An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules

Rating: 10/10 (21 July 2010)

With the Dark Knight being a runaway critical and financial success Warner Brothers allowed Christopher Nolan to do whatever project he wants so that he would direct the next Batman movie. Nolan decided to turn a concept he made when he was 15 into a 2 hour, 25 minute sci-fi epic.
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a best at what he does, invade peoples dreams to steal their ideas for corporations. But when a job goes wrong, businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) gives Cobb an offer he cannot refuse: if he can implant an idea inside the head of an industrial heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to break up his father's empire, Saito can get all the charges against him in the United States dropped and therefore get to see his children again. Cobb forms a team for the Inception operation: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his second-in-command and lead researcher, Eames (Tom Hardy), a man who can assume the identity of specific people, Ariadne (Ellen Page), an intelligent student who can create the world of the dream and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who creates the drugs needed to ensure the operation is disrupted. But Cobb is a man with personal demons, with the memory of his died wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) who sabotages his missions.
Inception is an complex, intelligent film, but Nolan is know that he can not make it a vanity project. He had to make it engaging for the majority of the audience. The basics is Nolan knows how to deliver these type of psychological films, with excellent action scenes. The action is incredible in the film, whether it was a well constructed battle in the streets and on a mountain top to a zero gravity fist fight. Nolan is a traditionalist, he avoids CGI as much as possible and of course it works again when doing action sequences. When he had to use CGI it was top notch and worked whether it was the fist fight, the eternal staircase and shifting the whole of Paris.
There are a lot of ideas, bending the ideas of reality. Like The Matrix it shows that the idea of reality can be bent and be made into anything you want: but there are rules, too much interference would lead a person's mind to defence itself. It looks at the ideas of dreams, with clever ideas like multi-layered dreams to both alternative internal timelines to allow the inception team more time, but also add another layer of confusion to the make so can allow the team to exact information. There are themes of how much the mind can create and how other can affects, with of course the psychology of dreams, such as not remembering how a dream starts and how much a subconscious can relieve. The film has ideas of actually trying to go into someone's subconscious selves, how much memory we would actually have and what the mind would do to protect itself. There is also a big theme of what happens if you try and bury your problems and memory it can lead to making things worst for yourself. Facing up to issues is a much similar thing to do. Plus there is the idea that if you get to hooked on the idea of living in your dreams then you would get confused on what is real and fake. It shows that to implant a idea that it needs to be positive for it stick in the mind but needs elements of positive and negative to ensure it works. Nolan is also clever in the sense of adding a threat to the film: one problem was going to be that if you die in a dream the worst thing that would happen is wake up, but Nolan was able to make sure the character had to live in the dreams because if their die then they would loose their memories and mind.
Nolan has also assembled another excellent cast. DiCaprio works in his second psychological film of the year, playing a man who is suffering from grief and lost, avoiding facing up to his problems. He is a psychologically complex character that is a recurring theme of Nolan's films and a fantastic performance from DiCaprio. He knows how to pick a film and shows why directors love to cast him. Page too was excellent and gives her performance yet (I admit I have thought she was overrated in the past). Gordon-Levitt shows his talent and with Hardy were able to add a slightly lighter touch but still able to serious when there need to. Cotillard too shows that she is a brilliant talent, with a great role, which people could easily argue as being the main antagonist of Inception and Murphy had a excellent role that allows him to show his ability. Plus there are great minor roles for Michael Caine, Pete Postlethwaite and Tom Berenger.
The editing, cinematography and score was also of the highest level. Hans Zimmer is a great composer and give the film fitting music and Wally Pfister had fun with the many different locations of the film. Lee Smith shows how a film should be edited, mixing the scenes of different actions in different worlds to action scenes where we get to see what's happening. Nolan is clearly one of the best directors around, making intelligence blockbusters.