Another Great Film From Nolan.

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2012)

Inception is, in my opinion, one of the most fantastically written and directed films of our time. It has made Nolan one of the most talented directors, (of course, along with the new batman films, memento, and insomnia). I'll give you an explanation of the film, and try not to give away any plot points. It stars Leonardo Di Caprio and Joseph Gordon Levitt as dream "extractors" - talking about how the most resilient parasite is an idea - highly contagious - once it is in the brain, it is impossible to eradicate. The dream extractors steal these ideas. They can search minds and find secrets of the person, however, they must be completely open to the extractors. As if their mind is a safe, and the dream is what is in there - the extractors are trying to steal what is in the safe. The best way to obtain these ideas is going into a dream, in which they go into another dream. So a dream within a dream. Sometimes further, but it is harder to get out of these dreams. Timings are everything. Most people in the dreams are just projections of the mind, random people you may have seen before. However, Di Caprio's character, Cobb, is plagued by his ex-wife; she and him used to have dreams together about their life - they built a world in their dreams, and one day, Cobb planted just a simple idea in her mind that the world wasn't real - spinning a totem, and locking it in a physical, rather than mental, safe. What he did, by planting the idea int a dream to affect the person, is what is known as "Inception". The idea must first be stripped down to it's very basics, as explored by Tom Hardy's character, Eames. Inception is a very skilled art of the mind - there must be several people involved for it to be a successful job. Cobb and Arthur (Levitt's character) are the extractors/planters of the idea. Cobb recruits a skilled dream architect to design the layout of the dreams, so that they can access the person's mind with knowledge of places to go - Ariadne, (Ellen Page's Character) is the Architect. Eames is the Identity Thief and forger - he can shape-shift into other humans, and is one of the most clever and sly people in the team. According to Eames, Inception is a very subtle art - letting the idea begin just as a seed and then flowering to possible something that can change the route of their life, and define who they are. They require the heir of major corporation to dissolve his fathers empire. Creating and perceiving is what the mind does without it actually knowing - and because the mind is unaware of this process, that allows the extractors to get straight through to their mind and control. Yusuf, is a chemical compound creator - he creates sedatives for the others to become in such a deep sleep that they won't wake up without a "kick". This is where the body is pushed or made to fall backwards, in which they will wake up straight away if they already haven't been killed in the dream - in which they will also wake up. For Eames to transform into a person, he first has to know mostly every single thing about them. And for Inception to work, they must first find out the relationship between the father and son in the empire. They must study everything, because if they get one aspect, just a tiny part of the job wrong, it could mess everything up. Everything has to be on target, and synchronized. Inception is also best achieved the deeper you go into a dream state. So with his task, the sedative that Yusuf has made must enable them to delve into at least 4 layers of a dream state. The one thing that could mess everything up is Cobb's wife, Mal, who i explained about earlier. Whatever dream he is in, if he knows the layout, then his sub-conscious who projects Mal into the dreams is then able to sabotage everything. So he must not know the layout of each level of the dream. "I Will Split Up My Father's Empire" is the main idea. Each level, they have to plant a filtered version of the idea, which gets stronger on each level. At the bottom level, they bring out the "big guns", according to Eames. There is so much about the film and it is, quite confusing, the first time you see it. But each time you watch it after, you understand it a lot more, and everything becomes a lot more interesting and awesome. Anyone who liked any of Christopher Nolan's other films will thoroughly enjoy this. Admitted, it takes a little bit of concentration to understand and first, but it is one of my many favorite films. - Sam Shepherd (Shepz0r).