Inception

Hans Zimmer. 2010.

You’ll like it… If you accept to get into oppressive atmospheres, loaded with as much violence as melancholy.

Avoid it… If you expect sweet dreams…

Inception is the third chapter in the collaboration stablished between director Christopher Nolan and composer Hans Zimmer, after Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008), a personal project that took the British ten years to set up. In the universe Nolan has been building with his still short filmography, it is a constant that nothing is what it seems, and in Inception reality and dreams mix together in a perfect clockwork, not far from others like The Matrix (L. and A. Wachowsky, 1999) or Dark City (A. Proyas, 1998).

At the same time, Hans Zimmer seems to have culminated with this work the process he started with Batman Begins: to musically represent not what’s happening on screen, but only the emotions. On this way to trascendence, both composer and director have explained in several interviews the work process followed in Inception: Nolan didn’t allow Zimmer to watch the rough edit of the film, in order to syncronize the music to it, but he had to write several pieces of music based solely on the characters on script; those pieces were arranged by the director himself in a temp musical edit, and the composer would made the final arrangements over it. So, instead of a normal soundtrack written for the images, we get a self-contained piece of music.

Just like the previous collaborations, Zimmer do not stand aside a bit from the style he has lately stablished: absence of complex themes, perfect orchestra-electronics symbiosis and all prominence to the lower regions of the scale. Like in a dream, music flows without direction, unaware of where it comes from or where it goes, swinging from the brooding to the menacing darkness and the lost love sadness, jumping violently from the quieter passages (Lost souls, Waiting for a train) to the more violent (Mombasa). But, in their simplicity, all the themes dissolve in the dark musical continuum. And, like in a dream, there’s very few in the memory after getting up.

Inception is not unconnected to film noir, and some of this aspect is covered by Johny Marr (Modest Mouse guitarist) collaboration, a collaboration, however, that is soon bolted down in the symphonic mess.

Unfortunately, in his quest of trascendence, Hans Zimmer reduces his resources to a minimum, dangerously getting into the narrow way of self-reference, so many times indistinguisable from self-plagiarism.

The song Non, je en regrette rien, by French singer Edith Piaf, which plays an important role during the movie, makes a ghostly appearance on the soundtrack, and it could make you doubt that, if everything sounds like in a dream, maybe it’s one…

Tracklist:

1. Half Remembered Dream (1:12)
2. We Built Our Own World (1:56)
3. Dream is Collapsing (2:24)
4. Radical Notion (3:43)
5. Old Souls (7:44)
6. 528491 (2:24)
7. Mombasa (4:54)
8. One Simple Idea (2:28)
9. Dream Within a Dream (5:04)
10. Waiting For a Train (9:30)
11. Paradox (3:25)
12. Time (4:36)

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