27 Aug 2021
Inception and why it's sick
Dreams are pretty neat. Without them, sleep probably wouldn't be all that exciting. It's when your mind is most active; crafting all sorts of wacky projections and scenarios for you to play around in. Since this is obviously your mind, you are tricked into believing it's real. Regardless of how much logic is defied, it will feel completely normal to you. With all this trickery and endless possibilities, you're bound to end up in completely new scenarios and places each time, all based on your experiences and thoughts from your life.
Now, I'm going to pose an interesting question: what if you could steal sensitive information from said dreams? I mean, they are the creation of your mind itself. Surely a thief can pry out what's in there when you're deep in the depths of your mind. So that's Inception, right? Dudes stealing corporate stuff from vulnerable people's brains? ...Not quite.
See, the movie title "Inception" isn't there for nothing. These dudes are thinking of the possibility of planting an idea in someone's head. Extracting information is the first thing, but inserting information? Surely it can't be done. So these guys do it...but there's a problem.
Dreams inside dreamsInception perfectly captures the concept of dreams inside dreams. We've encountered them before; you wake up to another dream. Usually this only happens one layer deep, and going to sleep in the dream within the dream probably wouldn't work. These dream extractors and company have already done dreams within a dream before, but in order to INCEPT an idea inside someone's brain they need to go one layer deeper. A dream inside a dream inside a dream.
To start INCEPTING you need to begin broad, and work your way down the layers until the idea has fermented itself in the victim's brain. Now here's the part I love about this: the concept of time.
Cobbs (protagonist) suggests the amount of time being in a 10 hour plane ride would affect the time in a dream. A week for the first layer, all the way up to ten years for the third layer. Obviously they're not gonna spend 10 years in one dream alone, only to wake up knowing only a few minutes have passed in the second layer, so they wake up early with a kick. But the concept of time slowing down in dreams more and more the deeper you go is still there.
The scene when Yusuf nose dives the van into the water is the most tense. It's not just a slow motion shot of the vehicle slowly plummeting into the bluish depths below, no no, it's an entire montage of what's happening in the layers below...and keep in mind Yusuf is still in a dream. There's a video called Inception in Real-Time that perfectly shows why I love this part of the movie so much. It speaks for itself.
In limboNot too early in the first layer of the dream, Saito gets shot, ouchy oof eeps yow. Now they're going to put him out of his misery to end the pain and wake him up (since you can feel pain in dreams (this applies to real life as well, obviously)) until Cobb introduces the concept of Limbo. They're so deep into their minds that getting killed in their dream wouldn't wake them up. It would take them to Limbo, where they would wake up on the shore of their subconscious and be there for almost 200 years. And this, to me, is pretty horrifying. For a century and a half you live in the deepest depths of your brain without even knowing it's real. And when you wake up... well, imagine waking up from the reality you're living in right now, knowing that none of that was real. Ouch!!!! What's scary is that, uh, this is actually kind of a possibility. I mean, it's not like most of us know how our life...or the universe...started.
And right then and there is when you realize that this is a movie that needs to be rewatched. You will not understand everything at first, but that's the beauty of it. The action, the surprising realism (besides the dream logic that exists in real life as well, there's also this), the complexity, and the look on your face as you approach the end. Inception is a wonderful foray into the world of dreaming. It takes that concept and twists it to create a bunch of badass dudes who are hunted across the globe because they take personal information from people's brain. That is REALLY creative. I actually forgot to talk about the score, but this is already getting really lengthy and I'm sounding like a huge dumbarse so... let me sum it up...
Holy ship.
10/10 Written on Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400