Inception Is Basically The Matrix, with Dreams
Since glimpsing teaser trailers for Christopher "Dark Knight" Nolan's upcoming mind-bender Inception, where "your mind is the scene of the crime," folks have been scratching their heads wondering what this movie is all about. Well, now we have answers. Kinda.
A new longer length trailer with actual dialogue has just been released, and it appears that the movie is basically Leonardo DiCaprio playing a dream thief. People hide secret things in dreams and then DiCaprio goes in to retrieve them, illegally. He is also trying to get "home," where apparently Marion Cotillard lies in his arms a lot and cries.
The Matrix comparison comes from both movies' ideas about lucid dreaming. Once you are aware that the whole show is just in your head, you can control the circumstances and make extraordinary things happen. This mostly leads to lots of Matrix-esque fly-fighting and some eye-popping scenes of a European city (Paris?) folding into a cube like a big cardboard box. There's also some Bond-style skiing and shooting antics and Joseph Gordon-Levitt with slicked-back hair, firing guns from taxicabs.
Nolan is one of the most stylish and dark-minded of the big-ticket filmmakers working today, and while this trailer makes us slightly less interested — it does feel a bit like we've been down this bendy road before — we still hold hope that it will at least be a nifty and tightly-built genre picture. Much like Nolan's first post-Mementon project, Insomnia, was a ruminative and moody take on the cop thriller. What do you think? Do some vague answers intrigue you more or less?