Christopher Nolan’s Inception, released in 2010, asks its audience to accept a simple premise: a thief can walk into your sleeping mind and steal what you know. The film runs 148 minutes and carries the tagline “Your mind is the scene of the crime.” It is an action picture, a science fiction picture and an adventure picture at once, and it earns all three labels without ever settling for the easiest version of any of them.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a professional thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. Cobb is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered impossible: inception, the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious. That offer is the engine of the whole film, and Nolan never lets it idle.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Cobb and the Offer From Saito
The setup arrives fast. Cobb and his partner Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, perform corporate espionage using experimental dream-sharing technology. Their latest target, Saito, is impressed with Cobb’s ability to layer multiple dreams within each other.
Ken Watanabe plays Saito, a Japanese businessman who employs Cobb for the team’s mission. Nolan wrote the role with Watanabe in mind, wanting to work with him again after Batman Begins. Saito offers to hire Cobb for the ostensibly impossible job: implanting Robert Fischer, the son of Saito’s competitor Maurice Fischer, with the idea to dissolve his father’s conglomerate.
In return, Saito promises to clear Cobb’s criminal status, allowing him to return home to his children. Cobb accepts. That trade — a man’s freedom for a stranger’s altered mind — is the moral weight the film carries, and it carries it lightly enough that you feel it before you name it.
Ariadne Builds the Maze
Cobb recruits a forger named Eames, a chemist named Yusuf, and an architecture student named Ariadne. Tom Hardy plays Eames. Dileep Rao plays Yusuf. Elliot Page plays Ariadne.
The team devises a three-level dream structure so that Robert will accept the implanted idea as his own. Ariadne is tasked with designing the architecture for all three levels, a task Cobb himself cannot do for fear of being sabotaged by his mind’s projection of his late wife, Mal.
Marion Cotillard plays Mal, Cobb’s deceased wife. She is a manifestation of Cobb’s guilt about the real cause of Mal’s suicide. Cotillard gets the film’s hardest assignment: she has to be terrifying and sympathetic in the same breath, and she is.
Cillian Murphy plays Robert Fischer, Jr., the mark. Tom Berenger plays Peter Browning. Michael Caine plays Stephen Miles. Lukas Haas plays Nash.
The Rules of the Dream
Nolan’s mechanics are the film’s real achievement. Due to time dilation with reality, time runs slower with each descending layer. The dreamer on each level stays behind to perform a music-synchronized kick that simultaneously awakens dreamers on all three levels.
Once Maurice Fischer dies, Saito buys the airline for Robert’s commercial flight to America. The team sedates Robert into the first level, a raining city dreamt by Yusuf. They successfully abduct Robert, but discover he is trained to anticipate such a scenario and has subconscious defensive projections. These projections attack, severely wounding Saito.
Cobb reveals that while dying in a dream usually awakens dreamers, Yusuf’s sedatives will instead send them into Limbo, a world of raw subconscious and extreme time dilation. That single rule turns a heist into a countdown, and it is the best piece of writing in the film.
The Cast Carries the Load
DiCaprio was the first actor cast. Brad Pitt and Will Smith were the first two choices and were offered the role, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Smith turned it down because he didn’t understand it. Cobb’s role is compared to “the haunted widower in a Gothic romance,” and DiCaprio plays him as a man doing arithmetic on his own grief.
Gordon-Levitt compared Arthur to the producer of Cobb’s art, “the one saying, ‘Okay, you have your vision; now I’m going to figure out how to make all the nuts and bolts work so you can do your thing’.” The actor did all but one of his stunt scenes and said the preparation “was a challenge and it would have to be for it to look real.” James Franco was in talks with Nolan to play Arthur but was ultimately unavailable due to scheduling conflicts.
Watanabe tried to emphasize a different characteristic of Saito in every dream level. “First chapter in my castle, I pick up some hidden feelings of the cycle. It’s magical, powerful and then the first dream. And back to the second chapter, in the old hotel, I pick up [being] sharp and more calm and smart and it’s a little bit [of a] different process to make up the character of any movie,” Watanabe said.
Six Countries and a Long Wait
Nolan did not arrive at this film quickly. After the completion of Insomnia in 2002, he presented Warner Bros. with a written 80-page treatment for a horror film envisioning dream stealers, based on lucid dreaming.
Deciding he needed more experience before tackling a production of this magnitude and complexity, Nolan shelved the project and instead worked on Batman Begins in 2005, The Prestige in 2006, and The Dark Knight in 2008. The treatment was revised over six months and was purchased by Warner Bros. in February 2009.
Inception was filmed in six countries, beginning in Tokyo on June 19 and ending in Canada on November 22. Its official budget was US$160 million, split between Warner Bros. and Legendary. Nolan’s reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film’s $100 million in advertising expenditure.
The premiere was held in London on July 8, 2010. It was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters beginning on July 16, 2010.
What Actually Matters Here
The ensemble is the film’s spine, and the order of its importance is worth naming:
- DiCaprio’s Cobb, because every rule in the film bends around his guilt.
- Cotillard’s Mal, because she is the threat the plot cannot shoot its way out of.
- Page’s Ariadne, because she is the audience’s eyes and never once plays dumb.
- Watanabe’s Saito, because the film’s ending depends on his promise holding.
- Hardy’s Eames, because the film needs one person who enjoys the work.
- Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur, because someone has to keep the clock.
The film’s biggest flaw is that it explains itself constantly. Cobb and Ariadne spend long stretches in dialogue that functions as a manual, and the manual is not always graceful. The raining city, the hotel, and the third level — each is a set piece, and each set piece arrives with instructions attached.
But the instructions are there for a reason. Inception is a film about an idea planted in someone else’s head, and Nolan wants you to feel the planting happen to you. By the final act, you have already done the work he asked for. That is not a trick. That is craft.
The film’s reputation has held because its mechanics hold. A lesser version of this script would have collapsed under its own rules. Nolan’s does not. It is a heist film that never cheats, a science fiction film that never condescends, and an action film whose best sequence is a conversation about how a kick works.
Inception scores 8.4 out of 10, based on 40,141 votes.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
