A film review: Inception

Sometimes my English teacher asks me to write about movies, books or something else in order to improve my writing skills. I've just posted a review I've written about "Inception", a film from Christopher Nolan that I liked very much. I've written something else in Portuguese and I've already posted it. But, to my English course, I've decided to write something different.           _________________________________________________

 “Inception" is a Christopher Nolan’s film that talks about dreams and their importance in our lives. Its importance has been showed not only as Freud said in the past in his psychology theory, but steps forward: that an idea can be inserted in the brain while someone else is asleep. When this person awakes, he/she will think that the inserted idea is his/hers.

When “Inception” starts we get to know that corporate spy-for-hire Dom Cobb (Leonard DiCaprio) steals ideas in dreams and he is good at doing that. But now he was hired to achieve the impossible: inception - planting an idea in the mind of a rich guy who will receive an inheritance from his father and will be the director of an important industry. But this plan has a lot of risks and if he fails he will be trapped forever. If he succeeds, he can see his estranged children.

Cobb and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have developed a technology that allows them to get inside the subconscious mind of someone else and poke around in dreams. It’s not an easy thing to access someone’s dream, plugging themselves into someone’s brain and so forth. Cobb’s cohorts - played by Tom Hardy (Eames), Ellen Page (Ariadne) and Dileep Rao (Yusuf) – have come from various areas of expertise and did all they had in hands to make the plan work. Ken Watanabe (Saito) is the client who has hired Cob and his team and Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer Jr.) is the target (the rich guy).

The special effects in the movie are very good and related to the story. Nothing is just to show off. Most of the film takes place in various people’s subconscious minds, and these dreamscapes are presented like real life, although they are weird. The people and objects are familiar; they just behave in unusual ways. Manipulating reality like this can be more exciting than using computers to play Farmville, and it’s more in line with what our real dreams are like anyway.

Behind the action in the film, there is an emotional side to all of this. DiCaprio’s character has grief issues that are superficially similar to those of his “Shutter Island” character (Martin Scorcese film). Mal (played by Marion Cotillard) is his dead wife who appears on the screen to remember him something he doesn’t want to realize. She appears with the La Vie en Rose (by Édith Piaf) soundtrack and it’s the film’s main puzzle. She is not, however, exactly a character in “Inception”. She’s a kind of Cob’s subconscious projection.

I liked it so much and think that it was the best film I’ve ever seen in years. I’m not the kind of person who likes action movies, but this one has a very good plot and good sequences, as the low-gravity part. The special effects are not there to fill spaces. They are part of the story and important to the viewers’ comprehension. Besides this, the soundtrack signed by Hans Zimmer is wonderful and so important to the action.

Christopher Nolan worked in this movie for almost 10 years and to do those scenes and special effects he and the production staff needed to travel to several countries, such as France, Japan, England and Morocco. The movie had a big investment and I do recommend it.