As night began to fall, a black car pulled up in front of the Century City Imperial Entertainment multiplex. Two men wearing sunglasses quickly entered the theater and headed into a pre-booked VIP screening room. It wasn't long before the Warner Bros. logo lit up the screen.
"Why are we watching a Matthew Horner movie?" Jada Smith grumbled, clearly displeased. "We're just adding to his box office numbers!"
Will Smith, feeling a bit helpless with his wife, replied, "Can you think long-term? What do our two tickets matter? Inception's performance directly affects the movie I invested in, The Karate Kid."
Jada snorted. "That Matthew Horner is always causing trouble for us. He knew we had already set the release date for The Karate Kid, but he still had to release his film on the same weekend. He's obviously trying to steal our box office."
"You can't say it like that," Will said, keeping his cool. "Matthew Horner is just the lead actor and an executive producer in name only. He didn't have a say in the production or the release schedule."
Jada remained unconvinced. "That jerk can do anything, you never know."
Hearing this, Will Smith fell silent. After all, there were things they couldn't just ignore or brush aside.
He thought about the small anti-Matthew Horner alliance they had formed. What had happened to everyone involved? It was like a competition to see who could end up worse.
Francis Lawrence had disappeared from the directing scene, Naomi Harris had fled back to the UK and changed careers, and the worst of all was Hollywood's Black activism pioneer, Spike Lee, who had spiraled into addiction. He'd become a pariah, sinking into alcoholism and drug abuse, and rumors suggested he didn't have long to live.
Thankfully, Will had played it cautiously back then, letting Jada take the lead, and when things started going south, he quickly apologized and changed sides, avoiding most of the fallout.
Still, in the past couple of years, there were almost no offers for him to star in major commercial productions as the lead actor…
Could Matthew Horner be entirely blameless in all of this?
Fortunately, he wasn't like the others, and he'd managed to land Green Lantern from the competition.
If he could pull off what Johnny Depp did with Pirates of the Caribbean, even if Matthew Horner had any further plans, they wouldn't be able to stop him, and he might even regain the upper hand.
The sudden sound of the score pulled Will from his thoughts, and he focused on the screen.
This wasn't a typical sci-fi movie. Perhaps it could be better described as a "contemporary action sci-fi film set in the architecture of the mind." The story wasn't set in a futuristic world but in the present, where a new kind of biological information technology had been developed, allowing people to enter another person's mind, thoughts, or dreams.
After watching for a while, Will Smith felt that Inception was, in some ways, a hybrid of The Matrix and Minority Report.
In the movie's world, this new technology allowed people to invade others' dreams, spying on their private thoughts and stealing valuable information.
Without any defenses, dreams became the best way to infiltrate the human subconscious. Matthew Horner's character, Dom Cobb, wasn't your average thief—he was an expert dream thief, and unlike most pickpockets, he didn't steal wallets.
In this world, people like him had a special name—"Dream Thieves."
His specialty was entering others' dreams to steal valuable secrets buried in their subconscious. If necessary, he would even go as far as implanting memories, altering their perceptions.
As the lead dream thief, Cobb had a team with him, and they were hired by a Japanese businessman to invade the dreams of a rival businessman, planting the idea to dismantle the latter's company. It was, essentially, an impossible mission.
The plot wasn't complicated, but the storytelling technique was relatively complex.
As someone who had starred in numerous blockbuster sci-fi films, Will Smith had a clear understanding of sci-fi movies, especially commercial ones.
Most sci-fi films have straightforward stories—aliens invade, the humans fight back and find a way to defeat them; a character is hunted by a terrifying monster; or someone is forced into an adventure in a strange, futuristic setting. These core stories are often repeated, mimicked, and mass-produced, which is part of the nature of commercial films. When done well, they become classics, but when done poorly, they feel bland, lacking originality, like fast food that quickly becomes tiresome.
Inception was definitely not in that category.
It became clear after a short while that the film's plot was intricate, full of twists and turns, with elements that connected back to earlier scenes.
From a sci-fi concept perspective, Inception wasn't entirely groundbreaking or unique.
