessities that are really the film’s only flaws. There is a necessity to establish motivations for the actions of a few characters and there is a necessity for Ariadne (Ellen Page) to have almost all her dialogue be exposition. However, the film moves with such an expert pace that you are never left long enough to question anything, you are too busy just keeping up with the action.

The idea of the shared dream that is central to this film is clearly about filmmaking itself, with Nolan the architect and we the dreamers. Certain elements of the set design in the early part of the film actually recall an empty soundstage, or a props workshop. And just like in filmmaking, the boss can’t go it alone, he needs to build a team of experts around him, whom he must rely on to reach the goal. In both cases, the teams assembled are the best in the business. DiCaprio’s Cobb has access to the very best extractors, architects and forgers in the business, and Nolan has assembled one of the greatest ensemble casts possible today while also attracting others at the very top of their game, with a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, and cinematography by Wally Pfister.

The conceits that are littered throughout the plot in order to drive it forward are almost perfect in every case, each raising a little smile on your face as you finally get a hint of where the film will turn next. Many of these knots that are unravelled through the running time are excuses to create some of the wildest and most original visual effects ever seen on a cinema screen. The dream realities have no hard and fast rules of physics and can be manipulated by the architect at will. This means cities fold on top of themselves, freight trains run straight through city roads and a simple fistfight in a corridor becomes a breathtaking, inexplicable thrill ride.

Despite the complexity of the plot, the ambition of the effects and the pace of the cutting, the film never feels like its overstretching, or that anything hasn’t been thought through to it’s conclusion. Like any good sci-fi, it strictly obeys its own rules, even if you as a viewer don’t know what they are sometimes. The performances are remarkable too, Leo in particular having so much to balance on his expressions that it would confuse the audience in the hands of lesser actors. The fact that he had a character with such similar motivations and problems with reality in Shutter Island and has managed to distinctly differentiate between the two men is testament to his skill as an actor. The supporting cast are equally incredible, Marion Cotillard providing the menace but also the emotional heart of the film with Mal, the relationship between Tom Hardy’s Eames and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur providing a little levity here and there, Ellen Page’s Ariadne doing remarkably well under the weight of all the exposition, not to mention Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger and Michael Caine.

Inception is one of the most brain-teasing films to ever have been made with this kind of budget and scale of production. It is a return to the intelligent sci-fi of the seventies, before it was infantilised by the likes of Star Wars, but rather than the cold, studied detachment of that previous era, it is fascinated by the relationships between people and with themselves. The result is a film that can not only sit in the pantheon of the greatest sci-fi movies, but the greatest movies at all. As Leonardo DiCaprio put it in a recent interview, this is Nolan’s 8 1/2. A masterpiece.

10/10

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