For a movie about the “architecture of the mind,” much of the design of the blockbuster Christopher Nolan film Inception seems tame—at first. We catch aerial glimpses of Paris, Mombasa (actually filmed in Tangiers), and Tokyo from a camera angle set close to the horizon, underscoring the mass scale and infinite loop of the film’s plot. (See: previous cityscapes — Hong Kong, Chicago — from Nolan’s last film The Dark Knight.)

The pace and tone are ultra-realistic, the lighting crisp, the characters well-dressed, never betraying the seriousness of the affair. It’s the buildings that warp, explode, and shift on screen as they do in the protagonist’s mind.

In Inception, we see an architecture student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) recruited by Cobb (DiCaprio) to break into a wealthy businessman’s mind to plant an idea. Having lived in Paris during her studies (at one point she romanticizes walking across the Pont de Bir-Hakeim on her way to class), she adapts quickly to building mazes in the shared dreamscape. She is also able to bend the rules of physics: her Paris bends and layers itself over her in a dream state, one of the scenes that became a teaser image and poster for the movie. It’s as if we were inside the head of Nolan’s Joker, a world based on reality but without rules.

Overall, we see how the built world is distorted and replayed inside our heads. In a film somewhat devoid of human emotion, the subtle characters let architectural emotions go wild. Maybe Inception’s buildings are mugging for an Oscar or something.

Note: light spoilers ahead.

Cobb talking with architecture student Adriane, Inception, photo courtesy Warner Brothers.

Paris bends, Inception, photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Inception Posters by Ignition Print, via IMP Awards.

The marketing from Inception reflects Nolan’s twisty concept: one poster jumbles the characters into an Escher-esque configuration, another depicts the Penrose stairs illusion, and yet another shows Cobb wading through average modern city flooded with water (this doesn’t actually happen in the movie, though Cobb seems to have water on the brain). The posters, designed by Ignition Print, sell the idea of a dreamlike architecture more–and the dark, blue atmosphere is not the bright, are-they-dreaming-or-not vision that Nolan depicts in the film.

Arthur in a dream hallway, Inception, photo courtesy Warner Brothers.

Gravity is a major theme. In the hallway action sequence Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Cobb’s point man, battles thugs and tries to keep his footing as the space around him shifts, turns, and finally loses gravity altogether. This dream world is connected to another layer of the dream (“a dream within a dream!”) in which a car twists, turns, and flies off a bridge. Like Fred Astaire’s ceiling dance, this zero-gravity brawl is likely to be one of the film’s iconic scenes.

The unstable edge of “Limbo City,” Inception, courtesy of Warner Brothers.

(Spoiler alert) One of Cobb’s interior worlds is Limbo City, architect-ed as a space for him and his wife (or is that a projection of his wife?) to occupy. The monolithic city is falling into ruins along its edges, which border a vast ocean, but the interior is a sort of Corbusier Contemporary City with a few houses in between. At one point DiCaprio’s character explains the dichotomy between the Brutalist urban planning and the central lane recreating all of the domestic abodes he and his wife had known in the real world: “We always loved buildings like this but we didn’t want to live in them.”

Bonus link: The visual effects of Inception [via Wired]

by Jim Wegener

posted in Archifilms

tagged Architecture, architecture on film, Christopher Nolan, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio, Limbo City, That's Brutalist!

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