As usual, I don’t write film reviews, only critiques and analyses, so get the hell away from this post if you have yet to watch this film. Come back only after you’ve done so.

Anyone who reads this blog should know that Christopher Nolan is easily my favorite director and that I eagerly look forward to every film that he makes. This has been true ever since I first discovered Memento. Since then, I’ve watched every one of his films, except for The Following, which I understand is sort of a student film made on a shoestring budget. With the sole exception of Insomnia, which, being an adaptation of a Norwegian film, is competent but otherwise unremarkable, all have been stellar.

Thus it pains me to say that Inception is a disappointment. I’m not going to summarize the plot, so I’ll just jump directly into the discussion here, starting with: what is or isn’t real in this film? My personal take is that Nolan intended all possible interpretations to have some validity. Most people focus on the final scene with the spinning top and whether or not it falls over. I hate that scene too and think it’s a cop out, but it’s really the least of the doubts that Nolan put into the film. If that had been the only part of the film where Nolan played coy, I’d be much more satisfied. Instead, blatant reality distortion effects aside, the scenes that are ostensibly set in reality feel like the most dream-like ones, and I believe that this is deliberate. The following is from my post on the subject on LYN:

1) Mal points out how preposterous his real world scenario is, and it’s true.

Even his real life seems like a James Bond movie, and a poor one at that. Two giant companies are fighting over the world’s energy supplies and the best plan that one of them can come up with to deal with its rival is to influence the heir to break up the company? That makes no sense. I’d expect this plot in a Michael Bay film, but not a Christopher Nolan one. And how ridiculous it is that they can so easily drug the heir, supposedly one of the most powerful people in the world? Even if he were forced to travel in a first class commercial flight, I don’t believe that he would travel alone without bodyguards or aides.

2) His escape in Mombassa is too convenient.

This has been conspicuously pointed out in a number of articles before but I’m including it for the sake of completeness. He escapes by squeezing himself with much difficulty through a tiny space between two walls. This is a commonly described scene in dreams. It cannot have been a coincidental choice.

3) Mal’s suicide scene is unrealistic.

Cobb enters the hotel room and finds Mal on the ledge. Except that the ledge appears to be on a building opposite the one he’s on with a large empty space between them. This makes no sense unless you consider that reaching for someone but finding it impossible because of a gulf between you is also another type of commonly described dream. Since I don’t believe that Nolan makes mistakes, I contend that this is a deliberate choice as well.

4) Cobb’s situation with his children is incredibly contrived.

Cobb’s driving force throughout the whole film is to be reunited with his kids, but if he can’t re-enter the US to be with them, why the hell can’t they leave the US to be with him? Then there’s the whole stylistic choice of not showing their faces until the final scene. In my opinion, all this casts doubt that the real world is indeed real. Plus there’s the grandfather’s line in Paris telling him to “Come back to reality.” One interpretation is that he knows Cobb is misusing the dream technology to see his dead wife but the context of the conversation at that time was that Cobb was desperately trying to find a way to be reunited with his children, not to bring his wife back. I therefore think that this phrase has interesting implications.

5) The dream technology is badly integrated with the worldbuilding.

One would imagine that the advent of this level of dream technology would cause huge changes to the shape of human society, yet the effects seem oddly muted in this film. On the one hand, it’s common enough that senior executives appear to be routinely trained to possess defenses against extraction and that some seemingly poor people in an underdeveloped country use it everyday. On the other hand, Ariadne, a university student in Paris, has never heard of it before. Other than these specific instances, the technology also does not seem to have impacted human society much. For example, if we had dream technology now, do you think we would still have televisions? If time can be so efficiently compressed in dreams, you could conceivably finish an entire university course’s worth of education in a single day. The whole world would be drastically different.

Since I think Nolan is a smart guy, I would attribute this to Cobb’s failure of imagination than Nolan’s. Cobb wants to be a superhero in dreams so he comes up with the concept and daydreams about it but he doesn’t care whether or not this ends up being a realistic world. But Nolan should.

6) Cobb’s totem is unreliable.

One common objection to the view that the real world is also a dream is that Cobb uses the totem in the real world scenes and it falls over. But Cobb’s totem is unreliable. First of all, it wasn’t his totem in the first place. It was his wife’s totem and he’d already explained how important it was that every dreamer should make his own totem or else it wouldn’t work. Secondly, he even explained to other people how it would work, defeating its purpose. Remember how Arthur would not allow Ariadne to touch his die because that would defeat its purpose? Arthur even tells Ariadne that Cobbs always tells people not to do something but then he always does it himself. To me, this indicates that Cobb’s totem and his methods for staying safe while in dreams is not reliable.

Once again, I’m not saying everything is definitively a dream. Rather, I believe that Nolan inserted just enough evidence to support any possible interpretation that you can spin while refraining from making any single one of them definitive. While that’s an interesting stylistic choice, it stands in stark contrast with his previous work in which multiple lines of evidence converge together in support of one powerful conclusion. (I’m one of those who steadfastly maintain that there is absolutely no room for multiple interpretations in Memento.)

This aside, I also found the film sloppily made. The opening scenes, for example, were far too rushed, cutting around too quickly to establish any sense of place. It was very disappointing that the mindblowing reality distortion effects that were heavily featured in the film’s advertisements took place only in a training scene and that they seemed to matter very little in the end. It’s just poor film-making that they primed the audience to expect something incredible by having a train run through a street right at the beginning of their mission, but then nothing else came of it. Instead, the last dream layer was a generic and completely unremarkable firefight in the snow.

All this doesn’t mean that Inception is a bad film. This is a film by Christopher Nolan after all, and even on his worst day, anything that he comes up with is still better than ninety percent of the commercial fare that passes through our cinema halls. Inception is genuinely thought-provoking, beautifully crafted and brimming with interesting ideas, making it a very worthwhile watch. Still, I’d prefer that in the future, Nolan leave the self-referential mindscape genre to Charlie Kaufman, the ambiguous many-layered meanings genre to David Lynch and stick to what he does best: intensely cerebral, meticulously plotted noirs.