Inception
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Inception is a 2010 science fiction action heist film which was written, co-produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. The film features an international ensemble cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine. DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a specialized corporate spy and thief whose work consists of secretly extracting valuable commercial information from the unconscious minds of his targets while they dream. Wanted for murder and unable to visit his children, Cobb is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "Inception", the implantation of an original idea into a target's subconscious.
In 2001, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about "dream stealers", and presented the idea to Warner Bros. in a story envisioned as a horror film inspired by lucid dreaming. Feeling he needed to have more experience with large-scale film production, Nolan retired the project and instead worked on Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). He spent six months polishing the script before Warner Bros. purchased it in February 2009. Inception was filmed in six countries and four continents, beginning in Tokyo on June 19, 2009, and finishing in Canada on November 22, 2009.
Its official budget was US$160 million, a cost which was split between Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures. Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film's $100 million in advertising expenditure, with most of the publicity involving viral marketing. Inception premiered in London on July 8, 2010, and was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters on July 16, 2010. A box office success, Inception has grossed over $800 million worldwide and is thus currently one of the highest-grossing films of all time. The home video market also had strong results, with $68 million in DVD sales.
Inception has received wide critical acclaim and numerous critics have praised its originality, cast, score, and visual effects. It won Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Cinematography, and was also nominated for four more: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Art Direction.
Dom Cobb and business partner Arthur perform corporate espionage by dreaming and infiltrating the subconscious of their targets to extract information, their latest being powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe). Tiered dream within a dream strategies are used and dreamers awaken by a sudden kick, or dying in the dream. Each extractor carries a totem, a personalized small object whose behavior is only predictable to its owner. Cobb's totem is a spinning top that perpetually spins in the dream state. The extraction fails due to Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb's deceased wife, whose memory projection sabotages his missions. Saito reveals that he is in fact auditioning the team to perform the difficult act of inception: using dreams to implant an idea.
Saito wishes to break up the energy conglomerate of his ailing competitor Maurice Fischer, by planting this idea in his son and inheritor Robert Fischer. Should Cobb succeed, Saito will use his influence to clear murder charges against him, so he can return to the U.S. and his children. Cobb accepts and assembles his team: Eames, an identity forger; Yusuf, a chemist who concocts the powerful sedative needed and Ariadne, a young architecture student tasked with designing the labyrinth of the dream landscapes. Saito accompanies as mission observer. Due to the sedative and multi-layered dream, death will result in entering limbo, unconstructed dream space where the dreamer could be trapped indefinitely. Real time in dreams is slowed; in limbo minutes of real time passes as decades. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he spent years with Mal in limbo, constructing a world together. After waking, Mal remained convinced she was dreaming and committed suicide, persuading Cobb to do so by incriminating him in her death, but he instead fled the U.S. and his children.
When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney and his body flown back to Los Angeles, the team share the flight with Robert Fischer and Cobb sedates him, bringing him into the shared dream. At each stage, the member of the team generating the dream stays behind to initiate the kick, while the other members sleep within the dream to travel a level deeper. In the first level, Yusuf's rainy downtown dream, the team abducts Fischer. However Fischer's antibody-like trained subconscious projections attack, seriously wounding Saito. Eames temporarily takes the appearance of Fischer's godfather, Peter Browning, to suggest Fischer reconsider his father's will. Yusuf drives the team in a van as they are sedated into Arthur's dream, a hotel, where the team recruit Fischer, convincing him his kidnapping was orchestrated by Browning. In the third dream level, a snowy mountain fortress designed by Ariadne and dreamt by Eames, Fischer is told they are in Browning's subconscious, but are really going deeper into Fischer's. Yusuf's driving manifests as distorted gravity, forcing Arthur to improvise a kick using an elevator shaft on the second level and creating an avalanche on the third.
Saito succumbs to his wounds and Cobb's projection of Mal sabotages the plan by killing Fischer. Cobb and Ariadne enter limbo to find Fischer and Saito. Cobb confronts his projection of Mal, who tries convincing him to stay in limbo. Cobb refuses and confesses he feels responsible for Mal's suicide, having woken her from limbo by using inception to plant the thought that the world was not real. Mal attacks Cobb but Ariadne shoots her. Through his confession, Cobb attains catharsis and chooses to remain to search for Saito. Eames defibrillates Fischer to bring him back up to the mountain fortress, where he enters a safe room to discover the planted idea; his father wishes him to be his own man and he accepts splitting up the conglomerate. Leaving Cobb, the team members ride the synchronized kicks back up: Eames detonates explosives in the fortress, Arthur crashes the elevator containing the team's bodies and Yusuf plunges the van off a bridge. Cobb eventually finds an aged Saito and the two remember their arrangement, awakening on the flight. Cobb passes through U.S. customs and reunites with his children. He tests reality with his spinning top, but is distracted by his children before seeing the result.
