solid and enjoyable movie

Rating: 7/10 (18 July 2010)

To start off with the positive, I feel this film features a good cast of interesting and likable characters, interesting action and visual effects, and a story which is compelling and human despite the unusual setting (much of which takes place in a number of distinct dream worlds). Indeed, the movie features two central stories with emotional resonance, one regarding the tortured relationship of the main character Cobb (DiCaprio) with the memory of his late wife Mal (Cotillard), and the relationship of the industrial magnate Fischer (Murphy) with his seemingly distant and recently-deceased father. Cobb's assistant Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) especially shines in wildly creative scenes inside a dream-world where gravity has been suspended, and the young architect Ariadne (Page) serves the story well in two ways, both as an outsider to the world of dream thievery whose training helps to explain the premise of the movie to the audience, and as a person curious to get at the root of Cobb's relationship with Mal.
The title "Inception" refers to the idea of implanting a thought in the dreaming mind of another person, and the central plot concerns a thought which the industrialist Saito (Watanabe) wants planted in the mind of Fischer, causing Fischer to break up his father's holdings. Members of Cobb's team seem skeptical about the feasibility of planting such a thought, but Cobb's tortured past has shown him that such inception is indeed possible. Powerfully motivated by the desire to see his children in America again, but constrained by authorities who believe he played a role in the death of his wife, Cobb agrees to help Saito because the latter can pull strings to get Cobb back to his home. As Ariadne discovers, though, Cobb's relationship with Mal ~ which remains very much alive in Cobb's subconscious ~ is a powerful danger to everyone who joins him in the mission.
So the film does deliver on many levels, with good action, good characters, and a story compelling both intellectually and emotionally. However, I do feel the movie dragged in spots, ironically because overdoses of action can slow down a movie rather than help the pace. Also, despite the fact that the movie is largely about dreams, I felt that the dreams weren't very dreamlike. Part of that can be explained by Cobb's use of the architect Ariadne to construct settings for the dreams, but real dreams arise from a non-logical place in the brain, and I think anyone who has kept a dream journal can attest that real dreams have a surreal quality quite unlike the real world. That isn't to say that the dream worlds of "Inception" aren't spectacular in their own way, but I felt the dream worlds of this movie had more in common with the alternate reality of the Matrix in the "Matrix" movies than any dreams I've ever experienced. As in the Matrix, the Inception dreams present a world where physical laws can be bent or broken (to the advantage of skilled and knowledgeable people who are aware of the true nature of the world), but I suppose I was looking for more crazy, unexpected, non-logical content in the dreams. Since the movie is already challenging to follow, such content might make the movie too inaccessible to most audiences, but I still felt the director could have done more to cultivate a bizarre and dreamlike atmosphere.
Still, all factors considered, I felt this was certainly a good movie at the very least, and probably worth your time if you're thinking about seeing it.