Pure exhilaration

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2010)

Like Hitchcock before him, Nolan is able to take artistically satisfying and challenging material and make it accessible for general audiences without dumbing it down. Being a crowd pleaser and a critical darling cannot be an easy task. Inception is heartbreaking, exciting, imaginative, unpredictable, violent, funny and very rewarding. Starring Ellen Page and DiCaprio, both do their best work. Frankly I am a fan of neither, but was absolutely impressed with them both here. While Page is the conscience of the film, Murphy is it's soul, Cotillard is it's id, Wantanabe the consequence and DiCaprio is our flawed hero whose plight and demons will break your heart. Making up the rest of the team in the mission to enter the dream consciousness and manipulate their target are a crew of some the coolest characters you're likely to see in any film this summer. Gordon-Levitt's mind bending gravity defying fisticuffs and Hardy's one man army are true action highlights. The rest of the cast too is brilliant including excellent cameos by Lukas Haas, Michael Caine, and Tom Berrenger. You may spot a great number of similarities to other sci-fi works like Matrix, Dreamscape, Total Recall and Dark City, but no film has done anything that hasn't been done before. Inception is able to make everything not only fresh, but seemingly brand new. It doesn't rely on the "is this real or a dream?" concepts to spin your head (if anything moments like those are fairly subtle and clever) but instead makes no secret of the dream reality where our heroes operate, and then piles layer upon layer of depth to that world and tension on multiple planes of consciousness. Simply put, the acting is uniformly excellent, the script is intricately clever, the effects are used in ways you haven't seen before and the story and it's concepts will have you talking to anyone and everyone you know long afterward.