Inception (2010)

 "The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you."

I can't believe it's taken me until 2023 to watch this uniquely brilliant film. Better late than never, right?

As you can imagine, this Christopher Nolan masterpiece (he has more than one of those, of course) has quite blown me away. It's not the conceit of entering people's dreams, or of dreams within me: that was spoiled for me by the episode of Rick and Morty that was riffing on Inception. Nor, really, is it the intricacies of the plot, brilliant though that is. 

No: it's the very human tragic romance between Cobb and Mal. My mind was blown by the revelation that, after exploring dreams within dreams and spending a subjective fifty years in a self-constructed dream paradise, Mal became convinced that it was the dream world that was the real one... so she demapped herself, as David Foster Wallace would put it, ensuring that Cobb would be framed for her death so he would be motivated to follow her into what she sincerely believed would be blissful, loving happiness. She died pointlessly, and made her husband's life a living hell with his children forever denied to him... out of love.

And then, later, we have bombshell number two. Yes, the main plot concerns a kind of reverse heist trying to plant an idea, an "inception" in the mind of a corporate heir in order to enrich Cobb's client so his life can be unruined, etc, blah blah. And that's all fascinating. But far more mind-blowing is the realisation that it was Cobb who planted the idea of the world not being real in his wife's mind so they could leave their dream world in the first place, by being run over by a train together. And the dialogue exactly parallels that in bombshell number one. It's all quite existentially jaw-dropping.

The ending, with the top still spinning, is nicely ambiguous: can Cobb finally have happiness with his children or is he still dreamimg? I would suggest that the answer to this question lies not in the spinning top, which may or may not fall, but in the fact that the two children have not seemingly aged since Cobb last saw them.

The impressions left in my mind, though, are certainly of admiration at the ideas and the plot, but of deep engagement with the very human emotions at the heart of this film. Cobb and Mal are both decent people, and a genuinely loving couple- indeed, no one in the film can be said to be "bad", just fundamentally decent people trying to do the right thing and sometimes making very human errors. That's quite profound. And both hopeful and horrifying in equal measure.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

 "No guns. No killing."

"Where's the fun in that?"

I've been putting off this film for years. Oh, its predecessor was a good action film, and was centred around a sublime performance by the late Heath Ledger. But it wasn't a good Batman film. I was expecting the same of this.

I was wrong. This is both a brilliant action film- the set pieces are universally sublime- and an equally brilliant Batman film. The typically wooden performance of Christian Bake matters not: the characterisation of Bruce Wayne, eight years after Batman has retired and Rachel has died, is at the centre of everything. He slowly regains hope, is beaten away from it, and symbolically rises from mpossible odds. It's all sublime.

I know not of Bane from the comics. He was after my time. Yet Tom Hardy, despite some accent slippage, is excellent as the muscular, pseudo-intellectual ewpitome of the sort of characters that could only have existed in the '90s.

A more pleasing character is an unusually engaging Catwoman: Anne Hathaway is both charismatic and brilliant, with so many little nuances to her performance. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is superb as a young, orphan cop who identifies with Bruce becausevof how he lost a parent. Morgan Freeman, as Lucius Fox, commentts wryly on the corporate side. Alred, meanwhile, has lost his stiff upper lip. Yet, if he's played by the extraordinary Michael Caine, who cares?

Yes, everybody bloody knows Bruce is the Batman. But I found this film to be excellent. Both the direction and the performances were sublime .