This is a review about Inception focusing on special effects.

Rating: 9/10 (10 June 2014)

The dream is (sur)real
Doesn't it sound exhilarating to break into a highly secured building, steal top-secret information while everything around you is being blown up and you are in the middle of a deadly gunfire? For you this may be an action-packed dream but for Dominic Cobb it's the hard reality. Well, more or less. Dom Cobb is an extractor meaning that he can enter one's dream and extract information from them and as a perk he gets to blow things up. The best thing is that if he dies he'll wake up unscathed. However, he cannot go back to his home and family as the police believes he killed his wife. The solution for his problems is thrown at him when an influential businessman, Saito, offers to enable him to go home if he takes the job. Saito needs Cobb to do something called 'Inception', he needs Cobb to change the mind of Saito's competitor by placing an idea into his mind. Many team members believe inception is impossible since you need to go deeply into one's subconscious. Planting an idea into someone's mind is therefore extremely difficult because you know that the idea is given to you and isn't your own. Nonetheless, Cobb takes the job and gets a team together. He enters the mind of Robert Fischer, the son of an important business man. However, there is a mysterious lady Dom didn't tell his team about, who could jeopardize the entire plan.
Throughout the entire movie Nolan succeeds in blowing the minds of the audience with thought-provoking scenes, but what keeps you lying awake at night most is the open end. Furthermore the visual effects supervisor did an awesome job on some action-packed scenes like huge explosions on snowy mountains and entire buildings clashing into the sea like icebergs carving of glaciers, it's a pity that you know it's fake. With the idea of Inception Nolan certifies that the most astonishing movies are created within ourselves as we are dreaming, but he sure did an amazing job in making a surreal reality in "Inception". The blending together of all the elements Nolan has used to create this movie , especially the visual and special effects, and the precision that is necessary to create a crown jewel in the department of movie theater, like this one. Not every part works perfectly, the story line could've been largely expanded upon, the history with Cobb's ex-wife is hardly discussed and the action was definitely out of place in some parts. An example is that it is remarkably impossible to hit a 'good guy' in a movie, but these bad guys deserve an Oscar for missing their target, even if you'd try to suck, I doubt you could reproduce their work of art. But what got me to rate this movie 4.5 out of five stars is the fact that it contains hardly any clichés. There is a femme fatale and a guy that got into a whole lot of trouble, but Nolan has put it in such a way that even though there is a love story going on, the emphasize is put on the fact that it ended, done, over with, finito! What is cliché on the other hand is that, like I mentioned before, the 'bad guys' never hit their target and when they do it's the one person that Cobb needs to survive this so he can overcome his complication and go home safely. What makes it so memorable is that it's no normal sci-fi movie, no sci- fi movie is 'normal', but Inception is applicable to what everyone experiences by night, or by day, dreaming. One does it more often than another, but this movie answers some of the questions you'd otherwise not even think about, like 'how did you end up in that dream, as you never remember the beginning of a dream?'
The special effects were what made this movie blown one's mind, especially once you find out that most of the effects are not animated but are performed by the actors ,instead of the all-time stunt-doubles, on screen. The special effects have a lot to do with stunting and acting, and just a little bit of computer generated imagery has been applied, only to enhance and enlarge features in the movie. So what you see is a combination of real life and visual effects.As the movie progresses, you start to see how all the special effects shape the entire sci-fi, action thriller, taking you to different areas of your own imagination. The most beautiful part about the entire story is that nothing like it has ever been done before. When you watch any movie, you do it as entertainment, because you can enter a new world, a world that is not yours, a world that seems to be a dream. But in 'Inception' the people in the movie are in a dream, or aren't they?
Inception is definitely a must see and can without a doubt be described as a masterpiece in the history of film making. It is a movie that you must see more than once to fully grasp it, but it's unquestionably worth the time as you can hardly get bored with this kind of cinematics. In the end, when it's all over and the dream has finished, you'll realize you ended up right in the middle of it and everything you thought you knew turns out to be something entirely different. Because of the combination of the visual effects and the acting, I was captivated by this movie and would therefore, without a single doubt in the world, rate it a 4.5 out of 5 stars.