In an age with avatars, video games and social networking sites, it is easy to get lost in another world. You can become exactly the person you want to be and have exactly the life you want. The fantasy becomes a reality, and you reach the point where you are constantly escaping to it.
In the movie “Inception,” directed by Christopher Nolan, the main character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is fighting to keep his reality and his fantasy separate. His fantasy is quite literally his dreams, in which he attempts to fix an awful tragedy from his past.
In the world of “Inception,” people can enter others’ dreams and extract secrets the dreamer has hidden deep within his or her subconscious. Cobb and his team are hired by various companies to steal these secrets.
The movie opens in the middle of one of their jobs. The team is actually asleep in the real world, but their “projections” are free to wander in their subject’s dream. This part is reminiscent of “The Matrix,” in which Neo and the others go into the Matrix as their real bodies sleep in the ship. However, in “Inception,” you don’t die in real life if you die in the dream world; you simply wake up.
An important client, Saito (Ken Watanabe), asks Cobb to do a job that is much different from his usual work. Instead of extraction, Saito asks Cobb to do an inception – plant an idea inside someone’s head. This is the most dangerous job yet for Cobb and his team, and it becomes more dangerous as Cobb’s personal struggles begin to spill over into work.
The only other person who is aware of the danger is the newest member of Cobb’s team, Ariadne (Ellen Page). She is the “architect” who builds the landscape of the dream for the team to work in. We learn about the rules of the dream world through the lessons Cobb teaches Ariadne with the most important lesson being that she must never construct a dream from memories because it blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
The movie feels a little confusing at first as the viewer is introduced to the rules of the dream world. Once you understand the basics, the rest of the movie flows more easily. I was a little thrown by some of the editing in the beginning of the film, which seemed to skip necessary parts that would make the jumps more believable. But I noticed this didn’t happen as often as the film progressed.
I thoroughly enjoyed “Inception,” especially because it was different from many of the films I’ve seen lately. It is full of rich colors and epic shots the eye just wants to drink in. It shows well the danger of messing with things that should be left alone, such as another person’s private subconscious. The film is a mind bender as viewers try to remember which is reality and which is the dream. From the first intriguing shot to the suspenseful and not-entirely-resolved finish, you will be lost in Nolan’s dream world until the house lights come up.