Summer movie perfection!

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2010)

My Rating: **** out of 4.
The serving of brains in a summer movie is always a welcome surprise from the usual servings of empty-headed potboilers and explosive non-thrillers, and INCEPTION, the latest film in a continued winning-streak of DARK KNIGHT-director Christopher Nolan, is a perfect change of pace from disappointing releases such as JONAH HEX or THE LAST AIRBENDER. It's not just smart, obscure, visionary and mind-bogglingly exhilarating, it also has its share of action-packed thrills and chases to keep us hooked but to dwell on them would distance ourselves to the point of the movie. Nolan's take on a summer movie is far more challenging and in a way riskier: Instead of blowing stuff up, he blows our minds instead.
Reportedly, Nolan has been developing the script for INCEPTION for over 10 years. That's pretty much like the scene in the movie where Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) asks his new architect/accomplice Ariadne (Ellen Page) to device a maze that Cobb would find difficult. And after 10 years, this year, Nolan has finished his. Finally, the finished product is obscure enough to keep our minds ticking and, sometimes, our patience tested. Nolan, like Ariadne, has taken all the previous possibilities and attempts and pushes it further to the point of obscurity, but in the end the theme stays the same. The answers to INCEPTION are in plain sight; Nolan was just the perfect architect at keeping us challenged and lost in his "maze" for 148 minutes until the film finally lets us come to grips with what it truly is about. Like THE MATRIX, INCEPTION tries to question the very fabric of reality itself.
Inception means the creation or beginning of something; an idea for that matter. Inception is the opposite of Extraction, which is the field of expertise of Cobb and his crew, including his long-time associate Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), master-of-deception Eames (Tom Hardy), his new architect Ariadne, and a chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao). Extraction is entering the subconscious mind of another during dream state, and steal whatever value however inaccessible information or secrets. But a rich businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a proposal; he wishes that Cobb and his crew carry out Inception (instead of stealing an idea, they will plant an idea instead), the target being a young business rival named Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy). To reveal any further (pretty sure there are still a number of people haven't seen it yet) would be risky, though I doubt it would do much difference. Anything you might have already heard about the movie, no matter how crucial it is to the fabric of the story, would not be too much of a spoiler; whether or not it reveals anything, you still have to see the movie to see how it adds up. Even the trailers (the best I've seen for a movie this year) reveal only the basic idea of the plot, but not its deeper themes. It works of course, since now more than ever, people are too used to spoon-feeding plot descriptions; there are just too little surprises because the trailers show too much of its "you've got to see this!" stuff and saves very little to the actual movie.
It's funny how INCEPTION is about people invading the minds of geniuses, because after seeing the movie, I wanted to "Extract" whatever made Nolan think of such heavy mind-bending ideas presented in the film, just as I wanted to know what goes on in the mind of Alfred Hitchcock when he made VERTIGO (which, upon closer inspection, actually shares a few common themes with INCEPTION). Is INCEPTION Chris Nolan's masterpiece? As in THE masterpiece? Who knows? Knowing what a successful and fruitful career the man has had with only eight films (most of which are instant classics) in his belt, more is yet to come. As of now, I'd say I'll see INCEPTION twice in the mean time, or more when the DVD comes.