Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight – his mind-bending magnum opus Inception – is one of the most complex, visually stunning, and truly original sci-fi movies ever made. It has the structure of a classic heist film, but with a unique twist: the robbers infiltrate a man’s dreams to steal an idea.
From nonlinear storytelling to ambiguous symbolism to elaborate practical effects, Inception exhibits all the familiar hallmarks of Nolan’s style. More than a decade after it hit theaters and became one of the biggest non-I.P. movies of all time, Inception still holds up as one of the ultimate Nolan films.
Elaborate Practical Effects
Nolan is renowned for filling his movies with practical effects. In an age when filmmakers massively overuse CGI, Nolan stages his action scenes for real so that all he has to do is point a camera at the stunt team.
The director flipped an 18-wheeler for The Dark Knight and crashed a Boeing 747 into a hangar for Tenet. For Inception’s trippy hallway fight scene, Nolan had a giant revolving hallway constructed.
Nonlinear Storytelling
Nolan rarely tells his stories in chronological order. Memento’s main storyline is told in reverse, Batman Begins jumps all over Bruce Wayne’s origin story, and Dunkirk follows three separate story timelines (an hour in the air, a day at sea, and a week on the beach).
Naturally, Inception also follows a nonlinear narrative. It kicks off in media res, then gradually reveals Cobb’s backstory and emotional baggage throughout the movie.
Cinematography By Wally Pfister
Nolan tapped his go-to cinematographer Wally Pfister to shoot Inception. Pfister had previously collaborated with Nolan on Memento and The Dark Knight trilogy, and he won an Oscar for his work on Inception.
Pfister has since become a director in his own right. When Pfister started directing his own movies, Nolan started working with a new cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema.
Music By Hans Zimmer
Pfister isn’t the only regular collaborator that Nolan recruited for Inception. He also tapped his go-to composer, Hans Zimmer, to work on the score. Zimmer created his usual mesmerizing wall of sound to accompany the mind-blowing on-screen action.
The music of Inception isn’t just confined to Zimmer’s Oscar-nominated original score; the soundtrack also makes great use of Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as a diegetic piece.
One-Word Title
Nolan loves a single-worded movie title. All of his films have snappy one-word titles except for The Prestige and the Batman movies, which were based on pre-existing source material. Three of them – Inception, Interstellar, and Insomnia – start their one-word title with the same two letters.
Nolan’s next film, Oppenheimer, also has a one-word title. He’ll probably never make a movie with a long, unwieldy title like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Noir Elements
Noir is one of Nolan’s favorite genres. Memento is the closest he’s made to a straightforward neo-noir, but almost all of Nolan’s movies have elements of film noir.
Inception is a genre cocktail of noir and cyberpunk. Cobb is a classic hard-boiled antihero, Mal is a classic femme fatale, and the cinematography is defined by muted colors and expressionistic lighting.
The Hero’s Wife Is Dead
Nolan’s films frequently include deceased wives. In Inception, Cobb is haunted by the memory of his wife, Mal, who took her own life. Memento is all about an amnesiac man trying to figure out who murdered his wife.
In Interstellar, Cooper’s wife died a while ago off-screen. In The Prestige, both magicians lose the loves of their lives: one dies of drowning in an illusion gone wrong and the other is killed when she finds out the secret behind the trick.
Toying With Time
Nolan enjoys using the power of cinema to play around with the flow of time. Tenet is a James Bondian spy adventure in which the agents use time travel to send bullets back in time.
In Inception, the dream world moves slower than the waking world. Every dream level is slower than the last. Nolan spends most of the film cross-cutting between real-time, slow-motion, and super slow-motion.
Recurring Actors
The star-studded cast of Inception includes a couple of frequent collaborators who have been in a bunch of Nolan’s movies: Michael Caine plays Professor Stephen Miles, Cobb’s mentor and father-in-law, while Cillian Murphy plays Robert Michael Fischer, the target of the dream heist.
Some cast members ended up working with Nolan again following their work on Inception. Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were all cast in The Dark Knight Rises after starring in Inception.
Ambiguous Ending
Unless the story is taken from immutable historical events, Nolan’s films tend to end on an ambiguous note. At the end of Inception, Cobb finally returns home to his kids and uses his totem – a spinning top – to determine if he’s still in a dream. The top keeps spinning and spinning and spinning until the shot cuts to black on the second it starts to topple.
This ending implies that Cobb could still be in a dream, but he doesn’t care – after everything he’s been through, he just wants to be with his kids, whether they’re projections or not.
