Tremendous Film

Rating: 9/10 (18 March 2014)

Rarely does a film manage to mix a great plot and characters with great special effects. This is one of those films. Nolan outdid himself here. This is definitely one of my all time favourite films. Every time I watch this I find something else to be amazed at. Whether it be the characters, the plot, the music, the epic scenes, the well explained and well made scenes, the camera work, or anything else, it's just fantastic.
First thing to note would be Christopher Nolan's writing. I knew exactly what was going on all of the time even though the concept or idea was sometimes hard to grasp. He explained everything through character interaction perfectly. Everything entwined together and made sense. The characters each had different, important roles. True, they may not all have been unique and we may know little background on most of them, but I believe that was necessary to the film's length and added a sense of freshness.
Then there's also Christopher Nolan's directing. He hasn't topped this. Alright, maybe the Dark Knight trilogy tops it, but it's still excellent. Everything looks and feels real. And the camera work and angles just add to this at the right moments. A good example is the scene where Cobb shows Ariadne the dreamworld for the first time. The directing makes this feel huge and the angles add to this feeling.
The acting in the films is great. The characters, honestly, don't really have much to work with. From the script, we can't really tell what the characters are like or anything. The only thing, I believe, that stops them from being two dimensional is the acting. We've have a background for Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and bits of background for Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and Saito (Ken Watanabe), but basically nothing for Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Ellen Page), Eames (Tom Hardy) and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), which makes the acting for them seem brilliant.
Finally, one of my favourite things about the movie is the soundtrack. Hans Zimmer is my favourite composer, scraping past John Williams. He makes the best of music. What he composed for Inception was very special, though. The soundtrack for this film is just amazing in my opinion. Yes, the tracks may seem very similar, but each one is still great, especially 'Time' and 'Dream is Collapsing'.
So this is a near perfect film for me. Very different from any film I've seen before. I think the concept is very well done. This film definitely deserves to be #13 on IMDb's Top 250.