Was Inception a Game Changer?

Inception. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

It was clear before Inception was released in 2010 that Christopher Nolan was a big deal. All of his films prior to that had been at the very least critical hits, with The Dark Knight being a massive financial, critical and cultural event. But for some people, Inception marked a sort of turning point where Nolan stopped just being a talented, inventive director and took his place as a proper auteur and visionary. David Sims writing in The Atlantic argues that Inception “invested [Nolan] with the authority” to defend “cinematic traditions.” Pretty lofty stuff. But does Inception earn that? Did it really position Nolan as a hero of the craft?

It’s true, as Sims points out, that Inception is bold and unusual - especially in contemporary Hollywood, where very few original ideas get turned into major blockbuster films. Moreover, it is true that Nolan used his position as custodian of the Batman franchise to get Warner Bros to pony up the money for these side projects. As cool as the idea sounds, it’s hard to imagine too many other people with the clout to get a $160 million film about dream prisons greenlit.

But is Inception really a tectonic milestone, a masterwork of psychological symbolism that peels back the layers of the human psyche to uncover the inner meaning of our lives? In a word: no. It is a very stylish and well-made sci-fi thriller. It has, as all Nolan films do, striking and inventive visuals and set pieces that are delightful to watch. It also has, as many Nolan films also do, an intractable problem with its dialogue and specifically the fact that much of the film is non-stop exposition.

Now, a film as intricate as this one of course requires exposition. But there are more artful ways to show the world of dreams and how they work then to have Joseph Gordon-Levitt go around describing everything like the Lonely Planet Guide to Dreamland come to life. Inception is ultimately mainly about the ideas - cool ideas, served up with really cool visuals. And that is absolutely fine. That is basically what we expect from the sci-fi genre. But it’s not the film that Nolan thinks he made. Here he is in 2010 describing the film to the LA Times:

“I originally wrote it as a heist movie, and heist movies traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms. They’re frivolous and glamorous, and there’s a sort of gloss and fun to it. I originally tried to write it that way, but when I came back to it I realized that -- to me -- that didn’t work for a film that relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes…. The character issues, those are the things that pull the audience through it and amplify the experience no matter how strange things get.”

But, in my opinion, he did in fact make a glossy, rather superficial heist film. Innovative and visually inventive sure, but how deep does it really go? Does anyone watch this movie to find out more about Cobb’s relationship with Mal, or his kids (who we never even see)? Or is she more of a narrative tool to keep the plot moving along and throw a wrench in Cobb’s plans from time to time? I would wager most people (though of course not all) like Inception because of the intricacy of the plot, the wild ideas and the fantastic visuals like the fight in a weightless hallway (an effect achieved using a trick Fred Astaire was doing decades ago).

All of that is perfectly fine. But, at the risk of being a Debbie Downer, I don’t think that qualifies Inception as a masterpiece, or a watershed in cinema history. I think it’s a fine, entertaining sci-fi thriller - an “existential heist film” as the LA Times called it. But it’s not much more than that. If anything this was a turning point in Nolan’s career because he started to buy into his own hype - and who could blame him?.

Nolan began to believe that he was making these visionary masterworks when in reality what he was making was more akin to a superficial, frivolous, glamorous action film, visually glossy with fun ideas but not filled with emotional resonance or deep thematic insights into the human condition. And this would become painfully obvious once Interstellar hit theaters a few years later.