Christopher Nolan Scores Again

Rating: 10/10 (26 July 2010)

Going into a movie with high expectations can set the viewer up for disappointment (I know because I've been let down many times.) Christopher Nolan—the master responsible for such greats as Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight—has been the most reliably excellent filmmaker of the past decade; he has never failed to deliver. He continues his winning streak with the remarkable Inception. The movie is so packed with detail and has so many layers that upon the audience's first viewing, they just go along for the ride and try to keep up with it. The story follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an extractor who tries to steal information from other people's dreams. There to assist him in his escapades is Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt.) They are hired by an influential businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) to infiltrate a rival's (Cillian Murphy) dreams not to steal an idea, but rather to plant one. This is called inception. Stealing information from dreams is difficult; planting an idea is even more so. Cobb and Arthur are hesitant to accept the job. However, Cobb wants to do it so that he can quit the business for good and get back home and see his kids, whom he hasn't seen for a long time. He assembles a team to help him. They include an architect (Ellen Page), who creates the dreamscapes; a forger (Tom Hardy), who can imitate other people within the dreams; and a chemist (Dileep Rao), who concocts the complex chemical cocktails used to induce the necessary states of dreaming. To fool the dreamer, sometimes Cobb and his team construct dreams within dreams. To accomplish inception, they need to create a dream within a dream within a dream. If that sounds complicated, there is one more layer still: limbo. This is a dangerous world of raw subconsciousness from which it is very difficult to return. There are other difficulties to overcome besides navigating dreamers' minds. If projections of the dreamer's subconscious start to detect an intrusion, they attack like white blood cells. The probability of this goes up if the dreamer has been trained to guard themselves by an extractor. In addition, Dom's efforts are sometimes foiled by projections of his wife (Marion Cotillard.) He and his team also have to use "kicks," which are prompts to wake them up at just the right moment. In the waking world, he and his team are on the run from both the law and former marks and clients. As expected, much of the movie takes place in dreams. Inception's visual style matches its lofty creative ambitions. The marriage of art direction and special effects is seamless; it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. This sometimes makes it difficult to discern dreams from reality, and this is almost certainly done by design. In the dream sequences, there are some extraordinary images, such as entire cities folding over on themselves, zero-gravity scenes in a hotel hallway, and paradoxical shapes, like infinite staircases. In a season of light-hearted popcorn flicks that are forgotten shortly after one has left the theater, Inception is a rare treat indeed—a brain-teaser that demands the audience rise to its level, rather than insulting the viewer's intelligence by stooping too low. The dreams Christopher Nolan creates and puts up on screen are worlds of pure imagination where anything seems possible, yet they have their own sense of order; they have limits and laws of existence. This film sets viewers' minds in motion like spinning tops, sending them out of the theater reeling and ready to come back again for a repeat viewing.
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