Movie Magic Monday: Inception

Hello again, Hollow Tree readers! It’s been quite a while! 😀 How were your last two weeks? I hope you did a lot of movie watching, book reading, and fun creative things. We missed you around here, so please leave us some love in the comments, yes?

Now, onto today’s blog post. I realize that I might be the last person on Earth to see Inception, but I couldn’t let it leave theaters without catching it on the big screen. I’d been excited about it since seeing the first trailer on TV, then even more when seeing some of the billboard promos at the theaters while going to see Eclipse. I knew very little about the premise of the movie except that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character had the ability to go into dreams. That alone fascinated me, as I’ve talked on the blog before about how much I like Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. I didn’t expect the world to be so fully realized and complex. For the movie to boggle my mind. For the characters to charm me.

Going into the first few scenes, I loved how real the world felt. Like our world, only not. A world where people know of others’ ability to steal secrets from their dreams, where people train and protect their minds with soldiers yielding actual guns, where someone could use your own subconscious against you.

It also helps that Leonardo Dicaprio’s character was so tortured. I LOVE tortured heroes. He was broken and empty and needing more than anything to fill a void in his life. He stole and schemed and lived a criminal’s lifestyle, yet he had a heartbreaking vulnerability.

All in all, the movie stayed close to the usual heist plot, with the element of the surreal. The ending, which everyone is still buzzing about, leaves the entire movie open to interpretation, and forces us to question everything we think we’ve learned.  But what I love best is the science of it all. The way dreams are used to expose the very basest part of us, and how our dreams truly reveal who we are and what we’re thinking.

There was just the right amount of humor and intrigue. Each person played a very distinct and useful role which made the completely surreal plot feel meatier, and somehow terrifyingly possible.

I can’t give away too much without giving it all away, but I found this movie to be one of the best I’ve seen, in that it truly boggled my mind and left me feeling awed. I give it a hearty A+.