Inception (Nolan, 2010): Screen on the Green, 10.30am
This 35mm presentation is part of the Christopher Nolan (35mm) season at the Screen on the Green and is also being screened on Saturday June 17th. Full details here.
Time Out review:
Funny things, dreams. Fascinating for the dreamer, but as dull
as a late morning in Slough for anybody else, unless, of course, your
guide is Freud. Or, as it turns out, Christopher Nolan, the 39-year-old
British director of ‘Memento’ and ‘The Dark Knight’, whose solution to
the boredom of other people’s dreams is to collide their woozy,
ever-changing, upside-down and roundabout nature with the thrust of a
fast-paced, men-on-a-mission movie and a startling visual language that
mirrors their strangeness. Better still, the dreams preferred by Nolan
include images of Paris folding in on itself and a trackless train
thundering through a city. The limited, sleepworld excitements of
retaking your A levels ad infinitum or forever missing a flight at the
airport don’t figure here. Nolan throws a perfect
storm of stunts, effects, locations and actors at one big idea: that
it’s possible to pilfer ideas from dreams by a process called
‘extraction’, which involves hooking yourself up to a drip, falling
asleep and entering the world of the subconscious. The holy grail of
this process is to reverse it, which is ‘inception’, the planting of a
new idea in another’s mind. That’s the trick that experts Dom (Leonardo
DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), aided by new recruits
Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Eames (Tom Hardy), try to pull off while
hopping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa. They’re working for Saito (Ken
Watanabe) in pursuit of business magnate Robert (Cillian Murphy), and
their motives vary, from financial to intellectual. But DiCaprio has
another driver: the memory of his wife Mal (Marion Cottilard) is
haunting him and it’s going to take a lot of psychological
spring-cleaning for him to reconnect with that lost world. All
hail Nolan for mastering a higher class of mass entertainment. Like all
good science fiction, ‘Inception’ demands we pay serious attention to
pure fantasy on the back of strong ideas and exquisite craft – but it
also combines fantasy with real observations about our sleeping lives.
Like a dream, Nolan’s film fades swiftly in the light – but while it
lasts, it feels like there’s nothing more important to decipher.
Dave Calhoun
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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