Country: USA | UK
Language: English | Japanese
Director: Christopher Nolan
First thing that I would like to mention about this film is that it is not for everyone. Christopher Nolan is an intellectual and a scientific mind and he expects his viewers to be the same. The film begins with a very complicated storyline and one has to make an effort to understand in which territory one is.
Here we speak of dreams and hence, similarity to The Matrix is inevitable. The difference is that The Matrix speaks of the world being false, an illusion and one can relate it to the eastern concept of Maya. On the other hand Inception speaks of the world of dreams and questions the reality as we perceive it. It is somehow related to the concept propounded by the Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca in his masterpiece La Vida es Sueño which is borrowed from A Thousand and One Nights, the legendary Arabic masterpiece.
Almost the first 45 minutes the viewers tries to understand what it is all about and after that there is a break with the reality and you are lost in Nolan’s dreamland; which is fascinating at times and at other times sort of frightening.
Nolan takes the viewpoint that one cannot exactly say what is real: the real cognitive world or a dream. The viewpoint, be it true or not, is incontrovertible because when you are awake, the world around you seems real and when you are asleep, the dream seems to be real… You never remember in a dream that it is false.
The concept of different layers of dreams is also something that is new to cinema and it can also be traced to have relations with the Buddhist theory of different levels or dimensions of reality.
The film is entertaining, but only for a scientific and contemplating mind.
Leonardo Dicaprio has really been growing up as an actor with each of his movies. He is better in every movie as compared to his last one. In Inception he is able to create the haunting aura of a person being hounded by his own subconscious; in which sense his work bears some similarity to his last role in Shutter Island.
Joseph Gordon-Lewitt is quiet good looking and perfect in the role of Arthur, the pointman. Ken Watanabe impresses once again after his role of Katsumoto in The Last Samurai. All the other actors are just fitting.
See Inception only if you like to reflect upon the films you watch. It’s not for you if you are looking for pure entertainment.
