This week sees the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, The Odyssey. Nolan’s career could be considered a bit of an odyssey, from small independent movies, to superhero movies, big budget sci-fi, historical drama, and now epic fantasy. We thought it would be a good time to take a look, 26 years to the day since its release, at Nolan’s most cyberpunk movie, Inception. 

Inception follows a group of high-tech criminals led by Leonardo Di’Caprio’s Cobb, who specialise in stealing information, directly from the subconscious mind of the target by way of dream invasion. When a successful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe) tasks Cobb with the rather more difficult job of inserting an idea into a business rival’s mind, he is at first reluctant. However, Cobb is unable to go back home to his kids in the US, as he is suspected of the murder of his wife, and so when Saito claims he can make the allegations go away, Cobb pulls his team together, and they plan an elaborate heist. Can Cobb pull off the seemingly impossible task of inception, and go back home to his family?

Inception never gets mentioned when people talk about the best cyberpunk movies. This is perhaps a little strange, as it contains a number of cyberpunk tropes. Cobb’s team infiltrate their marks by effectively ‘jacking in’ to their mind. They are a team of criminals, using stolen, co-opted military tech, on the run from both the law and a shady corporate group. Saito is a corporate boss himself, and uses his money and influence to coax Cobb into working for him. The ultimate aim of the job is to get the heir to a rival megacorp to disassemble it into smaller companies. In this world, it’s clear that corporate espionage is a common occurrence, as their mark has specifically had training to resist dream incursion.

Perhaps the reason Inception isn’t really thought of as cyberpunk is because that wasn’t what director Christopher Nolan had in mind whilst making the movie. Rather than a cyberpunk thriller, he was instead exploring the more metaphysical nature of dreams, how we experience them, and the anomalies we notice when we half remember them. He was also indulging a fascination with the concept of time. The many layers of the dream see time passing at a different rate, and Nolan has covered ideas of linearity, relativity, and time working in other different ways in diverse projects like Memento, Interstellar, and particularly Tenet. As well as all this, it is also Christopher Nolan’s metaphor for the process of filmmaking. It’s no coincidence that DiCaprio’s Cobb character is styled to look like Nolan himself, this is clearly his most personal movie.

There are, however, definite cyberpunk influences at play, and particularly the influence of a cyberpunk classic, The Matrix, on Nolan’s movie. They both feature ‘sleeping’ human beings experiencing a virtual world of sorts, where the rules are somewhat malleable. Where Neo asks for ‘Guns. Lots of Guns’, Tom Hardy’s Eames urges Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Arthur not to be afraid to dream a little bigger, before producing a grenade launcher seemingly pulled from nowhere. Where in The Matrix, the agents jumped between the bodies of the Matrix’s inhabitants, Cobb and his team instead fight against the target’s projections. Nolan also emulated the Wachowskis by using innovative filmmaking techniques to wow the audience, and produce unique visuals that are still a marvel to watch today. The zero gravity hotel sequence with Arthur leading the projects a merry chase still looks amazing.

Inception is a great, if somewhat flawed movie. So many of the scenes and dialogue are aimed at exposition, explaining the rules, laying out exactly what is going to happen and why. Probably 50% of Elliot Page’s dialogue as Ariadne was written with a question mark at the end, as the character serves as our proxy into the world. The action scenes at the climax of the movie are stunning, but they are necessarily broken up by the intercut scenes between Cobb and his deceased wife Mal, both by way of flashback, and his interaction with her presence as a projection of his own grief and guilt. These scenes provide the emotional heart of the movie, and are successful in doing so, but at the cost of chopping up the climax of the movie. 

The cast, though, are perfect, and every performance is great. The benefit of having a genuinely brilliant actor like DiCaprio is clear from first scene to end. The emotion Cobb feels is evident on his face at all times, and as Cobb becomes increasingly desperate, pushing the mission on despite the dangers he brings to it, you can see him almost completely unravelling, lashing out at Arthur, trying to blame mistakes on others. 

There are a thousand theories about the movie, what it means, and ‘that’ ending. There are also a thousand complaints about the rules of the world, whether the movie actually follows them all, if they are administered consistently. For years afterwards you’d hear debates about where, when, and how the ‘kicks’ should have worked in the different layers. With any movie that has this level of ambition, though, it’s going to be difficult to please everyone, and the script really couldn’t afford even more exposition and explanation. Most elaborate science fiction movies have some flaws in their plot and/or world physics. The bottom line is if a movie is entertaining enough, you won’t be moved to search for holes. If you don’t enjoy Inception, it isn’t because the physics didn’t make sense, it’s a fault of the filmmaking. It either works for you or it doesn’t. In the same way, whether Inception is ‘technically’ cyberpunk is down to your own ‘rules’ of what categorises the genre.