INCEPTION
Screenplay
Analysis by:
Petros L. Ioannou
Inception is a 2010
film written by Christopher Nolan to be directed by him.. It was released hot
on the heels of the film that hurled Christopher Nolan from “good director” to
“this director can do no wrong”, an adaptation of the Batman franchise, “The
Dark Knight”. The Dark Knight grossed over a billion dollars making it at the time
the fourth highest grossing film of all time. As such Nolan became so well
received as a director that he was given a virtually unlimited budget to create
a completely original concept film. Now as far as I can find, this has only
happened once previously in history, with James Cameron, who after Terminator
racking $500m at the box office got $175m to make Titanic and then after that
smashed the box office to the point that is made well over double Jurassic
Park, the top grossing film of all time, he was given the money to make Avatar,
the highest grossing film of all time to this date grossing nearly a billion
dollars more than even Titanic. So you can imagine the faith that Warner Bros
had placed in Christopher Nolan after his success with The Dark Knight.
Inception was an original concept that could either turn out to be the next
Titanic or Avatar or it could be a complete flop.
Well, it didn't make the kind of money that Avatar or Titanic, in
fact it didn't actually even reach the box office gross of The Dark Knight. It
reached similar critical acclaim, with Inception being nominated for Best
Picture and Best Original Screenplay, both of which it lost out to The King’s
Speech. It made $825m at the box office, a huge success also but still not
quite as much as The Dark Knight, a film that’s often considered one of the
biggest Oscar snubs in history. Now I will make often comparisons to The Dark
Knight in this analysis; the reason being is that both were massive budget
action films, written and directed by the same man with similar critical and
financial success. On a basic screenplay basis Inception is unusual for
Christopher Nolan as he usually co-writes his screenplays with his brother
Jonathan Nolan, even adapting Memento a short story by Jonathan. This is Christopher
Nolan’s first solo attempt at an original screenplay for a bigger budget film,
his first and only other attempt was “Following” a British Neo-Noir, so
obviously a much smaller scale movie. I
find it quite interesting to compare and contrast the screenplays of Inception
and The Dark Knight to see the differences; the first of which is obviously
that Inception is an original screenplay and The Dark Knight is an adaptation
of an existing work.
Inception is a very good film; it’s also a film which, much like
Avatar, was hyped to shit before its release and very much during and as such
as received something of a backlash for not living up to many people’s hype.
However this does not detract from the fact that Inception tells and
interesting story with some interesting characters, even with the flaws it has.
Just as with Avatar I will defend this movie to my dying breath as I believe
both are good films and certainly not ‘bad’ as many people seem to have
developed the opinion of, Inception being a great one perhaps.
Dom Cobb is an expert at going into people’s dreams using an
unspecified device. He’s an expert at reading people, all their subtle
movements, which in this case are thoughts. He’s made a career of stealing
information from people’s minds by subtly influencing their thoughts and by
proxy their dreams. He mentions secrets and the “dreamer” will automatically
fill a safe full of their biggest secrets. He’s also made a large number of
contacts in this ‘industry’ over the years. All of this is in Cobb’s character
introduction in the first five minutes of the movie. He’s also very smart and
has a ‘reputation’ for being the best as he not only goes into a dream but a
dream within a dream, which becomes further complex later on, as a trap to get
rich businessman Mr. Saito to reveal his secrets to him that a private company
has asked him to get. Cobb however is not a bad guy, despite his criminal
activities it’s soon revealed to us that he’s been wrongly accused of a crime
and can’t return. He’s a family man who loves his kids and his dead wife so
much that she’s stuck in his subconscious mind. Mal his deceased wife is a
character only inside the dreams. She now representing his doubts about reality
and self-loathing for everything he’s done. We eventually learn that Cobb is
accused of the crime of murdering Mal, despite the truth being that she killed
herself. We learn that Cobb and his wife were experimenting with dreams and in
the process ended up stuck down in “limbo” a shared dream space of nothingness
for decades as time moves slower more dreams within a dream you’re in and limbo
is a dream state four stories deep as it were. Mal became obsessed with the
idea that her world wasn’t real and even when Cobb and his wife got out of
limbo that idea, “the most powerful thing in the world”, is stuck in Mal’s head
and she becomes driven by the idea that the world they live in is not real
either and as such she kills herself trying to escape the dream. However the
twist is that Cobb planted that idea himself; he is technically speaking
responsible for her death, not in the literal sense that he murdered her with
his own hands as the police believe but in the sense that he planted the idea
that Mal’s world wasn’t real in an attempt to try and bring her back to
reality. The idea of creating an idea inside someone’s mind is called Inception.
