First Impressions: “Inception”

Hi there. “First Impressions” is where I give my first Impressions of a movie that is likely fresh in the cinemas.

Like meeting a person, sometimes you get a lot of things right by the first impressions, sometimes you find out subsequently that you were wrong. But more often you just learn that the things you judged by didn’t really matter in the long run.

The first trailers of Inception reminded me in no small part of “The Matrix”. And why not, “Matrix” was a defining movie for my generation, some of the aesthetics sure seemed similar enough, and even the first details of the plot of “Inception” seemed to call that film to mind.

But after having seen the movie I find that comparing the two yields no really interesting conclusions aside from that if “The Matrix” was comic book action approach to a layered world, “Inception” is its heist movie cousin with the urban action tendencies.

It deals, like Nolan’s previous favorite “Memento” and indeed DiCaprio’s previous endeavour “Shutter Island” with a conflict born of coping with the loss of a woman, and like Nolan’s “Batman Begins” it is also about stepping out of your father’s shadow, one way or another.

While these are things that are pregnant with potential of freudian spiders and woods, everything is treated with a slightly twisted action movie mindset. After all, a dream doesn’t need to contain any monsters, spiders or even basements to be frightening. They are, in and of themselves, terrifying constructs.

The surreal backdrop never becomes Terry Gilliamesque or technologically indulging like something out of Phillip K. Dick. Plot and theme are front and center here, all the exploitation of the dreamscape for it’s own sake pretty much peaks in the second act, after that it’s tightly scripted.

Characters are second fiddle, but they are quite enjoyable nonetheless, and there a few of Nolans humorous quips in their mouths, though this is a very serious affair. You’ll probably find yourself laughing fewer times than during “The Dark Knight”.

But though few moments are lost on laughter, not one is wasted. We move in and out of dreams, through car chases that bring to mind “Heat” and its like, mid-air brawls that reminds one of Hitchcock, and a final action set piece that seems taken straight out of cold war James Bond, yet fits like a glove. Nothing is a sore thumb. Yet then again nothing is weird about the dream while we’re dreaming. Like they say in the film, it’s only when we wake up that we notice something is wrong. 

A little bit like picking apart a movie.

For those of you that have already seen the movie. Screen Rant has some quite in-depth analysis of it which can be found here.