Inception landed on Amazon Prime Video this weekend, and it makes for a hell of a rewatch.
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, after a series of very sensible delays, will finally release in theaters this August or September depending on where you live. Even if the notion of going to the cinema might feel strange to you at this point, it’s largely seen as the movie that’ll supercharge theater attendance after they closed worldwide back in ‘spring’, due to the ongoing health crisis. I have really mixed feelings about going to theaters again right now, especially in England where I feel like people aren’t taking social distancing rules or mask wearing that seriously. But damn: I want to see Tenet a lot. In the meantime, I’ve been dipping into Nolan’s older movies again. Last weekend I rewatched 2010’s Inception at exactly the right moment. I don’t think I’ve seen that film since maybe 2014, when Interstellar was released, and it means I’d forgotten enough of the movie to truly enjoy it again. If you’re in the US, Inception recently left Netflix and landed on Amazon Prime Video (where it was already available in the UK), and holy crap: watch that film again. If it’s been a minute since you’ve seen it, you’ll get a lot out of repeating that experience. Inception is about Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ‘extractor’ who steals secrets using a type of technology that allows him to infiltrate and shape the dreams of his target. The bulk of the film is about Cobb’s complex efforts to plant an idea in a subject’s subconscious – businessman Robert Michael Fischer (Cillian Murphy) – in order for him to escape the law and reunite with his children. Meanwhile, Cobb is haunted by visions of Mal (Marion Cotillard), his deceased wife, whose death he feels responsible for. Essentially, Inception is a heist movie set inside dreams (inside more dreams). The film doesn’t waste time explaining how or why its fictional technology exists – instead, it just shows you what the technology does. A perfect introduction to the film shows how the dreams of Inception are layered – that the target can wake up in one dream layer, only to still be dreaming in another, perhaps without realizing it.
