Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) may be a return to his early puzzle films – Memento (2000) – but his follow-up to The Dark Knight (2008) mostly cements his blockbuster reputation in his capacity to unite ‘thinking’ and ‘action’.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate dream stealer whose team (an excellent ensemble cast) attempts the ‘impossible’ – to insert an idea into a dreamer – so Cobb can return to his children and the wife (Marion Cotillard) who haunts his dreams.

Featuring action sequences that seek to outdo The Matrix (1999), Inception initially compares to cinema itself, the dream factory’s creation of a ‘reality’ so seductive that we willfully let it temporarily confuse our understanding of just what is real, but may actually be more akin to contemporary trends in user-generated gaming worlds.

Regardless, Inception is ultimately about male guilt, memory and redemption – key interests of much recent American cinema – and it is only the difficulty puzzle films have in establishing emotional audience identification (wait, where am I now?) that prevents Nolan similarly achieving his own impossible, a truly great Hollywood blockbuster… but most of us, willfully lost in the thrilling ‘worlds’ Nolan creates, won’t care a jot.

Smiljana Glisovic also makes this interesting – and relevant (for my own research) – observation:

These ideas are weaved in elegantly amongst the bullets exchanged between our main protagonists and their ‘enemies’ without identity, they literally have no face. I wonder about the need to perpetuate this notion of the ‘enemy’. The characters find themselves in various states of warfare at all levels of consciousness. It serves to fulfill the ‘action’ part of what they want to pitch as a huge blockbuster, but it also sustains this fear of the ‘other’ and the need to protect ourselves from them, to eradicate them.

her point on the anonymity of the ‘enemy’ is well made, as is her identification of the state of total war – and the paranoia it implies… however, it seems in the film that the self is feared as much as any Other, and that many Others are indeed projections, constructions…

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