If you haven't seen INCEPTION, see it. Preferably in a real IMAX theater. The wider shots were captured on 65mm film, which is ultra crisp! Plus the sound has more OOMFF and the 35mm seems somehow enhanced & sharper on the bigger screen. I suggest a cheaper matinee showing.
Also if you haven't seen it, DON'T READ what I've written below b/c it will either SPOIL the movie or not make much sense.
If you have, please feel free to rip my analysis apart. I'm not trying to prove a point so much as navigate this maze.
!!!!SPOILERS BELOW!!!!
With INCEPTION, Director Chris Nolan succeeds in doing what 99% of other filmmakers can barely hope to do. Just like the "how the hell did they pull that off?" subconscious-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream climax, he employs multiple levels of metaphors and symbols to elevate INCEPTION into much more than a movie. It raises the bar for how powerful a film can be. So trying to understand the complex ways in which it succeeds would be like analytical suicide, right? I disagree! Let's do a quick breakdown.
First, Nolan decides upon a set of themes he'd like to explore. Themes such as fatherhood, leadership, corporate espionage. And an over-arching theme of perceptions of reality.
Next, Nolan faces the character with a basic spiritual/emotional journey that might compliment these themes, then subsequently builds around it. All good stories do this. Cobb's journey is to let go of his guilt and get back to his children. Translation: he must finish grieving (reconcile w/ his subconscious) in order to become whole again. Catharsis leading way to redemption.
Nolan then gives Cobb a specific reason for needing to undertake this journey. Cobb's been too selfish! His livelihood/passion/indulgence of conscious dreaming has destroyed his wife and taken him away from his kids. So he's incomplete. And he's trapped: that same livelihood/passion/indulgence is preventing his subconscious from letting her go.
Therefore Nolan needs a specific catalyst for Cobb to snap out of this. A deep-seeded ultimatum that causes personal change (or 'inception,' if you will...). That catalyst, I believe, is saving Saito. Saito is the only one who can deliver Cobb to his kids in the waking world - versus his limited subconscious projections of them. So there's relatively little altruism in saving Saito, but it takes the greater selflessness of letting go of Mal in order to take the chance and go for it. Simply put, it takes setting his own soul free in order to free another. True compassion only exists with true sacrifice.
Now, every event and character of the plot is backward-chained from the catalyst, meaning that they all function in an emotional way to converge and create Cobb's breaking point. His father/brother figure, Saito (representing compassion), first must give him the chance to do the right thing. His muse, Ariadne (representing the reason & rational thought in his mind), must be there to guide him. His subconscious, personified by Mal, must inflict a severe blow against being able to see his kids again (she shoots Fischer and locks him away in Limbo). And his analogy, Fischer (who is also attempting to grieve a loss & find redemption), must be stunted in a similar way. Like projections within characters' dreams, the characters themselves are projections of emotional processes within Cobb's mind.
(Could this whole movie have taken place within Cobb's subconscious? Maybe...but ruminating on the reality of Dom Cobb's 'waking life' is no more productive than debating whether Leo DiCaprio is actually Dom Cobb. It's completely beside the point. Cobb is able to get home, through no other way than to reconcile with his subconscious. A worthier debate is whether 'inception' is actually Nolan's conscious analogy to his own filmmaking process. Check out this pretty sharp analysis.)
But not only does Nolan use archetypes to propel Cobb's emotional journey; the entire framework of INCEPTION does this. Symbols are everywhere in INCEPTION. In the dreams, water, freight trains and altered physics are nothing more than representations of something going on in the dreamer's mind. Multiple dream levels simply serve as varying representations of each other. But the fact that they're just symbols enhances the core theme of the movie, perceptions of reality. Every cool little detail in INCEPTION is a symbol of something more basic, something more emotional. Just like Cobb's team carries out an extremely complex plan to inspire an emotion inside Fischer's mind, Nolan is similarly attacking us from every angle to implant the idea of metaphor: both dreams and waking life are just symbolic for what's happening inside a person's mind. His pervasive, multi-lateral use of emotional metaphor is the mastery of this movie.
Simply examining the title reveals all. As a stand-in for catharsis/redemption, 'inception' first occurs deep inside the analogy's subconscious - Fischer's; it then happens not-so-deep within Cobb's; and finally happens for each and every one of us who see it. I can't let it go. I can't stop thinking about what it means to be whole without having a grip on 'objective' reality. Nolan is suggesting - not so subtly - that 'inception' isn't just a dream or a movie. It's real. And movies, or at least his movies*, have the power to pull it off.
I don't know about you, but that is irresistibly invigorating for me as a filmmaker.
*Nolan just did what the Wachowskis failed to do with THE MATRIX trilogy. Keep us wondering.
**I owe a lot of my thinking about this to the article posted above.
