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Inception Inception
This article contains indepth information about the action thriller, Inception.
"Inception" is an upcoming science fiction action thriller film written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard, and Cillian Murphy. The film is inspired by the experience of lucid dreaming. The film, a variant on the heist genre, centers on Dom Cobb, an "extractor", who enters the dreams of others to obtain information that is otherwise inaccessible. His abilities and questions about the death of his wife have cost him his family and his nationality, but he is promised a chance to regain his old life in exchange for planting an idea in a corporate target's mind. This process of planting an idea, known as "inception", is less familiar and far more difficult than Cobb's usual job of "extraction". Development of Inception began roughly ten years before the film's actual release when Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. After presenting the idea to Warner Bros. in 2001, he felt that he needed to have more experience with large scale films. Therefore, Nolan opted to work on "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight". He spent six months polishing up the film's script before Warner Bros. purchased it in February 2009. Filming began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009 and finished in Canada in late November of the same year. Inception was officially budgeted at $160 million, a cost which was split between Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures. Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film $100 million in advertising expenditure. Inception premiered in London on July 13, 2010 and was released in both conventional and IMAX theatres on July 16, 2010. The film grossed over $21 million on its opening day, with an opening weekend gross of $62.7 million. The film received mostly positive reviews. Plot Dominic "Dom" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) washes up on a beach and is brought by armed guards into the chamber of an elderly man. The scene then cuts to a dream in the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe) where Cobb, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and dream world architect Nash (Lukas Haas) are on an "extraction" mission, in which an individual's mind is infiltrated through dreams and information is stolen. Extractors and their victims sleep in close proximity to one another, connected by a device that administers a sedative and share a dream world built on their mental projections. In the dreamworld, pain is psychologically experienced as real but death results in awakening. Cobb carries a spinning top to use as a "totem", a unique object which either spins unceasingly or topples, allowing him to always determine whether he is dreaming or awake, respectively. Unbeknown to Cobb or Arthur, Saito is in fact auditioning the team to work for him. Saito asks Cobb to perform the act of "inception"; using dreams to secretly implant an idea. The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of Saito's terminally ill corporate rival Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite). The objective is to convince Fischer to break up his father's company, preventing it from becoming a monopoly, forcing Saito out of business. Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger who shifts identities inside dreams, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who develops sedatives and dream architect Ariadne (Ellen Page). In Cobb's mind, Ariadne discovers that a vision of his deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) continually haunts him, constantly sabotaging his missions. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he and Mal spent many years in a limbo dream world forging their lives. After waking, Mal remained convinced that she was still in a dream and committed suicide, attempting to force Cobb to join her by incriminating him in her death. Cobb refused, forced to flee the U.S. and his children to avoid murder charges. In return for the mission, Saito promises to clear the charges and reunite Cobb with his children. The plan involves creating three dream layers—essentially, a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream—and due to the strength of Yusuf's sedative, death will not awaken a dreamer, but instead send them into limbo, leaving their real body comatose for an indeterminable amount of time. At such a dream depth, the duration of the plane's flight would be the equivalent of fifty years stranded in limbo. When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney, Saito and Cobb's team share the flight with Robert Fischer back to Los Angeles and drug him. They first enter into Yusuf's dream, a rainy downtown area, and kidnap Fischer. The team are fired upon by security forces, which represents by Fischer's trained subconscious defenses, and Saito is badly injured. Eames takes the identity of Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), Fischer's godfather, to try and extract information from him. The team then enters a van and sleep into the next dream level, hosted by Arthur; a hotel where the team tricks Fischer into believing that the kidnapping on the first level was orchestrated by Browning. Cobb convinces Fischer to enter Browning's subconscious in order to find out his motives, but in fact the team enter deeper into Fischer's. The third level is Eames' dream, a snowy mountain fortress, which Fischer must break into to reveal the planted idea. Fischer is killed by Mal, causing Fischer to go into limbo. Ariadne comes up with the unprecedented idea that she and Cobb should follow Fischer to this fourth level in an attempt to salvage the mission and confront Mal. Back when they were in limbo together, Cobb planted the idea in Mal's mind that her life was not real in an attempt to wake her up, and is indirectly responsible for her suicide. The guilt he feels is what causes Mal to sabotage all of his missions. Mal attempts to convince Cobb to stay in limbo and attacks him, but Ariadne shoots her. Fischer and Ariadne are able to return to the mountain fortress, where