Inception (****)

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao, Pete Postlethwaite, Lukas Haas, Michael Caine

Seen: August 1st, 2nd and 5th 2010

**** Out of ****

Inception is an exceptionally rare breed of film: the ultra-intellectual, pulse-pounding, eye-popping blockbuster. It has too many unbelievably brilliant moments to try and single out any single one. Christopher Nolan has crafted something of immense splendour that has leapfrogged straight into my personal shortlist of all-time favourites and into something that will change the landscape of cinema in years to come; as many will try to imitate what Nolan has perfected with Inception.

Dominic Cobb (DiCaprio) is a highly skilled extractor, he can go into his subjects’ (or victims) dreams and steal their locked-up ideas. When an extraction turns bad, Cobb is hired by his target Saito (Watanabe) to do something not many in this world has done or even attempted, Inception: the planting of an idea instead of the theft of one. Cobb’s security man Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) tries to explain its impossibility but Cobb interjects and soon enough he is building his team for the assignment: making Robert Fischer (Murphy), son of Saito’s main corporate rival Maurice Fischer (Postlethwaite), decide to dissolve his father’s empire on inheriting it. Cobb recruits three new team members to join him and Arthur: Eames (Hardy), the best dream-space forger; Ariadne (Page), an incredibly talented dream architect; and Yusuf (Rao), a genius chemist who develops the sedatives for their multiple dream layer mission. Saito joins as observer, very interested in “protecting his investment”.

While the team-build sequence is in itself engaging, teaching about the dream-world via tutorials for Ariadne also doubling as tutorials (and visual “previews” of what’s to come) for the audience, the last hour builds so much tension and intrigue that you can barely contain yourself as the team is shown operating on different dream levels, dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams. While this sounds confusing, the environments on the different levels are presented with sufficient differentiation to allow the viewer to stay in the thick of things throughout the movie, each level with its own jaw-dropping visual angle. There are foot-chases, car-chases, zero-gravity fights and shoot-outs aplenty, and these are all created with a deft touch, pulling the viewer ever deeper into the story. The score is fantastic, as the tension created by the story is intensified and carried by it.

As with Memento, Nolan again takes a look at the phenomenon of memory, in Inception presented in the form of projections within dreams, as one character that only exists in dreams is not a separate individual, but rather a memory of what this character was perceived or remembered as. I enjoyed the fact that there is also definite consideration of the fact that positive emotion trumps negative emotion, and this positive affirmation is used to solve a big issue in Inception.

The cast as a whole produce something monumental: although DiCaprio’s Cobb is the main character, even he does not truly stand out above the rest of the cast in delivering something bordering on flawless. Leonardo DiCaprio creates a conflicted individual dealing with a great personal loss; Joseph Gordon-Levitt perfectly executes the role of a security specialist with no imagination; Ellen Page excels as the student who in some sense becomes the master in Cobb’s world; Tom Hardy delivers some fantastic one-liners with pitch-perfect inflection; Ken Watanabe displays the full arc from villain to accomplice; Marion Cotillard terrifies (at times) as Cobb’s lovely wife; Cillian Murphy is brilliant as the suspicious target; Dileep Rao inspires confidence that the mission is possible with his calm chemist and Tom Berenger is great as more than just Robert Fischer’s uncle.

Inception had me excited from the first teaser trailer I saw in 2009 featuring only the spinning top and this excitement only grew with each successive internet-released trailer. What makes Inception better still is its delivery on all the insinuated promises from trailers – where there was no sense to be made from what was screened, it fits perfectly into the whole product; where more was shown in successive trailers, it only added to the curiosity; and where most movies fail to deliver on expectation, Inception rises to it and breaks through it. Inception is the best movie I have seen in many, many years, quite possibly ever.