Inception Essay Example

Clearly, Inception is a highly accomplished movie - for a Summer blockbuster. No one can possibly be so dulled to the dazzle of special effects and stellar cast, and the fast-paced action sequences, not to appreciate it at some level. The question that Nolan's unusually intelligent thriller wants us to ask of it, however, is whether this is a good, thought-provoking film by any standards, not just Hollywood's own seasonal one.
Certainly, the film teases at the limits of its viewers' intellect, with its illustration of the truly strange unconsciousness of dreaming. Rather than resorting to pseudoscientific explanations for its premise that dreams can be shared and altered by others, the film instead asks legitimate questions that we may ourselves have thought about at some point: Why can we construct coherent narratives in dreams but can never quite remember the beginning of one? Why do we always wake up before we hit the bottom of a fall? Why does a minute of sleep encode hours or years of narrative play within a dream? Especially towards the start of the film, as we struggle to orientate ourselves in relation to the imaginary dream worlds on screen and the everyday truths about our own dreams that they point towards, the film teases us that we have comprehended its conceptual playfulness before it suddenly scurries away down another Carrollian rabbit hole. Led on a merry chase through its mazes and Escher-type paradoxes (both of which feature as prominent metaphors), we leave the cinema not quite sure of whether we have reached the film's intellectual centre - or even if it is supposed to have one at all.
However, in an attempt to claim some point of understanding, I would note some aspects of the film that are most interesting. The first is how well the film deals with the potentially subversive question that is lurking in the background. Ostensibly, the plot claims that it is possible for one person to share the dreams of another, and to enter their