Dream team

What really goes on when you’re dreaming? After watching Inception, the new Philip K. Dickian flick by Christopher Nolan, I can only say for sure what goes on when Christopher Nolan is dreaming. And it’s a serious mind-frack.

Based on early buzz from movie trailers, Inception is the sci-fi geek’s Holy Grail this summer. And not a moment too soon, considering the poverty of watchable fare out there. Nolan proved he can do big-budget action with the two Batman reboots. Ah, but this is the same Christopher Nolan who made our brains spin with Memento, so be prepared to think while you sink that extra-large soft drink and popcorn.

It’s a real gamble to release a labyrinthine mind-twister like Inception in the middle of summer, but we like gambles: they actually give us reason to pry ourselves away from our laptops and screens — in this case, to catch a premiere at SM Mall of Asia’s IMAX Cinema.

Yet strip away the high-concept sci-fi premise — Leo DiCaprio is an Extractor, someone skilled in mapping out and exploring people’s dreams to recover lost information (for a price) — and what we really have is a good old-fashioned Hollywood team quest, an Odyssey of the mind with a winning cast and bar-raising special effects. Part heist film, part Dirty Dozen adventure, part Mission: Impossible, these three allusions don’t begin to cover Nolan’s energetic rethink of the action genre.

DiCaprio is Cobb, a man with bad memories, assisted by “point man” Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), the guy who maps out each client’s brainpan for extraction. Their recent job exploring billionaire Saito (Ken Watanabe)’s cortex goes a little awry, but the Japanese businessman wants to give them another chance: instead of extracting a thought from someone’s head, he wants them to implant a thought in a competing businessman’s brain. It’s called inception, and it’s far riskier than simply shaking down someone’s memories.

For one thing, the client can’t be aware that his or her dreams are being tapped. Clients are surreptitiously drugged and strapped to a retro-futuristic-looking device: a simple silver briefcase with a MacGuffin-like gadget inside and a bunch of tubes running out of it to administer simultaneous sleep to team members.

To avoid detection, Cobb’s team must map out intricate inner worlds that resemble the client’s memories, but not exactly: there must be tricky architectural dead ends (“paradoxes,” they’re called, some resembling M.C. Escher’s endless staircase) and mazes to allow controlled navigation and memory access. (I love that the clients always stash their most hidden thoughts in a literal safe inside their minds.)

Who best to design such a tricky inner life of the mind? Enter Ariadne (Juno’s Ellen Page) as a preternaturally gifted architect who constructs the dream world of businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the target for inception. And how about bringing along an actor (Tom Hardy) to impersonate people in the target’s memories and coax along revelations?

Sound really complicated? That’s just a bare-bones plot summary of the first 30 minutes. After that, it gets really complicated, and suffice it to say that a lot of Christopher Nolan freaks will be shelling out extra cash to see the movie again to catch all the details that slipped by them the first time. That’s okay, I like a movie that rewards repeat viewing, such as Kubrick’s work, the Godfather films and even the Star Wars (original) trilogy.

Of course, watching all the huggery-buggery involved in getting inside Fischer’s mind, I couldn’t help thinking it might be a wee bit easier to simply get rid of Fischer altogether, then pay off the shareholders to do your bidding. Or maybe pull a classic Godfather move: hold a gun to the target’s head, and say: “Either your brains or your signature will be on this contract...”

But this solution, while quick and to the point, would not be as intricate (not to say elegant) as Nolan’s solution. The whole set-up bears traces of Philip Dick’s worldview (a dream within a dream within a dream…), and dozens of crappy flicks have been made from similar “memory extraction” premises (remember Ben Affleck in Paycheck? Of course you don’t!). But this one easily soars above the mediocrity, even as it does remind us — like a ticklish, half-remembered dream — of other movies, such as The Matrix, Dark City and — in many ways, it seems — Fantastic Voyage, that groovy ‘60s sci-fi film starring Raquel Welch in a clingy wetsuit, miniaturized along with a team of scientists and injected inside the bloodstream of a dying scientist to repair gunshot damage. (That film has long been poised for a remake, with everyone from James Cameron to Roland Emmerich to Paul Greengrass rumored to direct.)

But unlike Fantastic Voyage, each of the team members here is onboard and above sabotage: each has his or her own special talent or skill, and their problems are not malicious white blood cells, but the dream world’s equivalent — projections — which are parts of the subconscious that take form and attack the intruding consciousness.

One of these projections would be Marion Cotillard (a nice in-joke is that the music used to “wake” the team from the subject’s dream is Non, Je Ne Regrette Pas Rien, a hit anthem for Edith Piaf, whom Cotillard bagged an Oscar portraying in La Vie En Rose). Whose projection is she? Watch Inception and explore all the dirty laundry yourself.

There are some thrilling, eye-popping set pieces here (the stuff that movie geeks cream over in the trailers, like origami-folding streets and collapsing cities) and you can tell Nolan has storyboarded this thing down to the tiniest rivet. Visually, there are things that remind us of the thrill of watching The Matrix the very first time. And like that movie, this one is based on original material, which (God knows) Hollywood sorely needs in order to wean itself from its addiction to comic book franchises and sequels.

Credit Nolan for crafting an intelligent (if somewhat overly clever) script that even creates its own language (“projections,” “kicks,” “extractions,” “totems”) to guide us through the maze of his ideas. Note how each character has a nickname (Cotillard is The Shade, Watanabe is The Tourist, Page is The Architect, Murphy is The Mark, etc.) like an elaborate, inner-cortex version of The Sting or Reservoir Dogs.

There’s some dry British humor, and lots of ass-kicking action scenes (a bit overlong, as though Nolan is trying to assure viewers that they are getting their Hollywood quota of dizzying car chases and firefights), and decent performances by all team members. What more do you want from a summer action movie? Just don’t check your brain in at the door and enjoy the wild ride.