On top of the smart revisionism crystallized by calling Batman "the" Batman in its brand-rebooting predecessor, it had provocative Bush-era subtext to burn and a few ace performances. But that movie had vibe , and vibe in a brand-name pop spectacle makes up for a lot. No matter how brainy they looked up against the dunderheaded competition, both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were Nolan in franchise mode.
Thanks to their megabucks success Inception gives us our best chance yet to see what the guy who thought up Memento can do with big stars, a summer-blockbuster budget and a running time when the concept originates in his own fertile mind. Things you buy through our links may earn New York a commission.
Every week for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting one film to watch as part of our Friday Night Movie Club.
Now imagine that insane-sounding movie was the runaway box-office hit of And that it was the rare Hollywood blockbuster that was not a sequel or a tentpole or an adaptation of any kind.
You can hate Inception all you want. You can, like my friend David Edelstein wanted to do at the time , slap the living crap out of those of us who were enamored of the film not to hurt us, mind you, but to wake us up. But you have to hand it to Christopher Nolan: He sure pulled a lot of us into the crazy world of his existential heist movie. And some of us are still there. Anniversaries and pandemics aside, the rerelease makes some sense. And yes, The Prestige is great, too.
But for many of us, Inception is the movie we think of when we think of Nolan. To put it another way: The highest hope anyone has for Tenet is that it will be another Inception. And Inception still holds up, the rare movie that manages to be two steps ahead of its audience without ever really losing them. But in Inception , it happens at the beginning, in the middle, in the part right before the middle, in the part right after the middle, in the part right before the part before the middle.
We have to recognise that in spite of the awe this film has inspired, we aren't dealing with some inscrutable arthouse puzzler, primed for reverential exegesis. This is a big-budget, starry blockbuster that's supposed to blow away the 'plex-frequenting public. Its mysteries need to be viewed in this light.
Inception is essentially a bracing tale of thrills and spills, as it acknowledges with its nods to Bourne, Bond and Where Eagles Dare. To perform this function, it needs a plot-driver, or what Alfred Hitchcock called a " MacGuffin ".
In many films, the MacGuffin is so familiar that we hardly notice it. If it's bizarre, witty or particularly maladroit, we're more likely to. Some MacGuffins, like Schindler's List's list, are based on reality. Others, like Rear Window's window, impress with their credibility. Others, like Alice in Wonderland's wormhole, make a virtue of their weirdness. To most directors, including Hitchcock himself , the MacGuffin being deployed holds no interest except as a storytelling tool.
Some, however, expect a great deal more from their MacGuffin. They want it not just to provide narrative catalysis, but to invest their work with meaning as well. Films may be intended to entertain rather than inspire thought, yet appearing to illuminate lofty matters can make them far more entertaining. The MacGuffin that achieves this end can earn its creator not just success at the box office, but also critical acclaim, Oscars and an honoured place in cinema history.
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