The movie was captivating, but Matthew Horner's performance wasn't particularly outstanding. From Will's point of view, it was at most a solid, but unremarkable, performance.
"He's just clinging to Christopher Nolan's coattails," Will thought to himself, though he didn't say it out loud. "Just a lucky guy."
The film's greatest success lay in how the director's brilliant storytelling and flawless attention to detail made the movie deeply engaging and thought-provoking. Most films about virtual reality and dreams tend to focus on the real-world aspects because it's hard to portray a fully realized dream world.
However, Christopher Nolan masterfully illustrated how to enter a dream, the potential problems within a dream, and how to wake up. He created a complete dream world with its own unique laws, rules, and logic.
When combined with some puzzle elements and consistently impressive visuals, the film became irresistibly enchanting.
"Matthew Horner is really lucky," Will's thoughts solidified. "Landing a role in such a high-concept sci-fi blockbuster... the guy does have some foresight."
The worst thing for a sci-fi film like this, Will had concluded after seeing some flops, was ending up like Cloud Atlas—confusing and pretentious.
This film clearly wasn't going in that direction and seemed to avoid those pitfalls successfully.
As the plot unfolded, Will realized that Inception wasn't designed to test the audience's intelligence. The story was complex but not deliberately so; everything served the needs of the astonishing premise.
It seemed intricate, but there wasn't a single unnecessary scene or line of dialogue. Missing a single moment or a line of dialogue would make the experience incomplete.
The plot was also quite clear because the entire story followed a very distinct main line—Cobb and Arthur, hired by the Japanese tycoon Saito, invading the subconscious of British tycoon Fischer's son, Robert Fischer, to make him dismantle his father's company after his passing.
This was achieved through layered dream worlds.
Along the way, Cobb encountered all kinds of mind-bending visual spectacles, such as the inversion of space and resurrection from death.
None of this seemed possible in a live-action film, as depicting dreams in live-action has always been limited. Even David Lynch only played around with piecing together fragments of reality and dreams within a single space.
The film's brilliance lay in its ability to present a dream world where anything was possible, where the rules of physics could be completely subverted.
Will sighed. Despite some of his earlier thoughts, he had to admit that Matthew Horner was playing his cards right by staying away from niche films and remaining in the public eye.
Maybe that was the key to his rise to superstardom.
Matthew Horner's films consistently targeted a broader audience rather than limiting themselves to hardcore fans or professionals.
Moreover, the production team clearly recognized Matthew Horner's strengths and deliberately included action scenes that played to his talents. These seemingly cliché elements served an important purpose, providing relief from the mind-bending plot and giving audiences who were used to popcorn films a sense of familiarity. This prevented them from getting lost in the film's relatively complex narrative.
As the film ended, Will glanced at Jada, who was already impatient, but he remained seated. Based on his experience over the years, he could tell that Matthew Horner's new film was likely to be a big hit.
He couldn't help but shake his head. In the past five or six years, had there been a single Matthew Horner film that hadn't exploded at the box office?
"Let's go!" Will stood up and called for Jada as they exited the VIP theater. Slowly, he realized that Matthew Horner was leaving other Hollywood stars further and further behind.
Yet despite all that, Will still harbored no fondness for Matthew Horner, remembering the events of the past.
In comparison, he had more respect for Christopher Nolan. The British director was exceptionally talented, able to take ideas that Hollywood had long since exhausted and infuse them with a gripping new vitality.
At the Chieftain Stone Theater in Los Angeles, when the credits for Inception rolled, the entire audience erupted in thunderous applause. Matthew stood up, clapping along, and briefly glanced behind him. The applause in the general audience area was especially loud, continuing for several minutes without stopping.
Inception was nothing like those complex films that get snubbed; it was deeply loved by audiences.
This was certainly not a Cloud Atlas or a Matrix sequel, where pretentiousness overshadowed the plot's depth.
Though on the surface it seemed like a typical "artsy" film, it had a fundamental difference.
_________________________
[Check out my Patreon for +200 additional chapters in all my fanfics! $5 for all!!]
[w w w . p a t r e o n .com / INNIT]
[+50 PowerStones = +1 Chapter] [+5 Reviews = +1 Chapter]