Cobb is a specialist of entering people’s dreams to steal whatever secrets they have from their subconscious. Cobb’s wife Mal killed herself by having trouble knowing the difference between a dream and reality. She believed she was in a dream, jumped from a window in order to wake herself up and ended up killing herself. She left something behind framing Cobb for her death and because he is faced with murder charge, Cobb fled the country and left his children in charge of his father Professor Stephen Miles. Cobb is given a task to plant an idea to convince Robert Michael Fischer to take over his father’s company after he’s gone. Cobb assembles a team to help him with the job. Arthur, Cobb’s partner who manages and researches the missions. Ariadne, a graduate student of architecture. Eames, a man with imagination in order to become a master of disguise. Mr. Saito, a Japanese businessman who employs Cobb for the teams’s mission.
Blaine: Christopher Nolan spent ten years putting together the script for “Inception”. Dreams were one of those subjects Chris took an interest into. What Chris found interesting was how different dreams are different from reality. Being in a dream is like being in a fantasy world. Chris wrote different versions for the script and originally “Inception” was supposed to be a movie that wasn’t two and a half hours long. Chris wanted it to be smaller than that, but it was difficult because there is a lot about dreams that make it fascinating to Chris. Chris not only put together a script that was very smart, but also something that was action packed like James Bond. The way I would describe “Inception” is that it’s like therapy. You’re trying to find out what’s on the person’s mind and you are going deep within the mind, or as they say in “Inception” “dream within a dream” to see what the problem is by entering the subconscious. The actors had to do their homework through Chris Nolan in order to understand this project they were going to be involved in. You could say Christopher Nolan was their science teacher.
One of the things I find interesting about the characters in a Christopher Nolan movie is that they have names you don’t usually hear like Cobb, Ariadne, Eames, Mal. Cobb is a criminal and goes into peoples’ dreams so he can steal whatever ideas that are valuable deep within the person’s mind and that causes him to become a wanted man in a few different counties. Marion Cotillard's character Mal is Cobb’s deceased wife who he has trouble letting go and she wonders around as a bad memory wherever she pleases. Mal killed herself believing she was in a dream because both her and Cobb spent a lot of time in limbo.
Ellen Page's character, Ariadne, is the architect. She creates the surroundings in the dream like the buildings. Everyone knows Cobb is having trouble trying to forget his deceased wife, but Ariadne feels there is more details to it. Compared to the other members of the group, Ariadne is the only one who wants to get close to Cobb and see what his problem is. Ariadne sees Cobb keeps repeating the past in his dreams. She convinces Cobb to let go of the past and move on. Ariadne is like Cobb’s therapist and she sticks close to him. Mal is dead, but she lives on in Cobb’s memories and she keeps interfering with things in the dream world. She’s like a computer virus.
Tom Hardy's character, Eames, has been described as someone with imagination and I would also call him a master of disguise because he goes undercover and transforms himself into another person in the dream world. Eames can become someone he imagined himself or he can become someone who already exist in the real world. In order to become that real person, Eames has to study them if he is to portray them. He also does a lot of rehearsal. It’s the same thing actors do when they are finding their performance.
Both Chris Nolan and his cinematographer Wally Pfister have a great eye on how the scene should look. They think alike. There is a lot of shots in “Inception” that I like. There’s close up shots of small objects like the top that spins around to see if you’re awake or still dreaming. I also like the close up shot of Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard’s faces touching. There’s a scene in a men’s restroom where Leonardo is facing in one direction posing while Cillian is facing the left looking down trying to remember something. It is also a low shot that shows the sinks in a straight line.
Joesph Gordon Levitt has to fight off bad guys in hall way, but this is not any ordinary hall way fight. Everything is moving around because they’re in a dream within a dream. While everything is moving around on the outside of the dream the inside becomes gravity. Joseph had to rehearse the hallway fight for two weeks. He wanted to do everything himself without having a stunt double. There was one set of the hallway that was built vertical and that was for when Arthur is floating and Joesph would be attached to a wire coming down as the camera would be looking up at him while shooting. They built a centrifuge, a machine that rotates, of the corridor that would revolve. The camera would be screwed on to the set so that way it could rotate with it. Other times they would have the camera on a crane.
Cobb gives a demonstration on what dreams are like to Ariadne and the first thing he shows her is things exploding, like party poppers, around them, moving in slow motion. Chris wanted the Cafe explosion sequence to happen in the middle of Paris and the French weren’t too big on that while they were shooting because they don’t like explosions going off around there. The special effects supervisor, Chris Corould, used air cannons for the explosions and wires to flip over the cars, bikes, chairs and tables. Wally Pfister had six high-speed cameras to capture that sequence. The visual effects department would add more pieces to the explosion using a computer.
The hotel bar was a set that would tilt around like a seesaw. Chris would only want the liquid in the glass to be tilted. They had to ratchet the camera down in order to make everything else in the shot look still. That set would be very hard to stand inside once it would tilt and the people would have to hold onto it. Took a lot to construct a set just for one shot of a glass, but Chris likes to make things as real as possible.