Cinematography
The film was shot primarily in the anamorphic format on 35 mm film, with key sequences filmed on 65 mm, and aerial sequences in VistaVision. Nolan did not shoot any footage with IMAX cameras as he had with The Dark Knight. "We didn't feel that we were going to be able to shoot in IMAX because of the size of the cameras because this film given that it deals with a potentially surreal area, the nature of dreams and so forth, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible. Not be bound by the scale of those IMAX cameras, even though I love the format dearly". Nolan also chose not to shoot any of the film in 3D as he prefers shooting on film using prime lenses, which is not possible with 3D cameras. Nolan has also criticised the dim image that 3D projection produces, and disputes that traditional film does not allow realistic depth perception, saying "I think it's a misnomer to call it 3D versus 2D. The whole point of cinematic imagery is it's three dimensional... You know 95% of our depth cues come from occlusion, resolution, color and so forth, so the idea of calling a 2D movie a '2D movie' is a little misleading." Nolan did test converting Inception into 3D in post-production but decided that, while it was possible, he lacked the time to complete the conversion to a standard he was happy with. In February 2011 Jonathan Liebesman suggested that Warner Bros were attempting a 3D conversion for Blu-ray release.
Wally Pfister gave each location and dream level a distinctive look: the mountain fortress appears sterile and cool, the hotel hallways have warm hues, and the scenes in the van are more neutral. This was done to aid the audience's recognition of the narrative's location during the heavily crosscut portion of the film.
Nolan has said that the film "deals with levels of reality, and perceptions of reality which is something I'm very interested in. It's an action film set in a contemporary world, but with a slight science-fiction bent to it," while also describing it as "very much an ensemble film structured somewhat as a heist movie. It's an action adventure that spans the globe"
Visual effects
For dream sequences in Inception, Nolan used little computer-generated imagery, preferring practical effects whenever possible. Nolan said, "It's always very important to me to do as much as possible in-camera, and then, if necessary, computer graphics are very useful to build on or enhance what you have achieved physically." To this end, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin built a miniature of the mountain fortress set and then blew it up for the film. For the fight scene that takes place in zero gravity, he used CG-based effects to "subtly bend elements like physics, space and time."
The most challenging effect was the "limbo" city level at the end of the film because it continually developed during production. Franklin had artists build concepts while Nolan gave his ideal vision: "Something glacial, with clear modernist architecture, but with chunks of it breaking off into the sea like icebergs". Franklin and his team ended up with "something that looked like an iceberg version of Gotham City with water running through it." They created a basic model of a glacier and then designers created a program that added elements like roads, intersections and ravines until they had a complex, yet organic-looking, cityscape. For the Paris-folding sequence, Franklin had artists producing concept sketches and then they created rough computer animations to give them an idea of what the sequence looked like while in motion. Later during principal photography, Nolan was able to direct Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page based on this rough computer animation Franklin had created. Inception had close to 500 visual effects shots (in comparison, Batman Begins had approximately 620) which is considered minor in comparison to contemporary visual effects epics that can have around 1,500 or 2,000 special effects images.
Music
The score for Inception was written by Hans Zimmer, who described his work as "a very electronic, dense score", filled with "nostalgia and sadness" to match Cobb's feelings throughout the film. The music was written simultaneously to filming, and features a guitar sound reminiscent of Ennio Morricone, played by Johnny Marr, former guitarist of The Smiths. Édith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien" appears recurringly throughout the film, and Zimmer reworked pieces of the song into cues of the score. A soundtrack album was released on July 11, 2010 by Reprise Records. Hans Zimmer's music was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Score category in 2011, losing to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of The Social Network
Themes
Reality and dreams
David Denby compared Nolan's cinematic treatment of dreams to Luis Buñuel's in Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). He criticised Nolan's "literal-minded" action level sequencing compared to Buñuel, who "silently pushed us into reveries and left us alone to enjoy our wonderment, but Nolan is working on so many levels of representation at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what’s going on." The latter captures "the peculiar malign intensity of actual dreams."
Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University, said that Nolan did not get every detail accurate regarding dreams, but their illogical, rambling, disjointed plots would not make for a great thriller anyway. However, "he did get many aspects right," she said, citing the scene in which a sleeping Cobb is shoved into a full bath, and in the dream world water gushes into the windows of the building, waking him up. "That's very much how real stimuli get incorporated, and you very often wake up right after that intrusion".
Nolan himself said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else."
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