Awesomely cool, Inception mystifies viewers.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page can sell tons of tickets to even the most oblique, esoteric, and bizarre motion picture in decades. Witness the fact that they earned more than $60 million(usd) over the weekend despite audiences’ wholehearted agreement that Inception is by far the weirdest and least comprehensible movie since The Matrix, maybe even since Stanley Kubric’s 1973 mind-bender A Clockwork Orange. Typical of most viewers, Flannery Cross,22, said, “I’m not sure that I understood all the psychology and spy stuff, but I’ve gotta say that the movie was awesomely, amazingly cool. I would watch it again just for the effects.”
“Very cool” was powerful enough to dethrone surprisingly cute and endearing Despicable Me as the reigning box office champion, proving once again that cool beats cute like rock beats scissors.
Comparisons with The Matrix abound, because Inception combines sophisticated intellectual content with brilliantly choreographed and exquisitely photographed action. “If only my real life dreams were half as good as the movie’s dream sequences,” Flannery Cross sighed wistfully.
The movie’s main character, Cobb, played extremely well by Leonardo DiCaprio, uses electronic gear and drugs to penetrate the minds of his targets, first for purposes of industrial espionage, ultimately for more sinister purposes. As the plot unwinds and the stakes increase, Cobb, acting at the behest of an extremely wealthy client, attempts the complex and dangerous “inception”—a technique by which Cobb claims he can plant an idea in a target’s mind and bring it to fruition in the real world. Ellen Page plays “the architect” with her usual understated intensity and inescapable charisma. Through a series of increasingly dangerous ontra-psychic maneuvers, Cobb attempts to guide a business rival’s son into systematic destruction of the company he is poised to inherit. Some critics suggest the plot seems a little thin, but it provides more than enough cinematic DNA to bind a sensational string of increasingly breathtaking action sequences—the heart of Inception’s uber-cool.
