Dharmendra Singh reviews ‘Inception‘
*****
Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller might well have been called ‘Deception’, or better still, ‘Multiple Deception’, such is the effect the film has. The concept is original, no question. However, it does borrow from classic American films such as ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘The Matrix’.
Many film geeks – and ordinary punters – have described this film as ‘very complicated’. The truth is it’s just tremendously detailed. For his job, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), while in a dream state, steals ideas from people (‘Extraction’); however, the film concerns itself with him implanting an idea into a person’s mind, i.e. ‘Inception’. That’s the plot in one crude line. However, to reduce the plot – which took a modern master nearly eight years to flesh out – to one purely about mental thievery would be unfair. It is the minutiae which are meant to dazzle.
Business tycoon Saito (Ken Watanabe) needs Cobb to perform the inchoate process of Inception on another businessman’s son, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to prevent his father’s energy company from becoming a monopoly. After Fischer Snr passes, it is believed that he will betroth the business to his son, so the idea Cobb and his team must implant is for him to repudiate his father’s will.
The technology used to carry out the subconscious subterfuge is never explained. When we catch glimpses of it, it looks like a child’s primitive science-kit thrown into a briefcase. But this is not meant to be the focus.
For all its cerebral conceit, at the film’s core are two emotional stories. One is of Cobb’s wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who spends her time stalking Cobb’s subconscious and thereby sabotaging his missions. The other is between Fischer and his father, whose relationship is strained.
We saw DiCaprio mature in Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’. Here he permanently loses the schoolboy image and becomes a man. However, while the ensemble acting is good, most of the main characters seem far too young to do anything let alone steal and implant ideas, and Michael Caine’s turn as yet another sage is fast becoming trite.
The computer-generated imagery is, as expected, top-notch, though the action scenes would be clichéd if they were not embellished by Hans Zimmer’s superbly suspenseful music.
Ultimately, Nolan asks us to absorb too much gobbledegook too quickly. Perhaps he was being pretentious, perhaps not. Either way, I lost interest somewhere in the second half.
Within days of the film’s release, thousands of cinemagoers cast their votes on the venerated film website imdb.com, ensuring that the film became, at least in their minds, one of the top five greatest films of all time.
So much for polls.
George Gunn
There’s gold as well as snow in these parts:
Tyndrum, Argyll
Photograph by Islay McLeod
The local press in Caithness has always carried more of a sinister edge to it than the newspapers of other areas would be happy with – it has had 60 years of nuclear experimentation to report on, often when the nationals couldn’t be bothered.
This sometimes makes for strange reading. For example in a recent edition of the Caithness Courier, beside reports on the gala and the sheriff court, there was a rather plaintive and nostalgic request for a nuclear power station – something Dounreay never was – to be situated on our northern coast once again.
Is this the first case of ‘Decommissioning Blues’ to be made publicly? I have a strong liking for the person who made it (yes, it’s true – we all know each other) but unfortunately he is living in the past. The future for Caithness must be followed along a different route. The ‘experiment’ in fast breeder nuclear reactors for Caithness and for Scotland is over. Once all the mess is cleaned up and the nuclear burial mounds at Buldoo are added to those at Camster (over 5,000 years old) as testament to a past way of life, then perhaps the people of Caithness can ‘experiment’ in a sustainable future.
Just how this is going to be achieved is still a mystery. Plans for a bigger and better harbour at Scrabster appear to progress and new leases for further development on the seabed around Stroma are to be announced soon by the commissioners of the Crown Estate. These things, of course, are linked and the Scrabster Harbour Trust is hoping that the renewable energy sector – both offshore wind and tidal stream – as well as the oil field developments west of Shetland, will provide the new facility with work. It is true that if its new tanker pier is not there it cannot be used and one can only applaud its efforts to generate work, but is it right to claim that this ‘is the only show in town?’; or as Jock Campbell, vice-chairman of the Scrabster Harbour Trust, asked the press last week, ‘What else is there?’ In fairness, I ask the same question.
As many who have been wrecked in the Pentland Firth over the centuries found out to their cost, sometimes the light is in the wrong place.
Only a fool goes to sea without a chart. You may be lucky once, even twice, but eventually you will come to grief – so I ask again, where’s the plan for the future of Caithness? In the absence of a chart we are expected to sail into the future – blind, at night, with only some vague light in the distance to guide us. As many who have been wrecked in the Pentland Firth over the centuries found out to their cost, sometimes the light is in the wrong place.
As I write this I can hear the cartographical bleating of civic sheep all standing in an enterprising line as they queue up to cut this and slash that with little regard to the long-term damage this is inflicting on an already vulnerable area. The economic myopia of putting all your economic eggs in one nuclear basket is a lesson hard enough to learn for many in this county without the Westminster government, aided by Holyrood and abetted by Inverness, caaing the infrastructural feet from beneath us.
But it is not only Caithness which is in an economic and planning mess – in this matter all Scots must take comfort where we can. Why not try the Coronish gold mine at Tyndrum in Argyll. An Australian-financed company, Scotgold Resources Ltd, applied to open the UK’s only commercial gold mine on the site of the old Coronish gold mine, which it already owns. This development would have been an underground mine as well as a processing plant above ground spanning some 39 hectares. Coronish falls within the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park and the application was rejected by the national park’s board by 12 votes to 10. Scotgold has three months to launch an appeal to Scottish ministers and the likelihood is that it will do so.
