Inception

This movie is about how human beings invent and process ideas. What makes this film so remarkable is the journey we are taken on to discover how a natural idea is formed and in the case of this film how personally and financially important creating a small idea can be. The director of this film Christopher Nolan spent ten years crafting this film. I cannot begin to imagine how much of a daunting undertaking that must have been and as such, it is a very personal film. This film focuses on a very broken man who is forced to help the CEO of an energy company create an idea that the mark or target implants in his own mind willing. The idea the mark implants will help the rival CEO’s company financially and prevent the mark from becoming a energy superpower.

This film comes off the wild success of the Dark Knight which grossed over one billion dollars worldwide before bowing out to DVD and Blu-Ray. The reason this particular film has significance for me is that it is an entirely original project born from a director who values the idea of the fragility of the human spirit. Each film he has released has asked us to tap into our own fragility and asks us to feel more than we normally would in a movie theater. Essentially Christopher Nolan challenges us to think critically and open our minds to the possibility that the world may be a scary place but our motivations and the ideas we create that cause feelings in us or others is what we should truly be frightened by. No character puts this idea on display better than our protagonist Dom Cobb played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Dom Cobb is a man broken only by the sacrifices he has had to make and the guilt that he feels.

Christopher Nolan built the audience a complex environment to view and inhabited it with complex characters but that would mean nothing without his direction and the brilliant cinematography of Wally Pfister. We have come to expect that every film will take us on a rollercoaster ride with some sort of emotional underpinning attached to make us continually invest and care about the characters, I firmly believe this is his carte blanche film. Wally Pfister is an integral part of this film’s success as the film’s director of photography because he is responsible for the look of all the shots used in the film down to level of brightness or darkness each shot.

Inception works on multiple levels as a film about dreams. This film pushes the boundaries of what movies are allowed to say and as an audience what movies and specifically Inception can make us feel. Is it real or a dream? My enjoyment was real and I hope Christopher Nolan continues to make films that cause audience to get lost for two hours and a half hours.