Before my 3 week vacation, I heard the DJs on the Paul and Young Ron show discussing the movie "Inception". One of them said that he didn't get it, but he liked it. They also were discussing how it's one of those movies that you have to see a couple of times to "get it". Honestly, I really had no desire to see the movie- I'm just not a sci-fi girl. But when my friends asked me to go see it- we are all former IB students, mind you- I agreed.
Sitting in the movie theater, munching on my free small popcorn I said to myself
"Pay attention to every little detail because that's where the answers lie." The first 20 minutes or so did jump around a lot, but I accepted it and stored as much information as I could. The rest was fairly simple to understand. The scriptwriters did a lovely job of explaining 'inception' and 'extraction' and how the dream-world works through DiCaprio's character. He has a number of monologues that give the audience the necessary information they will need to understand the whole movie. Without giving away too much of the movie, I will say this- "Inception" is one of those movies that if you don't pay attention to the dialogue and the exposition you will be lost. After that, it's a matter of keeping track of all the layers of the dream and following Cobb's (DiCaprio's character) past as it haunts him and continually pops up.
Us three IB students at one point looked at each other and the same thought went through our heads. "Damn! Why didn't this movie come out when we were doing our TOK journals?" TOK is a branch of philosophy known as epistemology or the study of how we know things. I swear we took a class in high school that questioned how we know what we know. This is one of the many themes present; what is real and what isn't real. It goes even further by making us question what reality is. Is it possible to have multiple realities? The movie is very philosophical-but there is more to it than that. It was a great action film. It wasn't over-the-top ridiculous if you accepted the world the director has created. There were times of action and times of rest when the characters went about their daily lives. Although CG was used, it didn't stink of it. The limbo dream world of Cobb was very artistic. I felt like I had stepped into a Dali painting.
Another element to the movie dips into the realm of philosophy but has some very practical aspects. Think of inception as subliminal messages. You know the theory- imperceptible messages flashed over and over again supposedly make you think of the message as if it were your own idea. "Inception" goes further than that and takes it from a simple advertising scheme to life-changing decisions in a person's life. Planting ideas in someone's head so deeply that they believe they came up with the idea on their own and they are not conscious of how the idea came to be. Imagine what kind of world we would live in if corporations, the military, hell even individuals had that kind of power...scary.
Anyways, a 'real life' inception is discussed in Weaponized Culture. The post is entitled "Inception and the Fantasies of ‘Top Secret America'"
. No worries, the author of this blog actually has qualifications, unlike me.
The movie ends ambiguously. Personally, I thought that made the movie stronger and opens up the field for philosophical discussions with your friends afterwards. Can we ever really know?
As a side note, Leonardo DiCaprio has come out with two movies in one year that were fantastic and had me glued to my seat. This other really good movie was "Shutter Island". Secondly, does anyone know if 'Inception' is supposed to be a franchise or not? I thought I heard that it was intended that way, that it might be, but I don't know. I don't think there needs to be a sequel, prequel, or anything. This is a stand-alone flick that comes back to where it started. All the questions that needed to be answered were answered. If they weren't, that was Nolan's choice and added to the movie's theme.
