Movie: Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
There is a dreamsharing-industrial complex! Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) may be the best extractor in the world, but he is one among many. There are competitors out there, as well as corporations developing protection from people who are trying to invade your dream space. And then there are the bars and dens opening their doors to those who want to dream together in safety and peace. Dreamsharing is not a secretive plot of the American government that is separate from daily life; it is integrated into society-at-large and my favorite bits of Inception are the ones where Nolan shows glimpses of the odd ways in which the world has adapted to this new phenomenon. Unfortunately his actual conception of dreams and the subconscious is much less imaginative, never going much further than literalising the most straightforward ideas about the inner workings of the mind, and integrating them into a Hollywood blocknbuster that doesn't deviate as much from the mold as it likes to pretend.
Inception is always entertaining, but it's one of the reasons why I wasn't fully on board with Nolan (despite liking most of his movies) until Tenet and Oppenheimer. Tenet is probably the best possible movie about the current state of the fight against climate change. Its genius lies in not showing us a glimpse of the future - we don't really know whether it's good or bad, which is much more unsettling than presenting a straightforward dystopia. It's also the best possible fit for Nolan's obsession with exploring all the ways in which we can never know the conesequences of our actions. That makes him of course the perfect director for a biopic about Oppenheimer, a better film about the strangeness and unpredictability of our subconscious than Inception.
In one of the potentially best scenes in Inception Ariadne (Elliot Page) goes through the elevator of Dom's mind, seeing various memories of his life with Mal (Marion Cotillard). You could easily forgive the obviousness of Dom's memories becoming darker further down the elevator, if the content of those memories was a little more unrelaible and fraught. As it is, each memory of Cobb seems to follow a perfectly understandable straightforward narrative, about which he feels almost completely certain. There is no naked Florence Pugh appearing out of nowhere in an interrogation room. Even aside from those kinds of surrealist interventions, in Oppenheimer we are constantly aware that something feels off about Cillian Murphy's recollectios of the events and we always have to live with the notion that it may not have happened quite as it is presented, or that whatever is presented could be seen in a much different light. Inception achieves this only rarely, even in the scenes between Dom and Mal, where it most forcefilly tries to go for such an effect. DiCaprio and Cotillard are put through an aleborate wringer in the service of a cloyingly sentimental, and somewhat distasteful, plot about trauma that offers no real insights into the characters except that they are feeling sad and guilty, something that's established right at the start of the movie. It offers no real insights into dreams, subconsciousness, or architecture either (though it likes to talk about these things a lot), while also sacrificing any semblance of fun.
Thankfully, the rest of the film is much better. In partuclar, the final third, where the fate of characters in a dream depends on the actions of others in a dream within a dream, while there are also things going on in a side dream, is exciting. Nolan's greatest strength has always been setting the stakes, and creating great tension by showing exactly how a different number of conflicted interests and scenario's converge to a point of no return, His croscutting across different dream states here makes it really fun to follow how the actions in one dimension affect events in another one. Inception also works exceptionally well as a heist movie, helped by Elliott Page, Tom Hardy (between 2010 and 2015 there was probably no more exciting actor in the world than him) and Joseph Gordon-Levvitt at the height of their bantering charisma. Still, none of that can take the attention away from the film's most basic issue. Dom has done an inception before, planting the idea in his wife's head that the world she lives in is fake. This should provide an opportunity for some freewheeling filmmaking that goes into all kinds of goofy, grotesque, frightening and bizarre directions. Instead, Nolan glosses over this with a few lines of dialogue and instead focuses on the inception of the idea to break up a company, culminating with the opening of a vault with a piece of paper inside. It's quite incredible that the movie sets up its world with the folding of Paris, and the subsequent dream tour of the city, and then never shows anything remotely as spectacular or as irrational.
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