Inception | Review: Exceptional and Flawless?

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I love movies that re-enforces the idea of “infinite realities” and Inception strikes me as a perfection in a lot of ways.

So I had to read a couple of reviews online before putting mine together and I am quite astonished at the fact that some people find the concept of “a dream within a dream” as unreal.

For someone who's had countless lucid dreams and sometimes false awakening, I find it hard to believe that it's a foreign concept to many.

As a result, for those who have never experienced false awakening, this film might be a bit challenging to grasp and maybe enjoy, especially if you're a hard-ass critic who doesn't watch films for the hell of it(enjoyment).

To clarify, false awakening is an occurrence where a dreamer falls from one dream into another but thinks that he or she has woken up, when they are really still dreaming.

I must confess, I was attracted to this one due to a line Leonardo DiCaprio dropped in the trailer and it goes like this: “You never really remember the beginning of a dream, you always wind up right in the middle of what's going on.”

And my genuine response was “Hell Yeah!”

Inception is a film that attempts to fascinate its audience with a dream-based action and adventure to implant an idea into an individual’s mind by infiltrating his subconscious.

Top Casts Overview

Inception stars 20 incredible personalities including the director Christopher Nolan, a 53 year old British and American filmmaker popular for being the seventh-highest-grossing film director of all time having earned over $6 billion through his films worldwide.

Top casts include:

● Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio: an award winning American film producer and actor whose films have grossed over $7.2 billion worldwide, and has been placed eight times in annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actors according to Wiki biography. Leonardo plays the lead role “Dom Cobb” who is starred as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets.

● Elliott Page: an award winning Canadian actor and producer. She, who much prefers to be addressed as a he/him, is such a laid back character that I love to watch and I'm usually not a fan of this new Hollywood madness. Elliot Page in the movie “Inception” plays the female role Ariadne, who is tasked with designing dream architecture.

● Cillian Murphy: a 48 year old Irish actor most popular for his Tommy Shelby role in Peaky Blinders and more recent film “Oppenheimer” of which he won many awards. In Inception, Cillian plays the naive and “desperate for father's love” rich heir role Robert Fisher, whose subconscious will be infiltrated to plant an idea that would dissolve his father's energy company after his death.

● Joseph Gordon-Levitt: a 43 year old American actor and founder of HitRecord: an award winning online media platform founded June 20, 2004. Joseph plays the role of “Arthur”, the support role of the main cast who together with Cobb are the original “extractors” using dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their target’s subconscious.

● Ken watanabe: a 64 year old Japanese award winning actor, in addition to Inception, popular for his role in Christopher Nolan’s film “Batman Begins.” Ken played the role of Saito, a wealthy businessman who hires Dom Cobb and his team for the inception mission of implanting an idea in Robert Fischer's mind. Saito joins the team on their mission to ensure its success and offers to clear Cobb's criminal charges if they succeed.

● Tom Hardy: an English actor who has appeared in three Christopher Nolan’s films and is most popular for playing Eddie Brock - Venom. Tom plays the role of Eames in Inception - a professional impersonator who appears as different people on their mission to implant what would feel like “an original idea” in Robert Fischer's mind.

● Marion Cotillard: an award winning French actress who played the role of Cobb's wife “Mel” of whose death proved to Cobb the possibility of an inception and at the same time earned him criminal charges as the suspected murderer of his wife.

The Plot Overview

The inception is a combination of thriller, science fiction(Sci-fi), action and adventure and it delivers on all grounds by my judgement.

The film sets off with Dom Cobb laying facedown by the waters, discovered by what turns out to be Saito’s men, who takes him up to meet the now old man living in regrets, waiting die.

The scene is then cut off in the most unnoticeable fashion, giving way for what looks to be the extractors first encounter with Saito, where Cobb and his team attempts to steal information from his mind but fail with faults of Cobb's initial architect.

Saito takes leverage of the event and offers Cobb a near impossible mission to plant an idea of dissolving a powerful energy company in the mind of its soon to be CEO Robert Fischer of whose continuity of the company’s operation would pose a centralizing threat to the power sector.

Arthur, acknowledges the risks of the mission as the lead researcher in the team and attempts to talk Cobb out of taking it up. His efforts fails as Cobb is being offered a deal that would reunite him with his family - kid daughter and son that he had to leave behind when his wife died and he became a suspect.

Cobb takes the deal and soon finds out that Saito will be joining them on the mission as he journeys to assemble the right people for the job.

Ariadne, played by Elliot Page(then Ellen I suppose) was the first new recruit as the dream architect, responsible for the overall structure of all dream states. Ariadne is new to the concept of shared-dream technology, fascinated by it, is compelled to accept the task even after discovering that Cobb had a mind virus - being his dead wife in his subconscious - that could sabotage the mission and put every team member at risk of being trapped in a dream state.

Cobb recruits Eames, played by Tom Hardy to impersonator prominent figures present in Robert Fischer's life in order give their idea a shot at feeling original and close to home to the young lad.

Originally planned to be a mission involving three stages of dreams, stabilized by a powerful sedative provided by a Chemist, Yusuf - played by Dileep Rao - where the target, Robert Fischer, feels awake and does not suspect any abnormalities.

Of course, the idea of three stages of dreams were only theoritically possible and would require compromise for an effective implementation.

It is revealed at the third dream state that Cobb's confidence in the success of inception was out of experience as he had used this on his wife Mel when the two shared dreams and built an entirely new world.

However, Mel had lost grasp of what was truly “real” in the process, leading to her delusion that the real world was actually “a dream” and that she and her husband Cobb needed to kill themselves to get back to her idea of the real world. Mel committed suicide, but before this, had made arrangements that would make Cobb appear as her killer with hopes that it would force Cobb to join her.

To get Mel out of his subconscious for good, Cobb had to confront her in the third dream state on their mission to infiltrate Robert Fischer's mind.

This encounter caused the extention of dream state to four - a deeper dream layer called Limbo(an unconstructed, raw subconscious space that anyone can access if they go deep enough into the dream layers), where Cobb is left alone with Saito who was shot in the first dream state and died in the third, hence could not wake up but fall deeper.

What was originally perceived as the beginning of the film, was rather the closing scene of the Inception mission where Cobb finds Saito to remind him that he is living a dream and ought take his life to wake up.

For clarity, Yusuf, Arthur, and Eames dreams were the three layers of dreams the team designed to infiltrate Robert Fischer's mind. The 4th dream layer, the limbo was an open subconscious that anyone could access by going deep enough. Typically, dying in a dream wakes up the dreamer, but due Yusuf sedatives, naturally “kicks” in regular dream states were not enough to wake the dreamer up so the team had to use alternatives means to create a kick that wakes them up.

As such, Saito’s death in the 3rd dream layer sent him deeper into Limbo where he needed to be reminded by Cobb, whose previous experience of the dream state with his wife Mel gave him insights of how to wake up from a dream that deep.

Personal Verdict

My review may come off a bit confusing, but I promise that the film itself isn't as difficult to grasp as everything is perfectly knitted into the scenes that the audience can understand the why(s), how(s) and when(s).

For someone was has had experiences of lucid dreams and false awakening, this film felt so “real” and original. The effects, the acting, the story telling in-between and the general plot are all a masterpiece and deserving of many awards.

Not often do I find films that have me locked-in and not disappoint at the end as Inception did. It may be a challenging watch for older peeps(as a old fellow himself reviewed) but the younger viewers are bound to definitely enjoy this one.

Now whatever you do, do not watch this film and lose grasp of what the real world is :).