The Spanish Prisoner

I finally got around to seeing Inception. I recently learned that there is a cinema near where I live where you can see a movie that’s been out for a while for a $1.25. So expect some belated movie reviews in the future.

Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an industrial spy who enters people’s dreams in order to get information from them. He is hired by a businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), to implant an idea into the head of a rival businessman by entering his dreams. Cobb employs a team of people to help him with his plan, but the success of his endeavor is threatened by Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb’s subconscious representation of his deceased wife, whom he is accused of having murdered. (Trust me, it will make sense when you see the movie.)

I found Inception entertaining, even though it runs into the same problem that the Matrix movies ran into, which is that it is hard to really care about what is happening when you know that it’s a dream. This especially becomes a problem towards the end, when the action starts to get confusing.

The basic idea in Inception is similar to that of a Japanes anime film, Paprika, which was directed by the late Satoshi Kon. There is a sense of wonder in Paprika that is lacking in Inception. This is because the latter is more concerned with being an action film than with exploring the possibilities of entering people’s dreams.

Inception is one of a number of Hollywood films that take it for granted that governments and trans-national corporations are corrupt. Although it’s nice to see these films acknowledge this, they present this idea in a casual manner that is likely to engender cynicism rather than anger. What’s more, in Inception we are expected to believe that a billionaire can, with just one phone call, immediately negate an arrest warrant for murder. This is in keeping with the conspiracist view of the world, which holds that George W. Bush could, with one phone call, get people to blow up the World Trade Center. Fortunately we have Wikileaks to remind us that the world isn’t that simple.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2011 at 9:15 am and is filed under Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.