Why? Because Scotgold claims that the local people are all in favour and that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) received not a single objection and it also claims that all the local councillors on the board voted for its development and all the quango appointee’s voted against, although that cannot be proven.
It is true that gold mining goes back some 300 years in the Tyndrum area and there probably would have been jobs created and there was to have been a ‘gold centre’ for tourists to visit. There is also estimated to be five tonnes of gold in Coronish valued at £110 million, not to mention the 20 tonnes of silver. The principal complaint of the national park board was the industrial mess this mining would make to a significant site of natural beauty in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, which is a reasonable concern. The locals saw the glint of lucre and are angry that it is not coming their way. Likewise the Australian investors, although we can perhaps dry our eyes over them as Scotgold has many other significant sites outwith the national park boundaries to sink a gold mine.
The pity of it all is that it has to come to this public stramash. Amid the bouts of undoubted genuinely-felt concern as well as rancour and sheer unabashed greed, I can’t help but thinking of another argument over gold in another part of the Highlands at another time.
In 1866 and 1867 the herring fishing along the east coast of Caithness and Sutherland failed. Many of the people who were crowded in the little villages along the Grey Coast were near to starving as a result. When Robert Gilchrist returned to Helmsdale from New Zealand and discovered gold in Strath Kildonan in 1868 it caused a sensation. People flocked to ‘the diggings’ and at its peak in 1869 some 600 souls were busy trying to chisel a living out of the bare rock. So much so that a village of tents and huts, Baille an Or (the town of Gold), sprang up on the banks of the Helmsdale river where it met the Suisgill burn.
People did find gold – as, like at Coronish and Tyndrum, gold had been found in Kildonan since pre-history – but many more did not. The whole somewhat sorry episode came to an end on 30 December 1869 when the factor to the Sutherland estate announced that no more licences would be issued and that those who had existing ones had to clear off as their licences were terminated. The truth was that the second duke was nervous seeing hundreds of people settling in the strath his father had so ruthlessly cleared a generation before.
In Chile the poor are down a hole in the desert and the rich are in Santiago enjoying the benefits of having one quarter of the world’s copper reserves.
So it is, the world over, that peasants must scrabble in the dirt for the very stuff of life. The more it changes the more it stays the same. So, fast forward, if you will, to present-day Chile where high up in the Atacama desert, the world’s driest place, at a place called Copiapó, there is a copper mine run by the San Esteban Company. At a depth of some 2,200 feet 33 miners have been trapped for over a month.
A couple of weeks ago a six-inch diameter drill broke through to the underground pocket where the men have miraculously been surviving. This being a media age a television camera was attached to the drill string and the picture of a miner’s face staring up out of the pits of hell is one of the most moving and horrifying images ever to be broadcast on the six o clock news. These brave men face another 100 hundred days trapped in the mine until a relief shaft can be drilled. In a very Catholic country the rescue is being hailed as a ‘miracle’. On the other hand one Chilean copper mining company alone made $1.18 million of a profit in the first six months of 2010.
Other than profit and lots of it, there does not seem to be much of a social plan or a credible safety regime at work in the Chilean copper mines. What the Kildonan gold rush of 1868/9 and the contemporary examples from Argyll and Chile show is that when ordinary local people try to do something to improve themselves, or even try to stay alive by whatever means they can, they literally get shafted. In Kildonan it was the hunting and shooting interest which won the day. In Argyll it is the quango which runs the national park which is chartered to protect the environment as against exploiting it. In Chile the poor are down a hole in the desert and the rich are in Santiago enjoying the benefits of having one quarter of the world’s copper reserves.
Recently the ultra neo-conservative president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, proclaimed: ‘Human wants are unlimited and should stay so’. The problem with such garish statements is that they reinforce the base human instinct as propagated by the tabloid press and confuse young people who mistake ‘wants’ for ‘needs’. This brings us, you will be glad to know, back to Scrabster.
What is the difference between the Scrabster Harbour Trust wanting a larger lifting facility and a bigger pier for tankers and the Caithness people needing them? Who will actually benefit? Will it be the Scrabster Harbour Trust or will it be the broader economy?
I ask this simply because we are entering a new Edwardian era where the gap between the haves and the have nots is ever widening. According to the UK government’s own National Equality Panel the top 10% of society now owns 100 times the wealth of the bottom 10% which represents the highest level of inequality since the second world war. Does the panacea of wealth ‘trickle down’ apply to Caithness as well as Copiapó?
Last week that ‘very nice man’ Nick Clegg, the PM’s gofer, told the waiting world that ‘social mobility is the badge of fairness in society’. Other than asking ‘what, if anything, does that mean?’ it is fair to point out that ‘social mobility’ for most young Caithnessians means leaving. It seems to me that the concept of ‘social mobility’, as espoused by the UK government, is – as the poet Hamish Henderson said of Calvinism – a conspiracy of the old against the young. If the ‘only show in town’ is to aspire to the top 10%, other than to work up chimneys or take to begging, I am not entirely sure how this can be attempted, as things stand, in Caithness in 2010.
George Gunn is a playwright and theatre director
