February 2011 — reviews by Shannon Bowman-Sarkisian

Inception

Inception has been compared to The Matrix, and the two films are similar in many ways. Both feature constructed worlds created to control people, question what is real, and use innovative special effects. However, The Matrix is about a post-apocalyptic Earth where machines use virtual reality to enslave humanity. In Inception, humans hurt each other, and themselves, through dreams. Dreams bend reality for the dreamer. We see the impossible, and then forget most of what our subconscious shows us. Writer and director Christopher Nolan, known for his Batman Begins and The Dark Knight films, explores these themes in Inception.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor, a thief who steals information from the minds of sleeping targets. Dom and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are hired by a wealthy businessman (Ken Watanabe) to plant information into his competitor’s mind. And so the true nature of Inception is revealed; this is a heist movie, inspired by classics like The Sting, The Usual Suspects and Ocean’s Eleven. Dom and Arthur assemble a team of specialists: an apothecary (Dileep Rao) to sedate the mark, a forger (Tom Hardy) who can change his appearance, and an architect (Ellen Page) to build the dreams they will inhabit.

A movie as complicated as Inception could easily get tangled within its own plot, but Nolan has created an accessible film that challenges viewers — it assumes the audience is intelligent enough to follow multiple storylines and complex characters. The movie itself is very dreamlike. By the end, the line between conscious and subconscious is blurred beyond recognition.

Inception, available on DVD, is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout. Running time: 148 minutes.

Idiocracy

Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is a flawed, but ambitious, movie. Twentieth Century Fox doomed the movie to DVD distribution — with no marketing and limited theater showings, Idiocracy went unnoticed by the general public. Judge’s Office Space and Beavis and Butthead notoriety was enough to get the Internet buzzing about this redheaded stepchild of a film.

Idiocracy is the story of Private Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), an average guy content with his mediocre existence as an Army librarian. He’s recruited as a test subject for a government experiment that will keep him in stasis for a year. Unfortunately, he and his fellow test subject (Maya Rudolph) are kept frozen for 500 years. The world has devolved into a garbage dump. Advertisements cover every surface, people are tattooed with bar codes, and Starbucks has become a brothel. Joe is now the smartest man alive.

Judge’s arguments aren’t very subtle, but they are effective. The future is often envisioned as a Star Trek utopia or apocalyptic nightmare. Idiocracy isn’t either, but who wants to imagine a world where we’re too stupid to realize that plants need water in order to grow? This it is a bitter critique of American culture. Science fiction imagines what we will be, but those ideas come from the present. It’s painful to see ourselves in the bumbling fools of the year 2505. They are an exaggerated version of a society obsessed with entertainment, brand names and instant gratification. Tone it down a bit, and the future starts to look like the present.