Inception Movie Review PDF

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A movie review on Inception...

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Inception Movie Review

Brandon Hicks L27253415

Inception Inception is a science fiction, thriller film, revolving mainly around two partners Dominick “Dom” Cobb and Arthur. They are extractors and are hired to perform corporate espionage by “incepting” other people. “This is experimental technology that allows the user to enter into another person’s subconscious while they are dreaming and convince them to do things. At the beginning of the movie, a man named Saito hires Cobb to convince the son, Robert, of Saito’s business rival to dissolve his company. Cobb’s payment would be a clean slate from his criminal record so that Cobb may return home to his children. Cobb accepts. Eames is hired to create identities for the group for entering into Robert’s dream. Yusuf is a chemist who develops the sedative to make Robert sleep and prepare the group to create a “dream within a dream.” Ariadne is an architecture student who designs the layout of Robert’s dream. Ariadne discovers that Cobb’s subconscious contains a projection of his late wife whom he does not speak about. The team enters Robert’s subconscious on a ten-hour flight. At each level of the dream, one member has to stay behind to set up a “kick” to wake up the other members from the deeper levels of the dream. Time flows at different speeds in each dream level, but the kicks have to occur simultaneously. Saito is wounded on the first level and warns everyone that dying in Robert’s dream would send them to a limbo of infinite subconsciousness. On the third level, Yusuf dives off a bridge and initiates his kick early. This causes issues on the other levels. Ariadne finds out that Cobb and his wife had entered limbo before and spent fifty years in dream time there. His wife did not want to return to reality and committed suicide. Cobb makes peace with this fact and they begin waking Robert up who now is aware of the planted idea to dissolve the company. Cobb finds Saito in limbo and everyone wakes up on the plane. Cobb returns to his children and uses a test to see if he is still in a dream. However, he does not wait to see the result.

Inception encapsulates every feeling of a thriller movie. It is a gripping ride from start to finish and incorporates its science fiction ideas in an easy to understand manner. Many thrillers try to pack as many twists and turns into their story as possible in an elaborate attempt to shock the viewer, but Inception restrains itself and instead tells the story exactly how it needs to be told. It also does justice to the science fiction genre. It fulfills is duty as science fiction by allowing its protagonists using fictionalized, experimental military technology to accomplish their goals. The technology is grounded in real theories, but they are theories only. Inception meets all the requirements of a science fiction thriller. Christopher Nolan, the director of Inception, really put everything into this movie. He spent ten years writing and creating this film and it shows. Each scene flashes with Nolan’s signature style and tone. The characters are well-dressed, and the film utilizes a heavy amount of muted colors. Even the opening credits help to set the tone of the movie with ominous, crashing music as the film finally opens on waves striking against a rock. This allows the viewer to understand the type of movie they are about to watch. It is clear that the director put effort and care into every single frame. Christopher Nolan adds to the film’s “dream worlds” by shooting close ups using wide angle lenses. It allows the characters to seem small in comparison. Nolan’s films are also notorious for having a plot twist, or and ambiguous ending that leaves the viewers coming up with theories for years to come. Nolan’s minimal use of computer-generated imagery also helps to draw the viewer into the film and hardly anything ever seems out of place in the shot like many large budget, CGI-heavy movies do. One of the movies biggest themes is the question of reality. What is real and what is not? What matters and what does not matter? The entire film could be broken down by these two questions. The premise of the film revolves around these very questions. The opening scenes

show the main characters inside another person’s dream. From the very start, the audience is asked to begin determining reality from fiction. One brilliant idea Nolan puts into the film is introducing the character of Mal inside of a dream. Cobb recognizes her and converses with her as if they had known each other for a long time. This gives the audience the impression that this woman is real. The audience discovers only later that Mal has been dead. Shortly after this, we find that this is a dream within a dream. Nothing we have seen up to this point can be conceived as real. In fact, by the end of the movie, the audience begins to question if any of the movie was real. Inception helped bring the idea of thinking for yourself into the world. I believe people can use this movie as a teaching tool for learning not to blindly believe whatever they are told. Instead, they should learn to think for themselves and not be like sheep. Inception is one of, if not the, best films made in the 2010s. The characters are sympathetic, the story is intriguing, and it is clear that effort went into the film. The beauty of the film, to me, is that the story is straight-forward: a team attempts to plant an idea into a man’s mind and make him think he created the idea. However, the bits and pieces make it a complex idea to follow along if one is not paying attention. The story is tightly written, and each scene provides a key piece of information for the viewer. Like many successful films, every character is important for telling the story. Each person has a skill set that is utilized in-depth within the film. One of my favorite scenes occurs when the gravity has been turned off in one of the dream levels. The characters begin walking on the walls and the ceilings while continuing to fight each other. What I believe makes this scene so unique and brings the audience in is that way Nolan decided to shoot it. He built a large, rotating corridor and placed the camera right at the mouth. The corridor then rotated while the actors moved around, and it gave the impression that the

entire dream was rotating, and the gravity was missing. Another bit of cool trivia I discovered during my viewing of the film was the significance of the character’s names. Cobb’s nickname Dom means “home” in the Polish language. Ariadne is most likely named after the famous Greek woman who led Theseus through the Labyrinth. This is appropriate since her character is the architect and is recruited to build a maze in the dream worlds. “Mal” is a root word that translates to “bad” in many of the Latin-based languages. I believe that Nolan may have used this name as a little joke towards the audience. He is telling us at the beginning of the film that the woman is not to be trusted. Yusuf is another form of the name Joseph. One of the most famous Joseph’s in the one from the Bible who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams. It really adds to the film’s quality to see that there are things to notice through the movie during every subsequent viewing....