The Ingenuity of Inception

Premise

Inception… Come on, admit it! Nobody can watch it once. Maybe, because the plot is complex. Or maybe, because you’ve been mesmerised by the ingenuity of the movie without your knowledge. A movie that’s too good to watch, too hard to explain and too awesome to forget. This is the same movie that your geeky friend wouldn’t stop talking about, this is the same movie you watched after you’ve watched the Interstellar or watched it after you’ve learnt that it’s directed by the same guy who directed The Dark Knight.

So basically, the story goes like this. Leonardo Dicaprio is a wanted man in the USA for killing his Wife (allegedly). He is doing anything and everything he can to get back to the USA back to his Children. He’s a master in Inception where you can dream together with other people using a secret military project. A billionaire approaches Leo with an offer to get him back to his Children if he can complete a task which feels like corporate espionage.

Argument

The movie has a simple but powerful advantage. It’s based on dreams. In dreams, the limit is your imagination. Leo’s task is to manipulate a person at the core with an idea that will tip the balance of his future decisions in favour of the billionaire. In pursuit of doing that, he goes too deep into the grey area between dreams and reality where his wife is waiting as a memory to torment him. Once she throws complications Leo’s way, the plot gets crazier, the visuals seem breathtaking. For example, a scene where a train bulldozes through cars on the road or the infamous fight in the spinning hallway.

Why this movie is so captivating? It’s a dream, so anything is possible. Be it the scene where subconscious mind attacks the intruders or the scene where Ellen Paige uses physics to fold entire city blocks like cardboard. Christopher and Jonathan Nolan know how to play with the best of both worlds… Science and Mind. We know so little about both of them yet we find them fascinating. Science is full of possibilities and Mind is full of wonder. The human mind is the most complex thing in the universe… So complex, that we don’t even know basic things about it.

If you can master the attention of a person using nothing but your words and appearance, it’s hypnotizing a person. If you can program a winter soldier into doing anything by saying a dozen words in a sequence… That’s sci-fi. Both are fascinating subjects with endless possibilities. However, it turns out that Leo’s wife (Mal) and Leo has built a world of their own in their joint dreams. But slowly, Mal loses the track of reality and takes her own life thinking that it was a dream. That made me stop for a second… Dreams that feel so real that a person commits suicide… Hmm… Maybe we see them every day in the newspapers and judge them without giving a second thought.

Food for Thought

We all spend one-third of our life sleeping. Roaming, dreaming, searching for something new in the limbo. So real the dreams are, you can almost fool yourself doing anything you want. Dream without limits, at the same time, you gotta know your reality. So, to keep check with reality, maybe pinch yourself every once in a while or keep a totem that challenges you in the real world. A totem doesn’t need to be an object, it can be anything or anyone. A person you care about, a profession you’re proud about or even your dreams you dream about.

Annnnndddddddddddddd… wake up now!