Saturday, July 17, 2010

Inception Movie Review

Slight spoiler alert!!

I saw Inception today with my daughter and one of her friends.  I really had no expectations going in to the theatre--sure, I'd seen the trailers and had thoughts such as "Cool Graphics" and "Interesting Concept".  But it is not something that I really thought much more about, other than a perfect diversion for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

After 30 minutes of the expected ads and previews, what proceeded to ensue was one of the most thought-provoking movies that I've seen in quite some time.

The screenwriters take us through this maze of sorts, an alternate reality based upon our dreams, and the (fictional) science for another person to enter a person's dream and thus access the deepest secrets held by that person.  Those involved in doing so for this film's purpose, were seeking to plant an idea into an heirs mind, that would take hold and grow, ultimately creating a breakup of his father's empire.

But that wasn't the fascinating story plot.  It was the subplots that seemed to take a front seat in this action packed film.  As the characters got deeper and deeper into the world of the subconcious, they elected to use powerful sedatives so as to take them essentially into a dream within a dream within a dream--three layers.  The danger, the fear, was that if one does not awaken from that deep of a sleep, from both the powerful sedative as well as the combination of 3 layers of dreams to climb back out of (the means of which consists of creating a "Kick", which was a violent fall, that we are all familiar with in our own dreams--the falling sensation that we awaken from as we hit the bottom of the fall), if one was unable to catch the Kick, than he or she would remain in Limbo, for decades, possibly forever.

The main character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, suffers from great grief over the loss of his wife.  They had been caught in Limbo, and to bring them out of that state, he convinced his wife to lay over train tracks with him, resulting in their "death" but actually resulting in their return to reality.  However, for his wife, that return to reality did not complete itself.  Because already, the notion--the idea--the seed of a thought had been planted deep in her subconcious, and that seed had taken over her mind and heart. She came to a place where what was real, in her mind, was only a dream, and the only way to wake up from that dream, was through suicide.  She tried to get Dicaprio to join her in her pursuit, and no matter what he did, he could not convince her that where she was living, was truly reality.

And so she jumped.  To her death.  Determined that by doing so, the pain would be over, that she would awaken from the nightmare she was in to the world they had built together while in Limbo, a non-existent dream world that she was convinced was real.

Oh the thoughts this provokes---thoughts about life, about death.  About dreams and nightmares.  About the mind, the ability to think, and the inability to control the dreams and nightmares that plague so many of us.  The couple, in limbo, rebuilt this word full of memories---they rebuilt each of their old homes, they rebuilt projections of their children, their very real and vivid memories became their very real alternate world from which there was no escape, except ultimately through death.

The implications and thoughts, the conversations that such a movie should generate are vast in nature.  I'll not explore them here.  I only know that my own mind is churning and processing, categorizing and sorting my way through the last 2 1/2 hours.  My thoughts are still too new to share in this forum, until I have thoroughly examined them.

"What's the most resilient parasite?  An idea....A single idea from an human mind........"  Dicaprio

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