A fascinating movie that has a few frustrating flaws.

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2010)

OK let's get this out of the way first, despite the things that I will point out bellow I really enjoyed watching this film! Christopher Nolan does The Matrix does Batman! Or at least it certainly has shades of The Matrix, though it's a far better film. Like The Matrix this is a film rooted in the philosophy of "reality" or to put it another way the struggle with knowing what is real and what is not. The age old question of "how do you know the reality you are experiencing right now is real", how do you know you aren't just someone else's dream, etc etc... This is dealt with quite directly in the film in the ability, through yet to be developed tech, to enter into, in fact alter and create, someone else's dreams. DiCaprio here plays an extractor, someone hired by shady underworld figures to enter other peoples dreams to steal valuable secrets. DiCaprio's character is an emotionally wounded man who wishes to get back to his children by pulling one last "job" (a role that he seems to be reprising in one way or another a lot these days). He has been on the run from the law since being suspected of killing his former wife. Said job is thrown to him as a lifeline by the CEO of a major Japanese corporation (skilfully played by Ken Watanabe). Do this one favour to me and one phone call is all that is needed to clear you of your charges. Of course this job is anything but routine and in order to pull it off DiCaprio has to put together a crack team of "dream thief's". The job is to plant an idea in the mind of a man who is a commercial rival of Watanabe's. Doing this is called "Inception" a concept that is so tricky that few believe that it is possible and involves creating a fantastically complex dream-scape several layers or dreams deep, the idea of dreams within a dream. What the others on the job don't know is that DiCaprio caries with him a lot of emotional baggage that threatens at various time to throw the entire plan off the rails, quit literally. So in some ways we have a conventional heist film about a team of crack thieves on a mission to steal, or in this case plant, an idea. But this is anything but conventional and the way in which Nolan weaves layer upon layer of plot in the form of layers of different dream-scapes is ingenious. Each layer also subtly and sometimes not so subtly affects the layer bellow, in the same way that one might incorporate music one hears while sleeping into the dream one is experiencing. All of this is fascinatingly complex and masterfully well integrated.
Having said all of this there are a few glaring problems with the film that are all the more annoying for just how good a film this is. For one I found the whole corporate espionage angle and the reasoning for Watanabe's plan to be rather shallow. It felt like a rather lame excuse on which to hang the concept of Inception. The idea of planting an idea, or the seed of an idea here, is such a powerful concept that it really requires an equally powerful motivation to make it all seem realistic, in this case the corporate espionage idea falls short of that for me. Also Fishers' acceptance of the idea seems too perfect and complete for my tastes. I know they wanted to wrap up the film with Inception being successful but there are a couple of lines that Fisher says in the film at the end that are essentially right out of the mouths of DiCaprio and his team. This should have been done a little more subtly in my mind.
Those who hated the Matrix for some of its silly characters, remember The Keymaker?, may find a few similarities here. Though no where near as garish as in the Matrix we have our own share of comic book nomenclature, Architects, Chemists, and more.
The film also suffers from a paradoxical lack of imagination. The plot, time-line, and scripting are all wonderfully suffused with imaginative twists and turns but for all of this the physical locals that are after all supposed to be dreams seem to lack a certain sense of imagination. The streets of Paris, a hotel, a snowbound fortress (that reminds one of nothing more than a level from a video-game), and a mega megalopolis. Considering that we are dealing with the boundless possibilities of dreams these are rather mundane creations.
Still the film is so smart, so engaging, so well plotted, scripted and acted that these flaws can be forgiven. With its amazingly complex plot it's certainly a film that deserves at least a second viewing. There are plenty of things that I know I missed the first time around. But even if you don't get it all one certainly walks out of the theatre with the experience of having watched something uniquely grand (which is a rare thing in films nowadays). And of course the film ends with a neat little bit of ambiguity, is this world real or are we all just dreaming?