Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Three Stars
What we find in Christopher Nolan's "Inception", when we burrow our way tangibly into the landscape of the human dream, is not dormant emotions or suppressed memories or any other nakedness of the soul, but rather places. Surfaces. The cold, drab exteriors of modern architecture. Our subconscious populates these empty streets with meaningless faces, and when reality shifts, it is entirely literal. Buildings shift or explode, time slows, but the chronology of events remains strictly linear. "Inception" suggests a sterile dreamscape indeed. I am reminded of Stanley Kubrick, who over the course of his illustrious career created a body of work that suggested that the human soul, our desires, our memories, our very nature, could be deconstructed in such a way as to reveal a being as mechanical and clinical as turning gears (Consider "A Clockwork Orange", "Full Metal Jacket", "Barry Lyndon", and of course "2001: A Space Odyssey" among the rest of his work). Nolan however, has constructed for himself and for his film a set of intellectual rules that map the human psyche like layers in an onion, not so much for the exploration of the mind but simply for the purpose of creating an action thriller, and where Kubrick's films made bold assertions, Nolan merely ponders.
