Imaginative espionage

Rating: Null/10 (19 July 2010)

"You're asking me for Inception. I hope you do understand the gravity of that request." Cobb
Grave it is: Inception is a dream within a dream and maybe more layers than that as Memento's Christopher Nolan plays this time not just with time but with the confluence of appearance and reality in a Freudian world of dream manipulation and regret. Is it also about the movie-watching experience—probably.
Did I just make any sense? Probably not because I am still working out the many layers of this most challenging summer sci-fi thriller in which Com Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is hired to manipulate a corporate head's subconscious through dreams to plant an idea, not Cobb's usual extraction of corporate secrets but this time inception. It's espionage at its most imaginative and confounding but fun in the action and the struggle to keep up with what is going on.
If this sounds all like The Matrix (1999), well, it is difficult to piece together the different realities like that film, and like Dreamscape (1984) it depicts dream manipulation. But it is a memorable film all its own as Cobb struggles in a dream world with his late wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) that impinges on the world he and Ariadne (Ellen Page) construct like architects.
You got it: Mal means bad, and Ariadne is the Greek mythical guide through a maze. Nolan is more obviously figurative here than even in his Dark Knight, which was moody and cerebral enough for an American comic book hero, Batman.
Nolan continues to know how to please an audience visually—the action sequences on a variety of terrains devised by Ariadne's imagination are as visceral as the dreams are cerebral. But like Memento, Nolan is interested in shaking up our control of the order of things: The most disturbing idea of the film for me was the question of what's real and what's appearance, when is death not death, and in what order do dreams and death come in reality.
Although I still don't know, I'll return to Inception to find out and certainly clear out the summer cobwebs, or should that be Cobbwebs?