Review

Rating: 9/10 (11 May 2014)

Inception has Leonardo DiCaprio as a "dream thief" who infiltrates and alters other people's dreams, and finds himself caught in a limbo of dream worlds, which the movie tries at considerable length to explain without ever doing much more than parroting the inbred logic of its relentlessly preposterous plot. It's an elaborately pedantic scheme whose lone virtue is that it serves as a good excuse for some bizarre mixtures of action fantasy and special effects. The technical virtuosity pouring from every frame is astounding.The visuals are stunning, perhaps the most fully realized of any film.
Screenwriter/director Christopher Nolan's story mixes fictional dream science and a kind of inner-space espionage, but neither the science nor the espionage matters much here. Mainly it posits a story world in which Leo and company are caught up in dreams within dreams—and eventually a dream within a dream within another dream. But even that aspect of it doesn't really take off, action- and entertainment-wise, until the film is well into its protracted final phases. His tale of purposeful memory-travel is a fun and exciting trip into the creative subconscious. If Inception is a metaphysical puzzle, it's also a metaphorical one: It's hard not to draw connections between Cobb's dream-weaving and Nolan's filmmaking, an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality.
DiCaprio's Cobb is the Orpheus of Nolan's inner world underground, and Cobb's wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is its Eurydice. But Page's Ariadne is in some ways the real moral and emotional center of the story, even as Cobb's dilemmas and dreads drive most of the action. Cotillard, playing the film's most oddly conflicted character, comes closest of the group to doing some good character acting, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is intriguingly mercurial as the best of the film's several sidekicks. Is the best film of the year and one of the best films of the decade, this is Nolan's masterpiece and it is perfect in every regard, the fact that the plot demands attention only adds to the exhilaration. This is a story about dreams that requires the audience to stay awake.