Inception will leave you thinking, what is real, what isn't?

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2010)

I want to start out by saying I don't think that the story is any way a rehash of the Matrix, like some critics seem to be saying. The Matrix dealt with other ideas about humanity, the dependency on machines, etc.
Let me also say before I begin: This movie is VERY VERY HARD TO FOLLOW. IT IS IN NO WAY A POPCORN MOVIE, IF YOU WATCH MOVIES TO TURN OFF YOUR MIND (there's nothing wrong with that, either) THIS IS NOT YOUR MOVIE! I had to tell my family what was going on at certain times, though I'm not sure I caught everything, because they brought up things that I had to forget to keep up with the movie.
Alright, to the actual review... but where do I begin? For my own sake I'll start with the cast. This is a strange group of people. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page isn't the first powerhouse combo that comes to mind for me, and some of the cast is from Nolan's Batman Begins. This cast works very well together, I heard a colleague say that this may be the best work Leo has ever done. I'm not going to go as far as to say that, because I haven't seen very many movies with Leo in general. He does, though, do a fantastic, job, equivalent of Pacino in The Godfather and Freeman and Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption. The rest of the cast does a great job too (though Ken Watanabe was sort of hard to understand at times). This though, is also thanks to how well Christopher Nolan was able to attach us to this cast, and with how little background he gave us to work with on everyone other than Cobb (relatively speaking, it still wasn't that much) I thought that was very impressive.
Next, I suppose I'll talk about the effects. Hands down this movie has some of the coolest fight scenes in the movie industry, from shifting gravity to anti-gravity, puzzle paradoxes to the mind's defenses. This movie also promised cool effects in the trailer, believe me when I say that it delivered, if you just let the movie happen and for the entire 2 and 1/2 hours allow the movie reality in, I promise you'll be blown away.
Now, this is the hardest part for me: the plot. This is by far the most complicated movie I've ever seen in my life. The plot is just plain hard to follow, in a good way, it is, in many ways, like a game of chess where you don't know what the other person is up to. Chris Nolan plays said game very well. I can't describe how difficult it was to follow this movie at some points, because of the different "dream levels" it goes to, but beyond that you tend to forget whose dream it was to begin with (in a sort of dream-within-a-dream concept). This doesn't help because of Cobb's past, and the fact that his subconscious is waging war on him the entire time. IF YOU DON'T WANT THE ENDING RUINED PLEASE STOP THIS PARAGRAPH HERE AND CONTINUE ON TO THE NEXT ONE. Now the important part: the "twist". The problem is, that the twist may or may not exist, because the ending of the movie leaves it open to interpretation. Believe me when I say that's infuriating, but at the same time fantastic, especially because the movie is so airtight that "plot-holes" (believe me, that could just be rationalizing) which could turn it one way or another actually open a new path for explanation, and are actually explainable no matter the circumstances, because it is a dream after all.
I stayed up until two thinking the night after watching this movie, I couldn't figure it out, it's like a puzzle where all the pieces but the edges are the same, and you can make a picture with more than one arrangement of the pieces, and that doesn't even take rotation of the pieces into account. So what did I think overall? It was quite possibly the greatest movie I've ever seen (a title that hasn't been overthrown since I saw Pulp Fiction). This is only after watching it once, my opinion could change with time (though I doubt it), and the few more viewings that I'm bound to do. But as of now, this is one of the greats, maybe the greatest.