Inception

Becky and I celebrated our 19th anniversary the other night with dinner at Chile's, a walk at the Green Bay Botanical Gardens and watching Inception. Even though this entry is going to focus on Inception, I have to admit the movie was not the best part of the evening. I really enjoyed the long, liesurely walk. The weather was perfect for it. The gardens were beautiful. I'm not really sure what else to say about it though except that if you ever get up to Green Bay, you should visit the botanical gardens.

So, anyway, the movie was good. Not as exciting as I thought it would be after seeing the trailers. I mean, plenty of action, but a lot of it seemed to be there merely for the sake of having action in the movie. It really wasn't an action flick. It's a psychological thriller about a man named Cobb who leads a team of individuals into peoples' dreams to steal their ideas using a process called extraction. Of course, that kind of activity is illegal. The whole "entering dreams" thing is really the only sci-fi/futuristic element of the story, though. It could otherwise take place today in this real world.

Cobb's team gets hired to do something radical. Instead of stealing an idea, they are to insert an idea - inception. Most people believe it's not even possible, but Cobb does. Or at least, he's willing to try for the chance at a clean record and a normal life with his kids. But there are complications that go beyond merely the technical difficulties of inception. I'm not sure how to say more than that without ruining the thriller aspect of the movie.

It was put together well. The characters are acted out well enough that I wanted to see them succeed. The action was fun to watch, even if it seemed gratuitous at times. The extraction and inception concepts are illustrated well enough to not lose us in either the boring tedium of someone elses fantasy or the complexity of something totally foreign. What really made the movie good, though, was how the characters' projections, their subconsious ideas, enter the film, interact with each other and affect both dreams and reality. The movie blatantly sets up a "was this all real or a dream?" conundrum in the end. Personally, I don't think it matters and it seems somewhat of a trivial debate considering that it's a work of fiction. The important thing is that it's a well imagined work that was fun to participate in.