A minute has passed since July 2010, so you may have forgotten how completely Start embedded in cultural consciousness, almost as if someone had invaded our collective mind and planted it there.
Christopher Nolan’s not-so-lucid dream heist thriller was basically ubiquitous for much of the first half of the 2010s. Start memes were absolutely everywhere: Leonardo DiCaprio memes squinting, spinning tops, the sweet tones of newcomer Tom Hardy telling us we shouldn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, dahlings. (The “glare”, by the way, was improvised). The giant BRAAAAAWWWWWMMMMMM! noise made famous by the movie trailer It continued to appear throughout pop culture in parody after parody. South Park did Start. The Simpsons did Start. College humor did Start. Troy failed Start!
The last time I saw the movie during its original theatrical performance, an audience member let out a confusing and performative scream of frustration as their instantly famous ending moment unfolded. In almost no time Start it had become a meme.
With such a deep level of cultural saturation, it’s easy to remember just the Start We collectively create, while forgetting how strange and iconoclastic the film itself is. But how Start Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the film, in all its imperfect perfection, still tempts us to look beyond memes and “dig deeper.”
Start it’s much weirder than you remember
Plus Start Fans obsess over his science fiction premise and his many unanswered questions, while getting lost in the plot maze. The premise, through the collective lucid dream, you can build dream landscapes and enter other people’s minds, it is so elegant that people are seduced by it. But StartThe plot is really a draw for the film’s obsession with the psychological mazes we build for ourselves. The story of Cobb (DiCaprio), a tormented widower who has fallen in love with an underground circle of thieves of international dreams, is sometimes surprisingly nuanced; in others, it is as subtle as the train crash that occasionally pierces our hero’s subconscious, reminding us that Cobb is an unreliable narrator of his own reality.
Sometimes Start it is a star vehicle determined to spread DiCaprio’s human pain all over the place in a giant capital maze fountain; other times, it’s a quirky and completely fascinating ensemble film, with Oscar winners and A-listers like DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine, all together with a group of new faces: Hardy, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Ken Watanabe, and Talulah Riley. The entire ensemble takes turns assisting Cobb in his exaggerated plan to return home to his children and a life of normalcy by performing the legendary One Last Job from each heist story. But this particular job involves changing the usual “thief” dream-thief concert – extracting data from a subject’s mind like the NSA by intercepting a brain – and performing a “start” instead: planting an idea instead of delete one.
This plot involves a fantastic amount of dreamlike landscape construction, largely unexplained. (One small thing in hundreds that always grabs me is the team’s ability to use walkie-talkies in dreams. There is no plausible explanation for this. I am looking for answers, but will I ever get them? No. Thanks for nothing, Nolan. ) For all that the dreamlike landscape of Nolan is a wild and wonderful vision of a world where anything can happen and anyone can build anything, it’s tempered by an amber-yellowish square ensemble design that, even in its most beautiful form, almost always resembles the executive gathering level of a Hilton. “We both wanted a house, but we loved this type of building,” Cobb explains at one point, as he shows off a dream house that looks like something you’d expect to find in Duluth.
In another moment, Cobb introduces his son: “That is James. He is digging for something. Maybe a worm. The script is full of amazing clunkers like this. “What is the most resistant parasite?” Cobb asks a customer before. A bacterial infection? An intestinal worm?
Seriously.
Much has been said about reading Start as a metaphor for film, but if Cobb is a director, he is filming Herzog Fitzcarraldo – off the map and dangerous for everyone, including himself. The script of Start underline this with lines that often deviate to the absurd.
That nobody really ate Start o Nolan for these flaws is a testament to all the other things that are happening, which is constantly drawing our attention away from the emptiness of Cobb’s plot. In fact, a lot is happening outside of Start DiCaprio is often neglected, not because the plot of the film doesn’t focus heavily on him, but because Start explode with 1,000 mysteries big and small.
There is the huge military backstory behind the creation of the Dream Swap, with all its science fiction gadgets and hand exposure. Egon Schiele’s inexplicable painting that is explicitly pointed out but seems to mean nothing. The updated opium lair where dozens of men dream of their lives in what now feels like a mysterious omen of the opioid crisis. The faceless men who appear to track Cobb through the maze streets and then never see them again. The tyrannical businessman whose son clings to a Citizen Kane moment of his childhood that may never have been real. The fact that Hardy’s character Eames plans most of the heist entirely on his own while Cobb … circle things with markers!
Chairing all of this is the biggest mystery of all: Cobb’s dead wife, Mal, the madwoman in his subconscious’s attic, the figure who may or may not be the minotaur at the center of a maze. Inside the tough and endearingly durable Start Fandom, where Cobb is frequently dismissed as a supporting character, fanfic writers have spent the past decade claiming Mal Cobb (whose name is a play about “disease”, THANK YOU, NOLAN), reversing Cobb’s story, and playing Evil his savior instead of his demon His subversion is not so much a testimony to Nolan’s writing as it is to his vision. He created a world that serves as a metaphor for the construction of the world itself. Of course, a group of fanfiction writers found a home in it.
Are all these other flexible elements that make Start A movie that I can see infinite times. Because honestly, I don’t think Start is necessarily a Okay movie but I think it’s a Excellent movie. To me, Start it is a minor miracle: a film built fundamentally without meaning, with a terrible script and enough holes in the plot to be a permanent provocation, but one that satisfies on every imaginable level. Sure, on one of those levels, I constantly torment myself with timeless technical questions. (If Yusuf accelerated the normal dose of Somnacina to be 20 times faster than real time instead of the typical 12 times, so that they could have lucid dreaming three layers down, then technically all the work only took about six minutes actually, so what does the team do at the highest level after the van crash during the approximately two weeks of sleep time they have to fill for the rest of the plane trip? Yes, I’ve been wondering this for one of each
But on another level, I am relaxing and enjoying the dynamics of the set, the masterful production and the funny of everything. No matter how frustrating I find Cobb as a character, no matter how weak and implausible I find the writing, every time I look StartWhen he arrives at the airport and Zimmer’s magnificent “Time” starts playing, I’m supporting him, holding my breath at every turn, wanting him to have his happy ending despite everything.
Most of menceptionThe plot may be built on nonsense, but a movie that can make you watch out above all that nonsense and nonsense is the essence of cinema: a Hollywood dream within a Hollywood dream.
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