he reaches the intended understanding that his father had wanted him to be his own man. To successfully return to reality, a team member is left behind on each dream level: Yusuf driving the van, Arthur in the hotel, and Eames and Saito in the fortress, to protect those in the next level and fight off Fischer's security forces keeping them from attacking the bodies. Ultimately they are running out of time, since at each level, timed "kicks" to help them return to reality are imminent: the mountain fortress falling due to the explosives, the elevator hitting the end of the shaft in the hotel, and the crashing of the van into a river. A wounded Saito dies slowly at the snow fortress and Cobb remains in limbo to locate him. Returning to the first scene in which Cobb locates an aged man—now revealed to be Saito— and Cobb tells him that they need to escape back to reality. Cobb suddenly awakens to find everyone on the plane, including Saito, awake and well. Saito honors their arrangement and Cobb enters the United States, reunited with his children at home. Cobb spins the top to test reality, but is distracted by the joyous reunion with his children. The top begins to wobble, but the scene cuts to black before it can either fall or remain spinning, which leaves the question of whether Cobb is awake or still dreaming. Cast
Development Inception was first developed by Christopher Nolan, based on the notion of "exploring the idea of people sharing a dream space — entering a dream space and sharing a dream. That gives you the ability to access somebody’s unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?" Furthermore, he thought "being able to extract information from somebody’s brain would be the obvious use of that because obviously any other system where it’s computers or physical media, whatever — things that exist outside the mind — they can all be stolen ... up until this point, or up until this movie I should say, the idea that you could actually steal something from somebody’s head was impossible. So that, to me, seemed a fascinating abuse or misuse of that kind of technology." Nolan admits that Inception shares some basic ideas with short stories by Jorge Luis Borges such as The Circular Ruins and The Secret Miracle. Nolan had thought about these ideas on and off since he was sixteen years old, intrigued by how he would wake up and then, while falling back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was dreaming, a lucid dream. He also became aware of the feeling that he could study the place and alter the events of the dream. He said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else." Harvard University dream researcher Deirdre Barrett points out that Nolan did not get every detail accurate regarding dreams, but that films which really do that "... tend to have illogical, rambling, disjointed plots which wouldn’t make for a great thriller. But he did get many aspects right," she said, citing the scene in which a sleeping DiCaprio is shoved into a full bath and water starts gushing into the windows of the building he is dreaming, waking him up. "That's very much how real stimuli get incorporated, and you very often wake up right after that intrusion. Screenplay Initially, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. Originally, Nolan had envisioned Inception as a horror film, but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that "traditionally [they] are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms." Upon revisiting his script, he decided that basing it in that genre did not work because the story "relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes." Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years. When he first started thinking about making the film, Nolan was influenced by "that era of movies where you had "The Matrix", you had "Dark City", you had "The Thirteenth Floor" and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real." Nolan was later accused by critics of 'ripping off' the classic French New Wave film L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) but when asked about this by the New York Times he stated that he never got around to seeing it until after "Inception" was finished. Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001, but then felt that he needed more experience making large-scale films, and embarked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He soon realized that a film like Inception needed a large budget because "as soon as you’re talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go absolutely anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale." After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script. Nolan states that the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream. "Once you remove the privacy, you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences." Leonardo DiCaprio was the first actor to be cast in the film. Nolan had been trying to work with the actor for years and met him several times, but was unable to convince him to appear in any of his films until Inception. DiCaprio finally agreed because he was "intrigued by this concept — this dream-heist notion and how this character's gonna unlock his dreamworld and ultimately affect his real life." He read the script and found it to be "very well written, comprehensive but you really had to have Chris in person, to try to articulate some of the things that have been swirling around his head for the last eight years." DiCaprio and Nolan spent months talking about the screenplay. Nolan took a long time re-writing the script in order "to make sure that the emotional journey of his character was the driving force of the movie." Production On February 11, 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros. purchased Inception, a spec script written by Nolan. Principal photography began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009 for the scene where Saito first hires Cobb during a helicopter flight over the city. The production moved to England and shot in Cardington, a converted airship hanger north of London. It was there that a long hotel corridor was constructed by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, and