Inception is considered impossible to do as the subject is always
slightly aware they’re dreaming and as such planting an idea inside someone’s
mind can never be real as they’re always aware of it. Unless you go deep into
their subconscious by going from a dream into a dream into another dream. Three
levels down if the scenario is engineered well enough an idea can be planted
even an artificial one and the dreamer will believe they came up with this idea
themselves. Inception is also, as the title would show, the plot of the movie. Cobb
is given a chance by Saito to have his record expunged and the chance to return
to his children in America for the first time since Mal died. All Cobb has to
do is go into the mind of a businessman who soon will control pretty much all
the world’s energy supply and plant the idea of breaking up his father’s
empire. He must perform an Inception, something that the last time he did it;
cost him his wife.
So this is Cobb and his dilemma that will drive the plot; Cobb is
an extremely well thought out character, he has an interesting past and over
the course of the movie he will develop and learn to get over the death of his
wife and the guilt that plagues him as he gets the job done for Mr. Saito. The
supporting cast however are well set up but not very well developed. Arthur is
his friend, confidant and possibly even protégé given their age gaps, he’s the
‘point man’, he’s smooth, he’s smart and he’s efficient with a unique class of
taste as we see based on the design of both his created dream spaces. There is
also Ariadne, the cute young college student who becomes a dream ‘architect’,
who even develops a five second sub plot of romance with Arthur. She also acts
as something of an audience surrogate, the person to whom all the information
about this complex plot is exposited to. There’s also Yusef, ‘the chemist’ and
Eames ‘the forger’, who is quite fun and cocky with something of a minor
rivalry with Arthur. Fischer is the subject of inception; he goes through some
development as he is incepted with the idea to break up his father’s corporate
empire.
So what’s wrong with the cast? Well Cobb is really the only
character is goes through any form of an arc, Fischer does also but that’s only
because there’s a subject. Everyone else is really very superficial; any
character that has minor development is almost discarded and never really
looked into. Arthur and Ariadne’s relationship is dropped upon during the plot
as they kiss but then never expanded upon. Arthur and Eames’ rivalry has a few
comical moments such as the one with “dreaming a little bigger” and the grenade
launcher but again is never really questioned or brought up. Let’s look at The
Dark Knight for a second. We have Bruce Wayne; a man who lost his parents to a
desperate thug with a gun, wrapped by guilt because of his fear and inability
to act he travels the world learning how to fight, be a detective and upon
returning to his home city of Gotham, takes on the symbol of the thing he fears
most Bats. As such, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman; possibly one of the most
complex and well written characters in literature and often not given the
credit he deserves because he’s an adapted character from comic books. He
develops in The Dark Knight as he tries to find a way to end his crusade and
become a normal man with a normal life but slowly realises that’s never going
to be possible when the love of his life is murdered by The Joker. As such
Batman becomes an eternal symbol of fear for criminals in Gotham being not a
man by a symbol who can be accused of murder and take the blame for Harvey
Dent’s crimes. There’s The Joker, a psychopath who we never truly understand
his back story but know he’s a psychopath who goes from robbing mob banks to
finding his true purpose in tormenting Batman. Alfred, Wayne’s butler, goes
from loving friend and confidant to hiding secrets from Bruce to protect him.
District Attorney Harvey Dent; the white knight of Gotham who becomes the evil
murderous Two Face after watching that same love of his life die literally
seconds after agreeing to marry him. Finally there’s the incorruptible
Lieutenant James Gordon who learns from Batman to do what is necessary, faking
his own death to bring down the Joker, receives a promotion to Commissioner and
learns that his actions in trying to bring down the mob have consequences, like
the death of Rachel and the change of Dent. This is an amazing supporting cast
and better written and developed than the Inception cast.
