After the success of the Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan decided to finally work on his oldest script, which he had been developing for over a decade. I watched Inception a couple of days back and this time, just like the previous viewings, I looked at it from a new and a different perspective, and as always, I found myself in awe towards the end. Welcome to my third and final part of the three-part series where I attempted to highlight certain aspects of my 3 favorite Christopher Nolan movies.
The other two movies which I reviewed are The Dark Knight and Interstellar. The only common thing about all the three movies including Inception is that at some point in all three movies, you will feel like you've never experienced this feeling before and that no other movie could possibly be this good.
Inception came out in 2010, it won the Oscar for Cinematography and sound editing although I'd argue it deserved more, I stopped caring about what the Academy thought and didn't want to use that as a yardstick to rate movies. The movie had a lot of familiar faces from other Nolan movies like Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ken Watanabe. Leonardo DiCaprio was the main character we followed, Cobb, an extractor who operates by stealing things from other people's minds from their dreams who is also on the run for being charged with the murder of his own wife.
The majority of the movie involves an expert from a particular field explaining how things work in the dream world. The group consists of a group of architects to design the dream world, a forger, and a chemist. The main plot of the movie is a group of experts, led by Cobb, attempting to plant an idea on the head of a major corporation using positive reinforcement which would then inspire him to dissolve his company. This movie demands and deserves your complete attention throughout its run time, this is not your usual popcorn flick where you can afford to miss a few scenes. In order to fully understand what happens during the mission, you need to pay attention to every second.
I'm not going to go into any more details regarding the plot, what I'd really like to talk about now is Hans Zimmer and his terrific background score which keeps you at the edge of the seat without which the full depth of the movie can't really be felt. In my opinion, this is the best work of Hans Zimmer, no other movie comes close to his work in Inception. There are plenty of soundtracks from Inception that are on my everyday playlist, a few of them being "Mombassa", "Dream within a dream", "Dark Mal", "One simple Idea" and the best of the lot being "Time". Zimmer really gave it everything he had and to this day, Inception's background scores keep getting so much praise.
The other huge achievement was the achievement in cinematography. The visuals were some of the best ever put to the silver screen. There are scenes in this movie that took months to be finished, scenes that would make your jaw drop so much that you'd want to be a part of their world and make you want to say goodbye to reality. This movie was a visual masterpiece, every scene was a spectacle, and this movie was an inspiration to so many other movies that were made during the decade. Outstanding camera work, sometimes it just makes you forget what's actually happening and admire how good the shot looks. I guess if I'm looking to nitpick this movie, this was the only thing that I can actually complain about, that it was so visually spectacular, it made me lose focus of the plot at times.
My plan was to basically just highlight what I liked about these three movies in particular and finish it by saying all three were equally good in their own way but watching these three films now has made me arrive at a conclusion which I really didn't expect to find myself in. Inception is Nolan's most original idea, perhaps his oldest idea, he had the script ready for years, he didn't have the budget for it but following the success of The Dark Knight and the name he earned for himself after that, he could even afford to make a terrible film and still keep his reputation untarnished. But Nolan managed to do the opposite. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this, Nolan made something better than The Dark Knight and Interstellar. The only person who can beat Nolan is Nolan and I'm hoping to be blown away by Tenet whenever we get a chance to catch it in theatres.
He had DC Comics material to guide him to make The Dark Knight trilogy, he himself has mentioned plenty of times that 2001: A Space Odyssey was his favorite film and that Interstellar is loosely based on that. Nolan created something from scratch, something which was supposed to be just a collection of abstract ideas and perfected it with such a flawless feature film, he literally made dreams a reality. Inception is Christopher Nolan's crowning jewel and watching these three films over these past few days transformed the question mark that I had into a full stop for me, to put it in simple words, Inception is 'Nolan's Best.'
Verdict
Fan in me: 10/10
Critic in me: 10/10
