by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2010
Inception is a fun look at one of movieland's famous themes: Is it real or a dream? This time it's in the format of a science fiction action caper.
The movie has a good start, but the middle action stuff ran long and by the end I was doing some headscratching: there were some technofiction inconsistencies.
Oh, and do see it twice. The action sequences do distract from understanding the story.
The basic premise of this story is science fiction action caper. We have a Mission Impossible scenario and we round up the usual collection of rogue experts inhabiting seedy places that populate these caper movies. So far, so ho-hum. What titillates is that this caper centers on dreaming, which, in theory, opens up many staging possibilities and brings up the classic "is this real or is this a dream" question that is so well-suited to the movie format -- it is for this good reason that Alice's and Dorothy's adventures both turned into dreams when they were adapted to the movie format.
This movie takes that dream issue head-on by positing that there are gizmo's originally developed for the military that can be used to sneak into people's minds while they are dreaming and from those minds steal information. Part of the premise is this technology has leaked out into civilian life, which is where our story takes place. This story is an industrial espionage mission which is part of a contest between two rich industrialists. Still a very familiar movie story format.
One nice touch is that this is new technology, so exactly what it can and can't do is not known, and in this movie the characters are going to try something new. Ah... that's something I like to see. We are seeing a bit of exploring of a new technology.
But, if you're going to give your viewers an explore-and-discover story, you better be well equipped in the internal consistency department. And if what you're exploring is the real-or-a-dream issue, that is doubly so! The viewers will be watching very carefully.
In this Inception fails to deliver and stays OK instead of Wow! -- it is too action film-oriented and there are just too many inconsistencies. Here's my list of Technofiction inconsistencies:
o First, something of a PSA: You use most of your brain all the time, not ten percent. The ten percent business is enduring urban myth. It endures because people make money saying it, and this movie is a perfect example. One quick piece of evidence of 100% brain usage: when was the last time you heard someone say, "Oh, I had a stroke, but it happened in the 90% part of my brain that I don't use most of the time, so I'm fine."
o Part of the premise of this movie is that there is bunches of the brain that can be used while we're dreaming that we don't use when we are awake, and because of this we can do neat things in our dreams and that dream time goes faster than awake time. I can suspend belief on that. But Christopher Nolan, writer/producer/director, goes a step further, and the second leap is a hard leap to make.
He says that time accelerates again in a dream that's in a dream. Whoa! This implies that the second level dream is not taking place in the dreamer's head, but in the head of dream character the person is dreaming about. This implies that the second level dream is completely divorced from the material processes going on in the brain that make thinking happen -- to put it another way: the second level dream has nothing to do with the neurons in the dreamer's brain, it's happening somewhere else.
That's a hefty leap, and it heads us off down the road to recursion land -- a truly nasty place to describe. Ouch, ouch, ouch!
o In the first scenes, Cobb, our main protagonist, is searching for information in Saito's brain, one of the rival industrialists, and what he wants is in a safe. OK... but the brain of a dreamer is filled with lots of information. How does the thief, Cobb in this case, find the right piece of information? In this opening dream scene Cobb tells Saito he's looking and Saito's mind responds by putting the significant information into a safe, which Cobb subsequently cracks. That works... if the dreamer knows what the thief is looking for, but its not clear how a dream thief could find any specific piece of information if such a confrontation didn't happen first.
o Another inconsistency is that dreaming is a first person activity -- you dream about what's happening around you, not about what's happening outside your sensory range. In this movie a whole lot is happening off-stage of the main dreamer. This problem reaches its climax in the third level dream, an assault on a winter-time fortress. Besides being pretty standard action scenes -- meaning that we see it happen from the third person viewpoint and it doesn't look very dreamlike -- there are so many scenes that are happening nowhere near the main dreamer. This Winter Fort dream sequence didn't work for me on many levels.
o Related to the above: Dreaming is about the surreal seeming real. But in Inception the most surreal parts of the dreaming happen in the beginner parts of the movie, not in the main adventure. It was a shame that the dreaming didn't get more surreal as we got into deeper levels. I was hoping that by level three we would be in for something more like the tail-end of 2001: Space Odyssey, or in something like this cows & cows & cows video. There are some surreal parts after the beginning, but they are segues that are memories of the main character, Cobb, not part of the main story line.
o Robert Fischer, our target, the other industrialist, gets on a commercial air flight without his own security people coming along. Eh? Even more strange, we find out in the middle of the movie that he's quite aware of dream secret-snatching and has been trained to resist it. If he knows, why would he let himself fall asleep in the midst of strangers? Relating to this security problem: Cobb enlists rogue people from around the world to help on this caper, and some of those people are coming from seedy and poverty-stricken places such as old city area of Mombasa, Kenya, where there are dream-junkie dens. Yet these rogue people are experts in this field. Why is there so much street knowledge of this technology? This implies it's quite widespread and cheap to implement. All the more reason to wonder why Fischer isn't better protected.
...He should at least be wearing a tin-foil hat.
o Fischer's dream resistance takes the form of heavily-armed thugs shooting up his own dream -- shooting at him! If this is his dream wouldn't these rescuers be heroes?
o The action sequences are all comic book action sequences. Fischer is an older man. A man who is the well educated and presumably put down his comic books more than a decade ago. Why are we in comic book action land?
o In dream Level Two we go to zero G for an extended period while the dreamers are in a fancy hotel. This was neat to watch, but... The main character in this scene has to get the sleepers into gravity if they are going to wake up properly. He ropes them together and floats them into an elevator. Ah... neat! Then... whoops! Instead of simply pushing the button for a floor so that the elevator moves and the sleepers fall to the floor or ceiling and experience gravity, the easy solution, he blows up the cables and the safety dogs so the elevator falls. ...Wait! The elevator is in zero G! It's not going to fall anywhere. Ah well... In addition to spending way too much movie time on this set up, it was wrong... except this is a dream, isn't it?
o Another big leap. Late in the movie Satio dies and goes to limbo. Not much later Cobb joins him in this same limbo... somehow... and leads him out. How did they end up in the same limbo? The implication is that there is one limbo for all dreamers, and that limbo has been filled up with Cobb architecture because he and Mal, his dead wife, were the first to find it.
o All through the movie people are falling asleep quickly and on schedule. When Fischer wakes up at the end of the flight, he's had a really freaky dream time, but he suspects nothing. Both of these left me uneasy.
o At the end of the movie, Cobb finally sees his kids, and they haven't aged or even changed clothes, and we don't ever see the top stop spinning. The implication is maybe Mal was right after all.
In sum, Inception was ambitious. It was doing what I like to see in a science fiction movie: explore the ramifications of new technology. I liked that, and I thought the filming, set designers, and actors did fine jobs. The first half of the movie I had lots of fun with.
Inception didn't rise to its ambition and become Excellent in Technofiction because of the story format. The caper format lead to the action format which lead to a drawn out middle story with lots of guns and shooting. And, instead of getting more surreal as the movie progressed, it got more standard actiony, which distracted from the surreal. That was a shame and I didn't enjoy the last half nearly as much as I hoped I would.
But I'm happy that it came out, and I'm happy that it's popular. That means there's hope for more and better in the future.
-- The End --