A fantastic, original twist on a heist movie

Rating: 8/10 (6 January 2011)

Cobb (DiCaprio), like Maximus in Gladiator (Russell Crowe), just longs to go home to his family. To do this, he and his team must pull that one last big job: a complex long con/reverse-heist in the victim's subconscious, and the designer dreamscapes they traverse trying to accomplish this provide a ride as spectacular and original as any since The Matrix.
Inception is much easier to follow than it's oft-compared schizophrenic cousin Memento, Christopher Nolan's earlier brainchild- you can obsess about what's dream vs. reality if you like but it makes perfect sense if you take it at face value. What the two films share is that they're both one man's journey through altered states. This is primarily DiCaprio's fantastic, tortured world and we follow him through it on multiple levels which don't confuse so much as peel back layers to surprise. Nolan uses the dream setting like a canvas upon which to paint an original masterpiece impossible in any other medium. It is at it's core a very simple picture made up of elaborate brush strokes, for example the use of recurring lines of dialogue in a way that induces our own dream-like feeling of Deja Vu. There are enough chases, explosions and gunfire for any two action movies but the action sequences are well done and the remarkable special effects are baked into the story rather than sprinkled on top.
The only nits I can pick are that I thought the rules of the dream world were a little too overdone to be believable (looking for believability in a dream-based movie makes no sense I guess) and the other characters were all too shallow to care about what happened to them.