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To sleep, perchance to dream

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Inception
DIRECTED BY:
Christopher Nolan
STARRING: Leonardo
Di Caprio, Ellen Page,
Cillian Murphy
CERT: 12A

I fell asleep twice during Inception. The first time, I dreamed I was watching the best movie of the year so far. Then I woke up and realised I wasn’t really. That, once again, the hype was better than the goods. So I turned over and nodded off again.
This time I dreamed I was running through a street uptown, naked and in slow motion. I was looking for my wife but I couldn’t find her anywhere. And my teeth were falling out. On the upside, I had a full head of hair again. You know – the kind of strange yet mundane stuff that most people tend to dream.
The characters in Christopher Nolan’s latest head-wrecking feature don’t go in for that class of banal dream. No, when their eyes close they go to exotic, intricately designed locations where men with big guns chase them around and a beautiful but dangerous woman stalks the landscape. Oh and trains come roaring out of nowhere on the city streets.
Though really, that’s not all that original. I once dreamed that a steam train went rolling past my primary school. I was only five at the time, Nolan! Have you been rooting around in my mind?
That’s what Dom Cobb (Di Caprio) does for a living – enters the minds of unsuspecting fellows while they sleep and steals their ideas. He is a master extractor and popular in the corporate world, where the rich and powerful are always ready to get one up on their competitors. The only snag is, he must operate outside of the United States, on account of a dark history that now prevents him from returning home to his children.
That’s until wealthy businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Saito will have Cobb’s record wiped clean, so he can finally see his kids, if he will take on a rare and highly dangerous job – an inception instead of an extraction, the planting of an idea rather than a theft.
The subject – or the mark, as they call him – is a young man named Robert Fischer Jr (Murphy), a business rival whose father is on the way out, with his company’s future hanging in the balance. Cobb’s job is to enter the son’s dreams and sow the right notion.
To pull it off he has to hire the right team – dream architect Ariadne (Page) to set the scene, forgery man and all round wise one Eames (Tom Hardy), pharmacologist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) to provide just the right dream-sharing drugs and Cobb’s own right hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, looking for all the world like Keanu Reeves wandered on to the wrong set, “Uh, I thought this was The Matrix Rebooted.”)
Once these guys have got their man under, they discover they’re going to have to go three levels into his sub-conscious mind – a dream within a dream within a dream. And it’s likely they won’t be able to find their way back up from there, ending up stuck in limbo for years.
Not that they’ll be stuck for a bit of adventure. Because at this point the movie turns into an all-out action flick, with gun fights, car chases and a snow-covered mountaintop assault that plays like a cross between Where Eagles Dare and a James Bond ski fight. To add to the excitement, whatever happens at one dream level is felt in the next – so when a van rolls over in the road, the lads in the next dream find themselves suddenly walking up the walls. And if that gets boring, well, there’s always Cobb’s crazy wife (Cottilard) to be scared of.
I wasn’t joking when I said I fell asleep during the film. I did. Not because it’s a bad movie, really. It’s a great and almost original idea (see Dreamscape for similarities) and that’s a rare enough treat. It looks incredible too – collapsing cliffs, folding cities and a street that explodes in color around Cobb and his apprentice, Ariadne (Ellen Page), are just some of the highlights.
But the down time tends to drag and I gave up on trying to keep track of the multitude of rules and possibilities in dreamland. The action is only workmanlike, which is surprising, and the fights get tired fairly fast. And as the climax is strung out way too long, it starts to feel like a bad dream that will never end.
It doesn’t help that none of the characters are worth caring much about but the actors do reasonably well with what they’ve got. Di Caprio (his dreams haunted by a dead wife for the second movie this year, after Shutter Island) does what needs to be done and Cillian Murphy is impressive in a small role. But all of them look like they might have enjoyed a few more laughs in the script.
They’re not the only ones. I really should go back and have another look at this one but to be honest, I can’t see it happening.

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