Chris said the idea of limbo is that Cobb and Mal have created their own world and have spent a lot of time architecting these buildings during the time they are trapped there. Chris and his team spent a lot of time looking up glaciers falling apart and designing concepts of what buildings would look like rotting away and collapsing into the sea. While they were scouting for a location in Morocco they found these buildings in the middle of nowhere and Chris thought it would be perfect to shoot the limbo sequence. They shot the scene with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page’s characters entering limbo and the people at the visual effects department would then later make those buildings look like they were rotting away. Machines were built to make the waves for when the characters, Cobb and Ariadne first arrive in limbo and walk to the surface.
In one of the dreams, a train runs through a downtown street. It looks like they used a real train for that shot, but it was actually a truck underneath. The train was molded from real train parts so that everything had the right texture and look. The front of it was built with a bit of a mild steel so that way when it impacted through the cars it wouldn’t shatter. It pushed the cars and smashed them up.
Fortress mountain was the biggest set for “Inception”. Chris wanted to be able to look out a window and see beautiful backdrops of mountains that could not be achieved digitally. Before “Inception” began production, Wally Pfister was shooting a commercial in Calgary, Canada and Chris asked if he could keep an eye out for a place to shoot the snow sequence. Wally saw a closed down ski resort and thought Chris should check it out. They had to make sure the set was built before it snowed so they started constructing it in August. They had to wait for it to snow before shooting continued. Chris Nolan has been a James Bond fan his whole life and he wanted the action in “Inception” to be something like the bond films. Fortress mountain represents the bad guys layer in a Bond film. Like I said Chris likes things to look as real as they can without using digital effects. They tried to shoot as many things with camera as they could and that was difficult shooting in Calgary when the weather is freezing cold. They shot real avalanches thanks to some professional people who would fly around and drop explosives in order to create them.
Cobb manages to succeed in the end and return to his beloved children. He spins the top to make sure he is not dreaming. He doesn’t wait for it to finish because seeing his kids faces is very exciting for him. The top is still spinning and the question is if it’s a dream or reality. The ending is a mystery. It took team work to make “Inception” according to Chris Nolan. Another subject Chris Nolan finds interesting is how much goes in to making one movie from costumes, to sets, to cinematography.
My rating on “Inception” is five out of five stars.
Music by Hans Zimmer
Parodies
The Simpsons
Plot: Homer is having bed wetting problems and he can’t explain what the problem is. Professor John Frink is able to help with his latest invention that allows people to go into someone else's dream. The Simpson family goes deep within Homer’s mind to figure out what is causing him to wet the bed. Homer’s deceased mother, Mona Simpson, who lives inside Homer’s memories, is able to help. She shows them a clip of one of Homer’s childhood memories when he and his dad, Abe went on a fishing trip. Homer accidentally tipped the boat over and both he and Abe returned hours later without one fish. Few weeks later Mona left Abe and Homer feels guilty for being the cause of it. Mona informs Homer he has nothing to be guilty about as long as Abe brought back their son safe and sound. And when Mona left she knew Homer was in good hands. Homer is now cured of his bed wetting problem.
South Park
Plot: Stan Marsh is hoarding stuff in his school locker and he can’t explain why. He is sent to the school counselor Mr. Mackey, but turns out he is hoarding as well. A hoarding specialist named Dr. Chinstrap attaches Stan, Mackey and a sheep herder to a machine to figure out their hoarding problems. They fall asleep and Mackey finds himself back in elementary school running from a bully. Problem is Stan and the sheep herder are in the memory as well. Dr. Chinstrap and his assistant Dr. Pinkerton can’t explain why Stan and the sheep herder are in Mackey’s subconscious. Dream experts (Cobb, Arthur, Eames, Saito and Yusuf) are called in to help.
They go into the dream to find Stan, Mackey and the sheep herder. Mackey and the others believe his problem was that he was bullied while on a field trip, but once the dream experts kill the bullies nothing happens. Mackey, Stan, the sheep herder and the dream experts are still in the dream. Mackey then recalls running away from the bullies and then hiding out in a cabin. Mackey opens the door and sees himself being molested by Woodsy Owl.
Woodsy Owl goes all evil now that he is exposed as the bad memory and goes after everyone. The dream experts shoot at Woodsy, but he’s too powerful. Woodsy kills the sheep herder. Freddy Krueger saves the day by killing Woodsy Owl after being called in by Chinstrap. Everyone wakes up and Mr. Mackey is now cured. After what he has experienced, Stan doesn’t want to know his cause of hoarding so he just gets rid of the junk in his locker.
Rick and Morty
Plot: Rick invents a small device that allows him and Morty to go into other peoples’ dreams. Rick’s plan is to go into the dream of Morty’s math class teacher and plant an idea to give Morty an A in math.
