Christopher Nolan
Inception

I believe that the "film of the year" deserves another review on Debaser. After all, cinema sites are pouring rivers of ink, or rather bits, on the latest work by Christopher Nolan.

I won't dwell on the plot, which would require 3 pages of the blog; it can be said that it consists of two parts: a first "training" part, where the viewer is instructed to understand the second, which consists of the "inception" that gives the film its title.

We are faced with a challenging film but not as bewildering as it is said to be; in fact, we are given the "tools" to face it, like an instruction manual, a guiding hand. Something that didn't happen in "Memento" (2000) where the viewer is a victim of the non-linearity of the story and the distortion of memory, without any reassuring explanation in the finale. "Fortunately" not here either, and it was an excellent choice to leave the final judgment to the viewer: is it dream or reality?

Buying a ticket to the cinema means securing a product of exceptional direction, perfectly cast, extraordinary special effects and music...paradoxes and labyrinths tickle the brain, in a cerebral thriller yet accessible to the general public gratified by phenomenal living architectures and zero-gravity fights.

This already hints at the commercial potential of the film (consider the video game in development) that could have been a masterpiece of our times, because it is intelligent, original, a spectacle for the mind and the eyes, but remains confined, due to the usual show-business, within the borders of a blockbuster, albeit one of excellent craftsmanship. Some filler scenes of chases and shootings serve only to place the film in the conventional label of the action movie.

The film's subject, then: the dream. Yet the dreams in the film seem more like virtual reality sessions (matrix..?) than oneiric experiences; they are indeed very artificial (the dream is "constructed" by architects)..the precise synchronization of the protagonists on various states of consciousness (the sense of time compression may be true, but to even codify it as if it were a decimal system well..) or the "projections" of the subconscious acting like armed guards, make everything too defined, geometric.

The parallel story of the protagonist's wife and her first inception (which ended badly) is the best part of the film, the element that complicates the story and makes it more personal, intimate, so the core is: you can't carry your demons forever, sooner or later you will have to face them, in the deepest part of your soul.

Then with phenomena well known to everyone like the "kick" that makes us fall into bed or the brilliant idea of our personal "totem" beacon in uncertainty, Nolan has done well not to emulate too much the masters of the "oneiric" genre (first and foremost, Lynch).

In this sense, what is missing from Inception's dream is the "stream of consciousness", a river that breaks rationality and proportion, this one truly monolithic in the dream as intended by Nolan. Better this way though, this element would complicate the viewer's life intolerably, risking making a catastrophic mess...

It hardly matters because, all things considered, it's a remarkable film, probably it will scoop up awards (although, who cares...) and ennobles a director who was a bit snubbed until The Dark Knight, now already idolized as the best of the decade.

PS (DO NOT read if you haven't seen the film yet): the happy ending, in my opinion, is still a dream, in fact, in the opening scene, which is then resumed in the finale, the aged Japanese magnate seems to grasp the gun...which would send good Leo into an even deeper limbo, populated by "long-forgotten" memories...but in the end, it's the spinning top that decides!