The dream sequence.. that tired plot device that has long been the tool of soap opera writers and their ilk. It ranks up there with the unknown twin, the wakened coma victim and the not so miraculous return from death. It has always bothered me to spend all that time watching something, getting hooked, reeled in and then.. and then.. the character wakes up and you can write the entire season off (yeah, I’m talking to you, Sopranos).
But what if you took the dreaded dream sequence and made it into something awesome? Took the reality warping effects, amped ‘em up on crack and let it rip. Then you would get the movie ‘Inception’. This movie is so many things and all of them awesome. It is first and foremost intelligent which that alone puts it a cut above 95% of the movies written in the last decade, hell the last 3 decades (man, the 80’s sucked). It is well written, well acted, and extremely well thought out. By the end of the movie I was managing to keep up with all the various plot points, twists and turns, but just barely. And then the ending hits, and hits you again and again and again. And get this, this is a bon-a-fide action flick. A well written, densely plotted highly creative shoot em up blast with all the tension of a great heist movie.
My one criticism is that this movie bares some resemblance to the Matrix. Conceivably this movie was written and being re-written when the Matrix came out, and it is also conceivable that the similarities of the two movies influenced Inception. At one point in the movie one of the characters tells the other that he needs to dream bigger guns and pulls out a grenade launcher. This concept was never fully explored. The movie stayed along conventional means (machine guns, pistols, etc..) and the act of ‘dreaming big’ was, sadly not explored further. I can honestly see why, the whole plot would have changed had everyone been able to become bullet proof projectile launching supermen. If there was a sequel to this movie I would love to see that side of it explored.
This movie is an event. It is so many things that movies today are not. It says something that it supposedly took 15 years to write. Still, this is not a sequel or rehashed idea. This movie is almost cut entirely from whole cloth, an act of creation that utilizes all of today’s special effects capabilities. It should scare the utter living crap out of every focus group watching, sequel obsessed, creatively bankrupt movie exec that continues to spew out vomit like GI Joe and Final Destination 5. Hell, if I was a movie executive whose job suddenly depended on flexing creative muscles I’ve never used before, well I might just hope I was having a terrible dream.
Go see this movie. This is not the newest and coolest 3-D movie on an alien planet with a sturdy script and amazing graphics. This is the rarest of the rare, an action flick that delivers on every level, it might take another 15 years before we see another of its kind again.