FILMREVIEW: Inception

In the future, we’re all going to be asleep with wires strapped to our heads, while our better dressed alter-egos whoop it up in virtual reality. The latest of a series of films to posit this is Inception, the big-budget sci-fi summer release that’s as much brain baffler as blockbuster. Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking working in tandem would have trouble figuring out what’s going on in this fiendish film.

The perplexing plot centers on hot shot dream raider Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). Dom is the best in the business, entering the minds of company bosses to steal corporate secrets for their rivals. But all he really wants is to be reunited with his young children back in the United States, where he stands falsely accused of murder. Exiled from them in Paris, the children haunt his subconscious along with his former wife, sabotaging his professional endeavors.

But Dom is tempted back for One Last Job by a powerful Japanese businessman who will make the murder rap disappear if Dom can pull off the challenge of planting rather than stealing an idea, persuading a corporate rival to break up his business empire. Are you following?

So Dom puts together a crack team of specialists for the mission – like Ocean’s 11 but without the gags – which has to burrow down into three layers of dreams and plant the idea while being shot at by the henchmen generated by the target’s subconscious. Simple.

Enormous sums of cash have been lavished on Inception, and it shows. A Paris street bends to create a weird urban box, illustrating the malleable architecture of dreamscapes, while one level of the business rival’s subconscious is a swanky hotel that is flipped around during a fight scene. The production values cannot be faulted – leaving aside a rather lame sequence made up of a pastiche James Bond mountainside and villain’s lair, replete with ski slope chases.

Director and writer Christopher Nolan is also to be praised for crediting his audience with some intelligence, his tricksy plot being one of the most demanding and intricate narratives to emerge from Hollywood in a long time.

But for its undeniable ambition, ingeniousness, technical virtuosity and visual brio, Inception lacks substance. First, the house-of-cards plot, when examined, doesn’t really stand up. Even if you accept that a Japanese businessman can make murder charges in the US go away with one phone call, why would Dom risk the lives of six people just to be able to return to the United States? Why wouldn’t he simply have someone bring his children to Paris?

It also feels like we’ve seen much of it before. Virtual reality while you sleep – The Matrix. Specialists tinkering with each other’s minds – Push. And though it’s a very different picture, rummaging around in someone’s subconscious was done to much more imaginative effect in Being John Malkovich.

All the sound and fury leaves no time for character exploration, making Dom and co rather one-dimensional. This would be fine if the movie had been positioned simply as a superior action flick. But Inception seems to conceive of itself as something much grander. The absence of any moral message, philosophical musing or consequences (is it okay to invade people’s subconscious for corporate espionage? Does all that dream-meddling and idea-planting change the person? The film is not interested in any of this) leaves the movie feeling somewhat empty, though the dazzling aesthetics and structure may successfully blind viewers to this while it is in progress. A little more meaning could have ensured that Inception left something cerebral behind after the thrill wears off.