Something to watch tonight: Monday 31 July

Inception is a digital rental at Arovision

A read­er was telling me the oth­er day that they thought it was cool that I could use this news­let­ter to go back and revis­it old films and then revise my opin­ion. We all get older, move on, etc. Old pre­ju­dices are replaced by new ones.

When I saw that last Friday was the 13^th anniversary of this review of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, I decided it would be cool to fea­ture it here (con­sid­er­ing all the recent Oppenheimer fuss.)

I thought my feel­ings at the time had been mixed but had no idea that I dis­liked it this much! Below, let me intro­duce you to a review­er who got out of bed on the wrong side that morning:

I was really enjoy­ing Inception until I woke up. Actually, that’s not true. Unlike my com­pan­ion, the Sandman didn’t come to res­cue me from Christopher Nolan’s bom­bast­ic block­buster and I had to sit through all two and a half hours of it, won­der­ing what all the fuss was about.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a cor­por­ate spy who spe­cial­ises in enter­ing people’s dreams and dis­cov­er­ing their secrets. This is evid­ently a com­plex tech­no­logy that requires one dream­er to design the loc­a­tion (it has to be fake because not know­ing wheth­er you are awake or dream­ing car­ries massive risks to one’s san­ity), one dream­er to lead the sub­ject, the sub­ject them­selves and (some­times) a for­ger who can take on the shapes and char­ac­ter­ist­ics of oth­er people.

There’s a lot of fight­ing in these dreams as the subject’s sub­con­scious sees the inva­sion and tries to fight it off like white blood cells. But, you know when in your own dreams you try and hit someone and they end up being really weak marsh­mal­low punches? That’s how the anti­bod­ies shoot so it takes quite a lot of bul­lets before one will actu­ally hit you. And when one hits you and you die, in the real world you wake up so it’s really like a video game with mul­tiple lives.

Where things get com­plic­ated for DiCaprio’s crew (and for us, the audi­ence) is when they cre­ate dreams with­in dreams to fur­ther bam­boozle the sub­ject and his defences. The risk is that you nev­er know wheth­er you are in the real world or not, except that I always know when I’m dream­ing as I usu­ally have no trousers on.

DiCaprio has anoth­er prob­lem. His own sub­con­scious is haunted by his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) who jumped out a hotel room win­dow pre­cisely because she couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. So, in a small way, then, Inception is like a pre­quel to Scorsese’s Shutter Island and it allows DiCaprio to pro­duce much the same per­form­ance, com­posed mostly of sweat­ing and frowning.

Japanese tycoon Ken Watanabe offers DiCaprio a deal – if he can plant an idea in anoth­er man’s head as opposed to tak­ing one out, he can go home to the chil­dren he aban­doned when he was accused of killing his wife. Inception, as they call it, is hard and requires a com­pletely unstable third level of dream-within-a-dream.

There are some cool moments in the film but it nev­er tran­scends them. The storytelling is so unsat­is­fy­ing and the char­ac­ter­isa­tion so non-existent that I can’t recom­mend Inception to any­one who actu­ally knows and likes good films. If you were to remove the huge digit­al “because-we-can” set-pieces and the long scenes of poorly writ­ten expos­i­tion, in which Nolan tries to explain to us all what the hell is going on, you don’t really have much left and he remains a com­pletely inco­her­ent dir­ect­or of action.

There are six people in DiCaprio’s under­cov­er team and I would defy any­one to actu­ally describe them in any­thing oth­er purely phys­ic­al terms. I can’t. They are not char­ac­ters – they are video game avatars. Only the great young English act­or Tom Hardy, who ate up the screen in Bronson earli­er this year, makes an impres­sion and even he can’t be described as any­thing oth­er than ‘smart-arse’. Who is Ariadne the archi­tect (Ellen Page)? Why is she in Paris? What is she study­ing with Michael Caine? Why is she dressed like a lead­er of the Australian Labor Party when she’s only 21 years old?

My memory is so dif­fer­ent to this that last year I actu­ally bought a Christopher Nolan 4K UHD box set, think­ing I would enjoy rewatch­ing them.

So, guess what I’m doing tonight?

Inception is avail­able as a video on demand rent­al from Arovision for only $5.99. The Nolan UHD box set has been deleted in Aotearoa but you might find it over­seas. Or they’ll put a new one out in a few years to include Oppenheimer.