Ben Child 

Christopher Nolan’s Inception: the first brain-ache blockbuster

Week in geek: Details are slowly emerging about the British director's upcoming film. But is it too complicated for our tiny minds to grasp?
  
  

Ellen Page
'There's realism even when it gets crazy'... Ellen Page sums up Inception, which she stars in. Photograph: Publicity shot/Guardian

For those of us who like to know what we're letting ourselves in for before we settle down for two hours or so in a crowded multiplex, Christopher Nolan's tight-lipped attitude towards Inception, his forthcoming follow-up to The Dark Knight, has been a matter of some frustration. Up until this week, we've known about as much about the latest movie from the director of the highest-grossing (pre-Avatar) film of the past few years as we do about the latest movie from Steve Pink, director of this weekend's enticingly monikered Hot Tub Time Machine.

All we've really known is that the film is described as "a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architect of the mind", and that it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the 500 Days of Summer man who seems to have survived the horrors of being cast as the main villain in GI Joe without so much as a stain on his burgeoning career.

Below, for those of you who want to know a little more, is Warner Bros' official synopsis. But first, bear in mind the words of Nolan himself, who recently told Collider exactly why the Inception storyline has been kept under wraps. "I really believe that for me the most gratifying cinematic experiences as a viewer have always been films that I didn't know what to expect," he said. "Right from when I first saw Star Wars when I was a kid in 1977. My uncle had told me to go see it. He said you'd probably get a kick out of it. But I didn't really know anything about it."

All of which sort of makes me wish I hadn't spent the last day piecing together snippets of information from various Nolan interviews and Inception set visits to write this article. On the other hand, everything I've read about the movie so far has made me keen to see if the British director can pull this one off come 16 July. Here's that synopsis:

Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan directs an international cast in an original sci-fi actioner that travels around the globe and into the intimate and infinite world of dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible – inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming. This summer, your mind is the scene of the crime.

Speaking to the LA Times last month, Nolan described Inception as being in the same vein as late 1990s efforts such as The Matrix, Dark City, and The Thirteenth Floor, as well as his own Memento. All of the above share the sense that the reality which we see around us may not be entirely real. Where Inception also seems to differ is that its characters are fully aware of the nature of their surroundings: the film posits the idea that it is possible to enter a shared dream state with other human beings, a sort of virtual reality of the consciousness. Nolan specifically rejected the idea that his film might borrow "second-life" tropes from movies such as Avatar, Surrogates, Gamer, or the Tron movies, however. He said he was inspired to write the story, which took him a decade, by his own experiences with lucid dreaming during the moments in between sleep and wakefulness.

He told the Times:

You can look around and examine the details and pick up a handful of sand on the beach. I never particularly found a limit to that; that is to say, that while in that state your brain can fill in all that reality.

I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else.

On a technical level, Nolan told Collider he would be eschewing 3D in favour of the combination of Imax footage and high-definition film which made The Dark Knight such a bravura visual experience. CGI will be used for certain sequences (the latest trailer features a self-assembling building which must certainly be computer generated) but wherever possible the crew built real sets, which ought to give scenes where reality starts to break down into chaos a definite edge.

One of the most well-considered descriptions of what Nolan is trying to do with the movie comes from Page, who will play one of DiCaprio's two sidekicks in the film (the other is played by Tom Hardy).

"There's a tangible realism even when it gets crazy, and somehow that makes the jeopardy feel more real," she told the Times. "It's like reading a Haruki Murakami novel – it's fantasy, but instead of feeling like some strange surreal world it feels very honest. The emotional spine of the story is there too, which is the key to his movies. There's the big scale, but the sincerity isn't left behind. The story is complicated but never confusing."

Inception, then, is a sort of noirish existential thriller set within a reality which exists in our minds, which technology has allowed us to access: a sort of Alice in the Matrix, perhaps. I'll leave you with Nolan's own description of the thought processes which led him to develop the heist storyline.

What would that [technology] be used and abused for? That was the jumping off point," he told the Times. "And clearly being able to extract information from somebody's brain would be the obvious use of that because obviously any other system where it's computers or physical media whatever, things that exist outside the mind, they can all be stolen.

Up until this point or up until this movie I should say, the idea that you could actually steal something from somebody's head was impossible. So that, to me, seemed a fascinating abuse or misuse of that kind of technology.

Thoughts on this one please. If anyone can fashion a brainiac blockbuster from such an erudite starting point, it's Nolan, surely? On the other hand, could Inception be too much for the average filmgoer's poor little cerebellum to handle?

 

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