cinematographer Wally Pfister; this corridor was able to rotate a full 360 degrees to create the effect of alternate directions of gravity for scenes where dream-sector physics become chaotic. The filmmakers originally planned to make the hallway 40 ft (12 m) long but as the action sequence became more elaborate, the hallway's length grew to 100 ft (30 m). The corridor was suspended along eight large concentric rings that were spaced equidistantly outside its walls and powered by two massive electric motors. Joseph Gordon-Levitt who plays Arthur, spent several weeks learning to fight in a corridor that spun like "a giant hamster wheel". Nolan said of the device, "It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for weeks, but in the end we looked at the footage, and it looks unlike anything any of us has seen before. The rhythm of it is unique, and when you watch it, even if you know how it was done, it confuses your perceptions. It's unsettling in a wonderful way". Gordon-Levitt remembered, "it was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night fuckin' battered ... The light fixtures on the ceiling are coming around on the floor, and you have to choose the right time to cross through them, and if you don't, you're going to fall. On July 15, 2009, filming took place at University College London library. The signage of the library was altered to French to imitate a bibliothèque. Filming moved to France where they shot the pivotal scene between Ariadne and Cobb at a Paris bistro. For the explosion that takes place during this scene, the local authorities would not allow the actual use of explosives. The production used high-pressure nitrogen to create the effect of a series of explosions. Pfister used six high-speed cameras to capture the sequence from different angles and make sure that they got the shot. The visual effects department enhanced the sequence, adding more destruction and flying debris. The next location that the production traveled to was Tangiers which doubled for Mombasa, where Cobb hires Eames and Yusuf. A foot chase was shot in the streets and alleyways of the historic Grand Souk. To capture this sequence, Pfister employed a mix of hand-held camera and Steadicam work. Tangiers was also used to film an important riot scene during the initial foray into Saito's mind. Filming moved to the Los Angeles, California, USA area where some sets were built on a Warner Bros. sound stage, including the interior rooms of Saito's Japanese-style castle. The dining room was inspired by the Nijo Castle built around 1603. These sets were inspired by a mix of Japanese architecture and Western influences. The production also staged a multi-vehicle car chase on the streets of downtown L.A. and this also involved bringing a freight train down the middle of a street. To do this, the filmmakers configured a train engine on the chassis of a tractor trailer. The replica was made from fiberglass molds taken from authentic train parts and then matched in terms of color and design. Also, the car chase was supposed to be set in the midst of a downpour (to present an increased risk that the flying water might "kick" the participants out of the dream-within-a-dream), but the L.A. weather stayed typically sunny. The filmmakers were forced to set up elaborate effects (e.g., rooftop water cannons) to give the audience the impression that the weather was overcast and soggy. L.A. was also the site of the climatic scene where a Ford Econoline van flies off the Commodore Schuyler F. Heim Bridge in slow motion. This sequence was filmed one day on and one day off for months with the van being shot out of a cannon according to actor Dileep Rao. Capturing the actors suspended within the van in slow motion took a whole day to film. Once the van landed in the water the challenge for the actors was not to panic. According to Cillian Murphy, "And when they ask you to act, it's a bit of an ask". The actors had to hold their breath for four to five minutes while drawing air from scuba tanks. The final phase of principal photography took place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in late November 2009. The location manager discovered a closed ski resort known as the Fortress Mountain Resort. An elaborate set was assembled on top of a mountain, taking three months to build. The production had to wait for a huge snowstorm, which eventually arrived. The film was shot primarily in the anamorphic format on 35 mm film, with key sequences filmed on 65 mm, and certain other sequences in VistaVision. Nolan did not shoot any footage with IMAX cameras as he had with The Dark Knight. "We didn’t feel that we were going to be able to shoot in IMAX because of the size of the cameras because this film given that it deals with a potentially surreal area, the nature of dreams and so forth, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible. Not be bound by the scale of those IMAX cameras, even though I love the format dearly". Nolan also chose not to shoot any of the film in 3-D as he believes that shooting on digital video does not offer a high enough quality image. Nolan has said that the film "deals with levels of reality, and perceptions of reality which is something I'm very interested in. It's an action film set in a contemporary world, but with a slight science-fiction bent to it", while also describing it as "very much an ensemble film structured somewhat as a heist movie. It's an action adventure that spans the globe". Post-production For the dream sequences in Inception, Nolan kept the computer-generated effects to a minimum and preferred to use practical methods whenever possible. Nolan said, "It's always very important to me to do as much as possible in-camera, and then, if necessary, computer graphics are very useful to build on or enhance what you have achieved physically". To this end, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin built a miniature of the Fortress Mountain Resort set and then blew it up for the film. For the fight scene that takes place in zero-g, he used CG-based effects to "subtly bend elements like physics, space and time". The most challenging effect was Limbo City at the