| Inception | |
 "You can't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling": Tom Hardy's chastising of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character that hovers so tantalisingly at the end of the latest Inception trailers could easily be taken as Chris Nolan's challenge to Hollywood blockbusters.Nolan's latest film raises the bar for summer blockbusters with a storyline and narrative structure of fantastic proportions. It centres on one man, Cobb, whose life has been spent stealing people's ideas from their dreams. This life supported him well, but also created some serious problems, leaving him living in exile from his home and family in the US. But big business representative Saito gives him the chance to have his slate wiped clean: if he can pull of the biggest dream heist of all time, and plant an idea into the head of the future CEO of Saito's rival empire. The way in which the heist itself unfolds is a masterpiece of imagination and organisation, with layers of dream worlds pieced together with the kind of structural precision and visual flair that only Nolan could produce. The trailer showed us a city folding in on itself, civilizations collapsing and gravity-free rooms hurling battling foes around mercilessly. I am pleased to tell you that this is only the tip of the iceberg. The film also brings together some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Old favourites Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy are obviously among the top billed, but with them comes Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe and Marion Cotillard. Oh, and Pete Postlethwaite and Tom Hardy. With a list this impressive it's hard to know what's showier, the cast or the effects. Sadly, the cast aren't given a huge amount to do. Why? Because in all of Nolan's structural genius, he failed to build a strong human core. The roles played by these outstanding talents are often little more than cogs in the massive machine Nolan has constructed. Each character fulfills their function to a T, in fact it may even be fair to say that I have never seen such an accomplished heist thriller set up, and none of the actors puts a foot wrong in portraying them. It's just that there is so little humanity in them that it's difficult to see beyond the shiny gloss and clever trickery of Inception's grand designs. Take, for example, our leading man Cobb (DiCaprio). His main problem is a trauma from his past, which creeps into his subconscious and begins to jeopardise the mission. The gradual exposition of his past is textbook B-plot stuff, delivered with the impeccable timing of a cinematic master. But it's just not especially endearing or original. It is also the only thing we know about Cobb. He is given no other elements to make him more than the functional construct Nolan uses him as. His supporting cast fair even worse: Ariadne (Page) is a clever student, offering no real emotion or history, Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), Cobb's long term collaborator, is a useful sidekick par excellence - operating an entire layer of the carefully constructed narrative barely anything to identify him as a living, breathing person with his own identity (the only scene in which he does so is welcome, but forced and unexplained). Most wasted of all, however, is Eames (Tom Hardy), the livewire 'dreamer' whose sudden appearance in Africa promised an exciting back story that was never delivered. All of this leads me to question whether Nolan has begun to get too wrapped up in the machinations of the filmmaking process to create the heart that could have made a film of this scope and scale one of the best of its time. Nonetheless, Inception remains a monument to a visual genius, and a man who plays with narrative structure in a way nobody in Hollywood can match right now. And that's an exciting prospect for any film fan. Rating: **** Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard Director: Christopher Nolan Release date: 16th July 2010 Run time: 148 mins Certificate: US PG-13 | UK 112A Review by Michael Edwards |
