Inception

Wow.


Is that enough of a review? Because I don't really know what else I can say about it... Ok, I'll give it a better shot.

Meet Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). They have the ability to enter a person's dreams in order to get secrets. Usually these two are hired by corporations to steal from each other. Cobb wants to go home to be with his children but can't due to pesky extradition laws. That is until a man he was meant to steal secrets from, Saito (Ken Watanabe), offers him a job: instead of extraction (taking a secret) he would like Cobb to perform inception (planting an idea). If Cobb does this successfully then Saito will pull so of his higher-up strings and Cobb can go home.

That synopsis is the most basic outline I can type here and it covers about the first half-hour of the movie. You come to learn that inception is ridiculously harder than extraction as Arthur puts it: "I tell you don't think of elephants. What do you think of?" You always know when someone else gives you an idea: true inspiration is much harder to produce. In order to go into someone else's dream you need uninterrupted sleep requiring a Chemist (Dileep Rao), you need a Forger to represent a real person in the dream (Tom Hardy), and you an Architect to build the dream world (Ellen Page).

Think of the dream world like a video game: there are different levels and you have to "complete" the first level before moving down to the next level. But the more levels you go the more unstable the dream world becomes. The dream world needs to be original, never recreating from memory, or the projections your mind fills the dream with will begin to attack. Described by Cobb like "white blood cells. Nobody likes to feel someone else in their mind."

This movie literally had me holding my breath. Not only was it filled with superb actors (the ones named above and including Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, and Tom Berenger) but Christopher Nolan has once again blown me away. The first movie of his I saw was Memento. I remember that movie just blowing me away with his directing style - - then I found out he also wrote it. I just had a Batman marathon including Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, and Christian Bale. As much as I'm not a huge fan of those Bale Batmans I, again, have nothing but praise for Nolan's take on the action sequences as well as the screenplays (even if I'm not impressed with the length of The Dark Knight). I'm definitely going out to rent The Prestige. I haven't seen it since theatres and am sure that my current Nolan obsession will make that movie a standout for me right now.

What I loved most about this movie was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He has these two incredible action sequences in the dream world that blew me away. His awareness of his body and his knowledge of the rules in the dream world are what really take these scenes to the next level. They are my favorite of the whole movie.

I noticed that Nolan is building up a nice pantheon of actors to call on: Bale has been in both Batmans as well as The Prestige. Caine also has both Batmans and The Prestige along with Inception. Cillian Murphy can be seen in Batman Begins and Inception. The same two movies go to Ken Wanatabe as well.

Bottom line: this movie is the most original movie I've seen in years. I will be incredibly disheartened if a sequel is ever made. The ending may strike some as being ambiguous or unexpected. I didn't think that at all. Well it may be a bit ambiguous but the whole movie is about infiltrating a person's sub-conscious what did you really expect?