‘Inception’ Happens Friday

By Dan Birlew | Posted July 13, 2010 in Film Previews | Comments Off

I’ll tell you why you should be excited about this coming Friday, July 16th. Potentially the best film of the summer is hitting theaters, both in regular distribution and in IMAX.

Inception is Christopher Nolan’s follow-up film effort after the highly successful The Dark Knight. A lot of money’s been spent on Inception, and therefore it should be a visually stunning and well-acted film because of it.

The various trailers released do a good job of showing off the special effects in the film. However, they’ve all done a very poor job of setting up the story. Hopefully I can help.

Inception is the story of “dream thieves.” In the near future these guys make a living as corporate criminals, using a program called Dream-Share to enter people’s dreams and steal their ideas. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, the leader of a crew who’s proven himself to be the best at snatching product ideas from the subconscious minds of valuable executives. While this line of work has made Cobb a rich and highly valued thief, it’s also turned him into an international fugitive and cost him the love of his life.

Dom and his regular dream-thief crew try to steal a corporate idea from a powerful executive named Saito (Ken Watanabe). However, Saito is aware of them and is secretly “auditioning” them for a job of his own. He takes Dom’s “dream architect” (Lukas Haas) hostage and proposes that they enter the mind of his chief corporate rival (Cillian Murphy) and plant an idea rather than steal one; an idea that will make him decide to abandon his company. In return, Saito will release Dom’s friend and also provide him leeway to re-enter the United States, ending his fugitive days.

Saito (Ken Watanabe) turns the tables on would-be "dream-thieves."

Dom’s first step toward this is to find a new “dream architect,” and for that he must revisit the college professor (Michael Caine) who taught him everything he knows about the dreaming mind. The professor introduces him to a student dream architect (Ellen Page) who is gifted but untrained in Dream-Share. By way of training her, the rules of the dream world are demonstrated. But we’re supposed to ask, without his regular dream architect will Dom still be able to pull off the job and get his old life back?

Inception has been previewed by the critics and has received a 83% score at Rotten Tomatoes. Warner Bros. has set up a really cool website (http://inceptionmovie.warnerbros.com/) and there’s also an online comic book you can read to get a preview of the story-before-the-story (http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/inception-comic.html).

I’ll be taking the wife this weekend. For me, there’s a complex science fiction story with a big budget and all the moral complexity I ever want. For the wife, there’s Leo. I’m sure we’ll be analyzing this film in great detail in the forums.