Leonardo DiCaprio is THE EXTRACTOR. He is the best extractor in the whole extractation biz, and no one’s extractables are safe while DiCaprio and his six intrepid ought-to-be-extracted chin hairs are on the case. What are extractables, you ask? Shut up. They’re brain documents, or something. What is extraction? The army invented it. Dreaming ain’t safe, DiCaprio says. “It makes your consciousness vulnerable to theft.” The chin hairs waft about like oily kelp. DiCaprio is thinking hard. About yo brainz.

Christopher Nolan has been working on the script of Inception for the past entire 10-year decade, which must be why it feels about a decade stale. Not bad-stale, necessarily—kind of comforting-stale. Like cold pizza. Delicious! Or a crunchy Chips Ahoy, moistened by Father Time’s rheumy tears, which thus becomes a chewy Chips Ahoy. Weirdly delicious! Or that Dorito I found last week, stuck between my fitted sheet and my mattress like one of those dinosquitoes from Jurassic Park. Delici…um…ish. (Speaking of, can you imagine if we could clone Doritos!?!? I already know what we’d call the facility: the Cooler Ranch. Intern, put out an ad for a “Samuel L. Jackson type” to run the powdered-cheese cannon. Chop chop, intern! Am I the only one here with vision, people!? UNLIMITED DORITOS!)

Anyhow, Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that he was inspired by turn-of-the-most-recent-century reality-benders (including his own): “You had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.” There’s some Mission: Impossible in there, too (Inception is structured as a classic heist) and some Jamiroquai and obligatory Escher (snooze) and a dash of the long con. The temporal origami isn’t as interesting or unsettling as Memento‘s, but overall Inception is a fun, familiar, exciting, slightly silly, and surprisingly restrained action movie that’s almost populated by real humans.

Once you get a handle on Inception‘s internal geometry (Nolan gamely plunges into the thick of it—no wussy exposition here), it’s a fairly-straightforward-if-mindfucky premise. A decade post-Matrix, we’re beyond being mind-boggled by the exchange “They come here every day to sleep?” “No. They come to be woken up.” But it’s still fun to watch Inception unravel itself. DiCaprio and his team—Ellen Page (professional nag), some British guy (my boyfriend), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (suspenders), Dileep Rao (the one with the drugs), and Ken Watanabe (apparently the CEO of American law enforcement)—have to climb all up inside Cillian Murphy’s dreams and convince him to dissolve his father’s corporate empire. Commercial concerns turn to personal ones as it’s revealed that DiCaprio’s thuggish-ruggish subconscious is running around dreamland fucking everything up.

That and his chin hairs. Keep those chin hairs out of the Doritos cloning machine. recommended

Lindy West was born an unremarkable female baby in Seattle, Washington. The former Stranger writer covered movies, movie stars, exclamation points, lady stuff, large frightening fish, and much, much more....

13 replies on “Concessions”

  1. That British guy is Tom Hardy, who looks totally different in every film he makes (Google images of ‘Bronson movie’ – yep, that’s really him). He’s sporting the kind of accent that Americans think all we Brits have but in fact no-one has because we don’t live in a weak 19C novella. TH is brilliantly eccentric and heavily tattooed with fairly bad teeth, so we worship him as a god over here.

  2. So is this Mr. Nolan’s free pass for making nothing but wholly watchable and enjoyable movies for the past 10 years? The tone in your review is the exact tone I recall putting on when I was six years old and got an 8 pack of socks from my grandmother for Christmas.

  3. I have a feeling I will come out of the theater saying “I liked it a bunch, I enjoy a very mild mindfuck, but it had way too much DiCaprio and not enough Murphy.” I hope I am wrong, but really, I don’t think”enough Cillian Murphy” is possible. Still looking forward to this.

  4. This is one of the few times I disagree with Lindy. This film is brilliant, up there with Memento and The Dark Knight. DiCaprio and his chin pubes were great in it, but the real standout is Tom Hardy.

    I walked in thinking, “The ending will probably be that they were in a dream the whole time or something.” And while that could be one way to interpret it, almost everyone I talked to had their own spin on what the ending and the whole movie meant.

  5. This movie was really thought-provoking. The biggest question it raised for me was: of the movies Michael Caine’s appeared in, which is worse, Inception or Jaws 4?

  6. Tom Hardy? THAT Tom Hardy? Oh goodie, now I can be a *professed* fan of the guy who I have found absurdly compelling through several different projects while never realizing it was the same guy. What a relief!

  7. Funny footnote: Hardy is going to be the new Mad Max. Seriously.

    Oh, and Inception is excellent. Maybe not Memento excellent, but certainly The Dark Knight excellent–bigger than anything else out there, and smarter than anything that big has any right to be. Hardy and Gordon-Levitt are certainly highlights, as far as performances are concerned.

  8. Sure, Inception may not be the best movie ever made, but it is 1000 times better than your average summer blockbuster. Nolan is a consistently good director. Leonardo DeCaprio is a good actor (although I agree he’d be better off without the skanky face whiskers). Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to impress. The whole movie is a delicious mind-fuck. The special effects were interesting, and not your average CGI.

    Well worth the ticket price, which is more than I can say for just about everything else in the theaters right now.

  9. Liked. But, the concept that planting an idea in someone’s head and making them think it was theirs is novel—WTF? Haven’t they been exposed to any advertising in the past 50 years?

  10. This movie sucked ass. If you’re going to make a fake-science movie like this it simply must maintain strict internal coherence. Otherwise it’s just dumb. That’s why The Matrix and Memento were so good; they laid out the rules of the world and then they followed them. This film totally failed at that.

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