A Midsummer Night’s Movie

“Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.”

If you want a mind fuck then you should watch Christopher Nolan’s Inception. It’s that kind of movie that made me think, as I was walking home with Makati CBD’s lights still blazing late at night, “Man, real life seems so boring.” The last time I felt that way after watching a movie was with The Matrix in 1999.

In 2000 Christopher Nolan wowed audiences with Memento, a story about a man suffering short-term memory loss (he’s the dead-serious precursor of Finding Nemo’s Dory). Its storytelling chutzpa has form and content intertwining in a loopy triumph. It’s there that Nolan first explores how the medium’s language is integral to the message. 1999’s The Matrix introduced bullet-time; at that time, it was just a neat way to show off the ballet of violence. In Inception Nolan uses slow-mo too, but this time it (as well as the other elements of film language) serves the story as well.

Indeed, Nolan plays around with film language—editing, slow-mo, cinematographic tricks, etc—and shows us how much movies and dreams share similarities. He seems to be fascinated with how much movies can mimic a dreamlike state, or that dreams are much like movies of the mind. The jump-cuts, the skewed images and the malleability of time can be dreamlike and cinematic.

Inception looks like a summer blockbuster movie, with set action pieces, car chases, gunfight, huge explosions, picturesque locations (at times it looks like a Bond movie, moving from country to country) and awe-inspiring visual effects. Yet it is also movie that demands the moviegoer to think. It has the trappings of a heist movie, yet at its core is the theme of loss, forgiveness, moving on and the finiteness of love.

Indeed, Inception is that rare summer movie. It is very much a dream of a summer movie.

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I watched Inception in a regular movie house. Now I want my second viewing to be an IMAX experience. If at the big screen it’s already a mind-fuck, seeing it on IMAX may turn out to be a cinematic orgy.

Oooh! And I now have a new crush: Tom Hardy.