Now here’s the interesting question; is the lack of development in
Inception’s supporting cast intentional? It could just be bad writing as some
assume and shows that Christopher Nolan whilst a man with a talented set of
ideas might need his brother Jonathan in order to full crystallise his ideas
into more cohesive screenplays. Or it could be intentional based upon the
ending. In the ending Cobb spins his spinning top “totem” but we never see if
it topples or not leading us to wonder if Cobb is in a dream. Now if Nolan
wants us to believe that Cobb is in a dream then the supporting cast don’t
matter, as that’s what it’s like in a dream, you’re the focus of attention and
no-one else really matters beyond the minor details. In this case it’s probably
an amazing case of writing and huge risk; he’s intentionally letting the
audience think the characters are underdeveloped to leave the hints that Cobb
is dreaming. There’s also a ton of times that it’s hinted in the movie from
Miles saying out of context in a conversation “Come back to reality, Dom.” To
when he wakes up from using Yusef’s compound and tries to use his spinning top
but it’s interrupted and we never find out and never see him use it again. This
scene also comes right after someone saying ‘why would you care if it’s
reality’ referring to a dream. His kids at the very end are exactly the same
age as before as though no time as passed. It’s all these little hints that
aren’t really noticed until you watch the film or read the screenplay a second
or third time. Could he even be inside Mal’s dream and Mal has woken up by
killing herself? Did she incept him? Afterall the spinning top’s exact weight
and spin was known by her also and a cardinal rule is that no-one should ever
know your totem or else its effects could become redundant in that person’s
dream. It’s hundreds of little hints throughout the movie or the screenplay.
They might even be a double bluff designed intentionally to make us feel like
it’s a dream but actually reality.
Overall the question about the ending for me can be answered in
one way. Does it even matter? Cobb is happy, he no longer cares, if it’s a
dream or reality and really just Nolan screwing with us as I believe, Cobb is
happy and no longer cares about dreams and reality, just that he gets to be
normal again and I find that ending almost romantically beautiful in that
sense. Inception is a movie much like The Dark Knight and whilst I favour The
Dark Knight personally and think it’s a better film overall, Inception created
an opportunity in Hollywood to create interesting science fiction films with
original concepts that have high octane action as this and The Dark Knight do.
It’s an excellent film really any way you look at it and even if it never quite
reached the success of The Dark Knight, it’s certainly a film to be remembered
for quite a long time.
Onto the world map. It was a nice change to return to the continuous world map of Mario World's style... however I think it can be made better. There's a few times you can go different routes, but what if there were multiple routes through many levels that took you to different routes on the world map like in Mario World itself, routes that allowed you to access special levels and maybe find warp zones. It played with this idea a little but I'd really like to see it some more. Why stop at eight worlds, defy the norm create, ten, or twelve. In the handheld Mario Games it seems like many of the worlds are skippable easily and you only do half, the same in this game, you seem to choose the path of the worlds you want to do, so why not add more worlds to choose from, give us secret worlds like Star Road, the more content that ships with the game the more it'll feel like this is a brand new game and not yet another NSMB game.
Last but by no means least, we've just been given this brand new piece of tech in the Wii U GamePad and all you can think of is Off-TV play and creating blocks for people to jump on? Surely there should be more uses of the GamePad than that. What about a level-creator, how many times have you wanted to create your own Super Mario Bros. level but the technology of a normal controller was just all kinds of awkward for designing stuff, but with the GamePad, it becomes nice and smooth, like doing it on a PC or a Tablet. For that matter, this is the first Nintendo Console with solid online gameplay. While it's awesome to play this game in the same room as people, they needed to get consoles out the door, and no way is there better than "Hey, play this round mine... did you know we don't have to socially interact to play this awesome game!? Fuck yeah! Online Play!" Combine this with level-creation and Miiverse and you've got a vibrant community that would shit all over Little Big Planet and make NSMB.U, THE hot product to buy and play for the next generation. It would actually become a system seller. There's still time for a Level Editor, make a DLC to download and watch the money roll in... or dare it say it... watch it... Print in?
