MUST MASH: Mind-Blowingly Awesome Teaser Trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception; New Details About The Film

It’s finally here, and man is it good. For a lot of lucky movie-goers who went to see the awesome Inglorious Basterds this past weekend, you got to see the first footage of Christopher Nolan’s next mind-bending thriller, Inception, via a brief teaser trailer. I’ve been profiling the progression of this film in great detail for months, so for many of you Movie Mashers, you know what a special day today is for me. I saw the trailer over the weekend at a screening of IB, but had to painfully wait until 9 a.m. ET this morning when Warner Bros. finally released an HD version of this amazing teaser online; some bootleg copies of the trailer had been uploaded on YouTube and various sites over the last 72 hours, but WB was quick and swift to take them down.

Inception is of course the follow-up film from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan’s brilliant mind. Though many of you may be dismayed that Nolan decided to delay delving into the inevitable Batman 3, I can assure you that this movie will prove to be well worth the wait. Thus far, the film has been draped in secrecy and a brief description of the plot has tagged the film as, “a sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.” Inception has been filming since June, and has had Nolan & Co. filming all over the world from Tokyo to Paris. A brief re-cap of the cast and the characters they play is as follows:

Inception features Leonardo DiCaprio as Jacob, a CEO-type, Marion Cotillard (La Vie en rose, Public Enemies) as his wife, Ellen Page (Juno)  as a young college grad student named Ariadne,  who is also DiCaprio’s sidekick, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, an associate working for DiCaprio. Ken Watanabe will play the film’s villain, a man named Saito, who is blackmailing Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. Tom Hardy (Bronson) plays Eames, a member of DiCaprio’s team. Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Sunshine) plays Fischer and Michael Caine is also involved.

This project is a completely original work from Nolan, who also wrote the script himself. And after seeing the trailer, it seems as though he’s going back to his mind-bending roots; Memento and The Prestige. Before your expectations bust through the roof, may I remind you that this is a TEASER trailer. The film is in the middle of production, with a rumored budget of near $200 million. Taking note from the twist-filled mind F’s of Memento and The Prestige, Inception has a lot of secret plot elements that CANNOT be revealed in any trailer, otherwise it would ruin the film. So with that, and the fact that it’s not slated to be released until next summer, there’s really not much footage they can show, with out giving anything away.

So without further ado, check out the badass teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Speculation and more details about the trailer and the film following the teaser.

OMFG! Am I right? So again, not much shown here, but we do get some great insight into the visual-style and tone of the film. As with all of Nolan’s films, Inception is very dark and very adult. Hans Zimmer, the great composer who scored Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, is back again with Nolan & Co., providing us with intense bombastic sounds (similar to the Transformers 2 trailer, but is much more badass in Nolan’s universe). We also hear very familiar and increasingly tense-filled strings, similar to Heath Ledger’s Joker scenes in TDK.

We see a couple shots of the star of the film, Leonardo DiCaprio. One in the driver’s seat of a car when it is pouring rain. The second when he looks at the camera menacingly in front of a dark city scape, and the third after he apparently “wakes up” following that insane weightless fight scene in the hotel hallway. Ahhh, the hotel fight. This is obviously the most intriguing footage of the trailer because it shows us how insane this movie can be. Many people have annoyingly dubbed it as “Matrix-y,” which is really starting to bother me.

1) After the mind-benders of Memento and The Prestige, I think Nolan has sufficiently proven himself capable of bringing us completely original head trips. I highly doubt, 10 years later, that Nolan watched The Matrix and said, “Yeah, I wanna do something like that.” 2) In The Matrix universe, Neo, Morpheus & Co. can “defy gravity and the physics of reality.” They have direct control of their motion. In this hotel hallway scene, it appears as though the two men fighting (which looks to be Leo and JGL), cannot control their physical actions and they are at the bending will of gravity itself; hence the bouncing of the walls and ceilings. Again, completely different. But as there is no other relevant film to compare it to, I understand The Matrix comparisons, but it just bothers me.

There also seems to be a significant point being made with the shot of the spinning top at the beginning of the teaser. Check out Warner Bros.’ official Inception website, which only features that spinning top, that you can manipulate with your mouse. As this film has a massive budget and seems to be a huge action, sci-fi blockbuster, WB is getting the ball rolling immediately with interactive marketing. A couple more interesting tidbits about Inception, comes first from internet rumors regarding the “mind” aspect of the film, which states the following:

“Inception is about entering peoples’ minds/dreams. A technology to do so has been developed and is done through an injection. DiCaprio and his team work to enter the minds of other characters in order to retrieve/plant information.”

So this brings us to the teaser tagline, “Your mind, is the scene of the crime.” I have a feeling that DiCaprio’s team develops this technology and somehow, Watanabe enters Leo’s mind which makes him “commit a crime.” Watanabe therefore blackmails Leo into giving him this mind injection technology. The mind injection is then sought after by many groups of people and is used constantly throughout the film, giving us the insane, trippy fight scenes we saw in the teaser. I have no idea if this is what happens, just some fun speculation.

The last tidbit comes directly from the set of Inception. It is currently filming in Paris with recent photos taken of Leo, Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard on set. One of the most intriguing reports says that in most of the scenes that have filmed in Paris thus far, have utilized two “giant mirrors the size of store fronts” which rotate above the actors as they film below. Whaaaaaaaaa the F does that mean!? Is this to display the hectic, multiple-dimension perspectives of being inside someone’s mind? Or is it just a new filming technique that Nolan & Co. created for filming action sequences? Here’s a pic of the mirror, with the reflection side facing the opposite way.

Pheeeeww, that was a lot cover and my brain is thoroughly twisted trying to figure out what the F this movie is about. But Nolan has yet to make a bad film or even a below-average film. And after this trailer and what we know about production thus far, I think it’s safe to say that Nolan has created another game-changer. Unfortunately we have to wait another year to see it. Inception opens everywhere July 16, 2010.

What Do You Think? Discuss.