end of the film because it continually developed during production. Franklin had artists build concepts while Nolan gave his ideal vision: "Something glacial, with clear modernist architecture, but with chunks of it breaking off into the sea like icebergs". Franklin and his team ended up with "something that looked like an iceberg version of Gotham City with water running through it". They created a basic model of a glacier and then designers created a program that added elements like roads, intersections and ravines until they had a complex, yet organic-looking, cityscape. For the Paris-folding sequence, Franklin had artists producing concept sketches and then they created rough computer animations to give them an idea of what the sequence looked like while in motion. Later during principal photography, Nolan was able to direct Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page based on this rough computer animation Franklin had created. Inception had close to 500 visual effects shots (in comparison, Batman Begins had approximately 620) which is considered minor in comparison to contemporary visual effects epics that can have around 1,500 or 2,000 VFX shots. Score Hans Zimmer scored the film, marking his third collaboration with Nolan following Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. According to Zimmer, it's a "a very electronic score". Nolan asked Zimmer to compose and finish the score as he was shooting the film. The composer said, "He wanted to unleash my imagination in the best possible way". At one point, while composing the score, Zimmer incorporated a guitar sound reminiscent of Ennio Morricone and was interested in having Johnny Marr, former guitarist in the influential 80s rock band, The Smiths, play these parts. He asked Nolan, he agreed and then Zimmer approached Marr who accepted his offer. Marr spent four 12-hour days working on the score, playing notes written by Zimmer with a 12-string guitar. For inspiration, Zimmer read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter because it combined "the idea of playfulness in mathematics and playfulness in music". Zimmer did not assemble a temp score but "every now and then they would call and say 'we need a little something here.' But that was OK because much of the music pieces aren't that scene specific. They fall into little categories". While writing the screenplay, Nolan wrote in Édith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" but almost took it out when he cast Marion Cotillard, who starred as Piaf in 2007 film La Vie en rose. Zimmer convinced Nolan to keep it in the film and also integrated elements of the song into his score. Release Inception was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters on July 16, 2010. The film had its world premiere at Leicester Square in London, England on July 8, 2010. Marketing In the spring of 2010 a viral marketing campaign was started for the film. On June 2, 2010 a manual was sent out to various companies. The manual was filled with bizarre images and text all relating to Inception. As the month went on, more and more viral marketing began to surface, including posters, ads and strange websites all related to the film. On June 7, 2010 a behind the scenes featurette on the film was released in HD on Yahoo! Movies. Warner Bros. has spent $100 million marketing the film. Reception Critical response
The film has received positive reviews from internet reviews and advance
screenings. Critics have praised the smart and innovative story, the cast, and
the score. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a normalized
score 87% based on 246 reviews, with an average score of 8/10, judging it to be
"certified fresh". The critical consensus is " Smart, innovative, and thrilling,
Inception is that rare summer blockbuster that succeeds viscerally as well as
intellectually". Review aggregator Metacritic assigned the film a weighted
average score of 74% based on 42 reviews from mainstream critics, considered to
be "Generally favorable reviews". New York magazine's David Edelstein wrote, "I truly have no idea what so many people are raving about. It’s as if someone went into their heads while they were sleeping and planted the idea that Inception is a visionary masterpiece and—hold on ... Whoa! I think I get it. The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype—a metaphor for itself". In his review for The New York Observer, Rex Reed wrote, "It's pretty much what we've come to expect from summer movies in general and Christopher Nolan movies in particular ... [it] doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment to me". In his review for the New York Press, Armond White wrote, "there’s a simple-minded sappiness at the heart of this cynical vision. If anything, the time and consciousness tricks stolen from The Matrix make Nolan a bastard Wachowski brother, not a son of Kubrick. Despite its big budget ... Inception is full of second-rate aesthetics, yet when shoddy aesthetics become the new standard, it’s sufficient to up-end the art of cinema". In A.O. Scott's review for The New York Times, he wrote, "But though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness". Box office Inception was released theatrically in approximately 6,700 conventional theaters, 197 of which are IMAX. The film grossed $21.7 million during its opening day on July 16, 2010, with midnight screenings in 1,600 locations. Overall the film made $62.7 million and debuted at #1 on its opening weekend. Inception’s opening weekend gross made it the second highest-grossing debut for a stand-alone science fiction film, falling behind Avatar’s $77 million opening weekend gross in 2009. In its second weekend Inception dropped only 32% and was #1 for two weeks in a row with $42.7 million. Since its release, Inception has grossed more than $148 million in the United States, and an additional $85 million internationally. In total, the film has grossed an estimated $234,648,901 worldwide. This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Inception" and is licensed under the CC-BY-SA. This article has been modified from the original. Send to friend
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