I’ve been in the techno-doldrums this week, lamenting my dependance on technology (and an internet connection) at the expense of real-world experience. I know I need to be online pushing my book, and my day job is all about computers, but it’s too easy to become disconnected from real life. I’ve not been feeling very creative this week, and I think it’s down to not unplugging enough (yes, I can appreciate the irony of that as I type this blog post into my web browser…). Digging around in these thoughts, I realised what my problem is with Inception: it lacks humanity – that vital element that sits at the core of great stories.

Possible Spoilers

Aside from Cobb (he has Very Big Issues to motivate him) not one person has a reason for following him on the task. They’re all cyphers – character archetypes who fill a need in the narrative. There’s a mumbling that Christopher Nolan’s films lack heart, and are cold as a result, and I don’t entirely disagree with that, but Inception goes way further. It’s entirely concerned with the HOW? at the expense of the WHAT? and WHY? So I put on my thinking hat, and tried to fill in those blanks myself, and it was then that I realised why Nolan’s characters aren’t human, why they need to be only cyphers – it’s because the core idea of the film is so abhorrent, the only way to keep it under the radar of most watchers is to dehumanise it to an abstract concept.

Now, I don’t read the Daily Mail, and I’ve watched some seriously moody fare in my cinema-going life, so I’m neither easily offended nor a tub-thumping cine-fascist, but Inception pissed me off. It pissed me off bad. It pissed me off enough to write a pseudo-review on my blog, which is something I never wanted to do. And it pissed me off because of the answers to those two questions: WHAT? and WHY?

• WHAT? They kidnap a man, whose only crime is to be the heir to a globe-spanning energy conglomerate and, without his permission, fundamentally modify his personality by injecting an alien idea into his subconscious. If this were technologically possible, I imagine the crime would be swiftly classified as a form of rape on a par with date rape: the victim doesn’t have to endure the horror of the attack, but the after effects  - the resulting knowledge – changes them forever, in fundamentally damaging ways. All rights to the contents of their mind (body) are dismissed as the attackers chase their goal.
• WHY? Money. Somebody pointed out the line Ken Watanabe says about the conglomerate nearing superpower status, but I’ve got one word for that. Antitrust. Maybe pre-Enron, pre-global-economic-meltdown, that would be a defence, but not now. Now it’s just about corporate greed.

So I’m not surprised that the characters were so lightly sketched; if you got to see their true characters, motivations and moral frameworks, you’d probably hate them, leaving only LeoNolan DiChristopher to root for as he wades through the guilt of having previously mind-raped his wife to death.

He’s one sick puppy.