Inception a Flawed Conception

I went into the new film Inception with high hopes. The film had gotten good buzz, I was a fan of the director’s previous works, and in general I like intelligent, well-written thrillers. Unfortunately, Inception is not one of them.

The plot of Inception is too complex to effectively summarize (at least without giving away too much of the plot), but involves a man named Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a corporate espionage artist who has the curious (and largely unexplained) ability to steal ideas from other people’s minds while they dream. Cobb is also an international fugitive who can’t return home to see his kids, but a rich business magnate named Saito promises to fix Cobb’s legal problems if Cobb can successfully implant an idea in the mind of a business rival during a dream. Cobb assembles a team including a forger, a chemist expert in anesthesiology, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a brilliant architecture student who can design dreamscapes in which Cobb can do his mind manipulation work.

Inception’s script, unfortunately, is not quite as clever as it thinks it is. There’s plenty of psychobabble mumbo-jumbo about dreams and brains, but a glaring lack of logic. I’m all for suspension of disbelief, though there’s a fine line between going with a film’s internal logic and a pileup of implausibilites.

Cobb seems to make up the rules about the dream world as he goes along. Apparently it’s a proven fact that if you dream that you are dying, you will wake up. You will also automatically wake up if you feel like you’re falling, so the best way to wake a dreaming person is to balance him or her on a chair and tip them over backward (this discovery will be a boon to drowsy drivers everywhere). You can go “two levels down” into the unconscious, but not three—because, well, I don’t know, they never really said. DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and the rest of the cast deliver these expository (and often clunky) lines with straight faces, but I was left wondering how, exactly, they managed to derive such discrete rules from the amorphous stuff of dreams. Call me a skeptic with a background in psychology, but I had a hard time buying it.

On a more philosophical level, you can’t really steal ideas. You can steal specific pieces of information (that’s the point of political and economic espionage), and if psychics were real they would be hired to steal knowledge—just as Cobb does. But you cannot steal (nor patent) an idea; as Robert Frost noted, “An idea is a feat of association.” You can implant an idea through ordinary communication or advertising, but in a real way, the basic premise of the film is fundamentally flawed.

Writer/director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) throws in plenty of car chases and action sequences to please the eyes as well as tantalize the brain. The excellent special effects and pounding musical score do their best to divert attention from the plot’s underlying silliness. These problems didn’t ruin the film for me; I’m still giving it a tepid recommendation. Nolan masterfully juggles multiple storylines and dreams-within-dreams, the performances are good, and the special effects are worth the price of (matinee) admission. But Nolan’s directing skills outshine is screenwriting skills, and I can only hope that he can do better next time.