"Inception"

In Agatha Christie's Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, Christie's famed Belgian detective is on the trail of what he defines as the "perfect" murderer - one who doesn't actually commit the crime on their own, but instead makes other people commit murder by the instilling the idea into them via words and suggestions. 35 years after the publication of that novel, Christopher Nolan (of Memento and Batman Begins fame) has made a movie with essentially the same idea, but with a lot more technical mumbo-jumbo thrown in. Inception finds a special group of thieves (led by Leonardo Di Caprio's Cobb) attempting to instill an idea into their target's mind (a process that is called "inception") by invading his dreams. This is in contrast to their normal skill of extracting secrets from peoples heads using the same approach - invading their dreams. Inception is supposedly fraught with risk, but the motivation for Cobb to take on this risk is that he would then be able to return to the US where he is currently wanted for the murder of his wife, Mal. That is the basic plot, but the execution is anything but simple. There are layers of complexity and indeed layers of dreams. Not unlike the shaving razor wars of increasing number of blades, we go from dreams to dreams within dreams, and all the way to dreams within dreams within dreams within dreams. At some point, we the viewer give up trying to figure out which layer we are on and just go along for the ride.

And it is mostly an entertaining ride, especially if you can ignore the earnest and somewhat repetitive dialogs. The characters are dead serious about their roles and never acknowledge the absurdity of their situations. There is a resolute attempt to project an air of normalcy - it seems that everybody knows about dream invasion and extraction and indeed some folks go so far as to train themselves to defend against it. The concept is clearly futuristic and so very SciFi but all the action all seems to take place in present time - this grates on a subtle level.

The inspiration of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is obvious in a fight that takes place in a hotel corridor, but under zero gravity. Many of the effects are quite impressive, but we have stopped taking the plot seriously long before the end of the movie. Indeed, it can fairly be said that a Bond movie broke out in the middle of a Nolan movie. There is very little attempt to explain the various plot elements and we are asked to take a lot on faith. Not coincidentally, some character or the other is regularly asking somebody else to "take a leap of faith" with them.

Throughout, there are hints of secrets withheld and they are faithfully unraveled towards the end, but they had no impact - I shrugged and waited for the story to move on. The ending is another attempt to salvage the mystery element, but feels more like a cheap trick. I am a big fan of Memento and that was the major reason I went for this movie, but Nolan does not fulfill that promise. It was famously said of Memento that the cast and crew were convinced that the tale hung together after they physically rearranged the screenplay and re-read it. I strongly doubt that any such permutation of the script will help with this one. The movie is full of thrills, spills, and inane dialog, but an engrossing work it is not. I suggest waiting for the DVD.