Director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) is back with his new movie Inception (starring Leonardo DiCaprio), which opens today. I went and saw the midnight showing last night and thought I would take a few minutes here to share my experience of it.
Inception is a movie about ideas and the mind and particularly about extraction and inception. The idea of being able to steal ideas or plant new ideas in people's subconscious minds through shared dreaming.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a professional extractor who specializes in subconscious security and stealing ideas. Cobb is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) a business man who wants Cobb to plant an idea in a business rival's mind. The story follows Cobb as he assembles his team to perform the job and as they travel through their target's mind via shared dreaming.
Inception poses some good questions throughout as the Cobb struggles with recurring memories and questioning what is actually real as the line between dream and reality start to blur.
Inception is a good paced action/thriller that will actually prompt you to think, a difficult tasks for many summer movies. Some viewers may be reminded of The Matrix and other movies that also deal with conscious and subconscious perceptions of reality and dreams but I felt Inception was fresh and smart and enjoyable the whole way through.
A lot of Buddhist philosophy and studies address the nature of dreams, memory and perception and many of those concepts are a key component to Inception.
After watching Inception I was reminded of a Chinese philosopher I read back in my undergrad studies by the name of Chuang-Tzu. Chuang-Tzu meditated on his dreams and wrote about them in great detail; especially famous is his Butterfly Dream, where he could no longer differentiate whether he was a human dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a human. DiCaprio gets so far into his dreams, even dreams within dreams that soon everything has to be questioned as to whether or not it's real and if he can ever wake up.
Below are a few links to various film reviews, trailers and other articles you mind find interesting.
Overall, I would recommend seeing Inception. I know I'll be seeing it at least once more while it's still in theaters.
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