inception

My dad has broadband from BT and as part of the package he gets a set-top box that has freeview on it, but it also gives him access to movies that he can stream. He has to pay for them of course - it's effectively a streaming rental.

Anyway, over the Chrimbo period we watched a few films, but rather than review all of them I thought I'd just do the one that was most entertaining, which was Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Obviously I'd been aware of Inception as it had quite a buzz about it, as they say, and I knew it had something to do with dreams. I should also note that I have a bit of a tricky time with Nolan's stuff - some of it I've really enjoyed, like Memento, other stuff I wasn't as impressed as everybody else seemed to be, like his Batman films, and then some I thought was rubbish, like Insomnia.

What I wasn't expecting from Inception was that it was going to be quite so complicated.

The film actually involves what are actually something like shared, lucid dreams - although they're still basically dreams, the people in them know they're dreams and can construct and manipulate them. This is already quite a complicated concept to get your head around as to how it works in the film, but later on they then go into dreams within dreams and things get really complicated.

By the end I think I'm right in saying you've got a triple-dream sandwich, where there's a dream within a dream, within a dream. It's complicated enough to write, let alone watch.

And what adds even more confusion is that this is all a mission to implant a thought in somebody's head, but to do so in such a way that they believe it's an original thought that they came up with themselves, rather than an implanted thought. Which is what the title is about - the inception of an idea.

So yeah - complicated, and so with the potential to be too confusing to understand. But it somehow manages to just stay on the side of the line that keeps it understandable.

I think part of how it does this is by treating the adults as intelligent people. So it doesn't feel the need to constantly explain everything - it does tell you stuff, but that's more about the mechanics than the fundamental plot or ideas. Instead it shows you the story and then lets you work stuff out for yourself.

So yeah, I thought it was really quite good - clever, with a good mix of action and ideas.