Christopher Nolan’s dream heist is ingenious, absorbing and overexplained, with Leonardo DiCaprio making the explanations feel urgent. We recommend it for the action, with a caveat: the subconscious ought to be stranger than this.
Inception is an absorbing science-fiction heist film whose chief weakness is how often it stops to explain itself. Christopher Nolan, writing and directing, builds the job around corporate espionage carried out through dreams, with the planting of an idea replacing a more conventional theft. We recommend it for the ingenuity of its action and the pleasure of following a difficult operation. Expecting an equally searching account of the subconscious is likely to leave you disappointed.
The dream-within-a-dream structure gives Nolan something useful to do with all that explanation: actions at different levels have to remain legible while the film moves between them. Editor Lee Smith makes that complicated arrangement remarkably easy to follow, without making it feel simple. His parallel cutting gives the action a rhythm that dialogue alone cannot provide. Keeping track becomes part of the suspense, and the editing helps us do it even while the screenplay is piling on fresh instructions.
Wally Pfister’s cinematography and Guy Hendrix Dyas’s production design give the architectural spectacle enough solidity for its impossible changes to register. When a city folds, the buildings remain recognisable as buildings, which is what makes the image so disconcerting. We felt a brief, childlike alarm at the sight of streets bending where streets should stay put. The recognisable streets give us something to measure the distortion against.
Hans Zimmer’s music works best for us as part of the action, where the film’s determination to keep moving feels justified. Leonardo DiCaprio, as Dom Cobb, is persuasive even when the dialogue asks him to explain things. His seriousness makes it possible to accept the premise without feeling that we are being invited to congratulate Nolan on his cleverness. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur and Elliot Page’s Ariadne are less satisfying, through no obvious shortage of ability; the writing gives them too little room beyond the requirements of the plot.
The weakness is in Nolan’s screenplay, which repeatedly treats an explanation as though it were itself a dramatic event. Rules matter in a heist, and we need to understand enough to know when things go wrong. But the quantity of instruction makes the dreams feel unusually well supervised, with too little of the irrational behaviour that might unsettle us. At 148 minutes, the film has room to let a conversation wander away from the job; it seldom seems willing to do so.
Measured against other heist films, Inception comes out well because its complications produce action worth the trouble of understanding them. Nolan understands the satisfaction of a complicated plan being tested, even if he is reluctant to leave anything unexplained. Most critics have responded to that ingenuity, and we think the enthusiasm is justified. Choose it when following the plot is part of the evening’s pleasure, and save the conversation for afterwards.
