As the totem top spins...

Rating: 10/10 (17 September 2010)

Inception (2010) is a brilliant film - intelligent, exciting and dazzling. When the award season comes, and it is not nominated for editing, screenplay, music, cinematography, set decoration, art direction, and directing by Nolan, I'll be very surprised. Nolan is highly talented as both director and writer and should be recognized for the amazing achievement which his new film is. By the words of writer/director, "the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream... Once you remove the privacy, you've created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences." Inception feels like The Matrix on steroids with the impossible structures of M.C Escher coming to life, with some ideas shared with Solaris and the short stories by Jorge Luis Borges such as The Circular Ruins and The Secret Miracle, and with the script that would do honor to Charlie Kaufman. In my dream world, I want Nolan and Kaufman work together and I would love to stay in the alternative reality they'd create. I would not mind the totem top spinning endlessly advising me that I am in the dream world of Nolan's and Kaufman's imagination. As it is, the film is a great entertainment, the real feast for brains, senses and feelings. There are so many references to the studies of the most mysterious stage of human brain, dream state, specifically, lucid dream. There are the nods everywhere to the previous films, mythology archetypes, literature and art works. I found particularly touching the use of the Edith Piaf's song, Non, je ne regrette rien and casting as one of the main characters of the film Marion Cottilard, the 2008 Oscar winner for playing Edith Piaf. Acting in the film is pleasure all around, starting with Leonardo Di Caprio (Hey, someone give him an Oscar already) as an expert in stealing the ideas out of the human brains in the lucid dream state, who has to perform the opposite task of inception the idea in someone's brain. Everyone was memorable and well-cast including Joseph Gordon-Levitt whom I like in every film I've seen him, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, and already mentioned Cottilard. My favorite performance is by Ellen Page as Ariadne - what a fitting and appropriate name for the Architect of the dream world's sets and mazes and the guide inside the labyrinth just like her mythological namesake princess on the island of Crete. With all its complexity, reality within dreams, many layers of subconscious, projection and manifestation of the dreams, three or even more states of dreams all played off each other and communicating with each other and the wake state, the film in its core tells a very simple story about one man's burning desire to go home to these whom he loved the most but couldn't be with. It is about love, guilt, creating and living the dream, and finally letting it go. It is an action thriller sc-fi heist that simultaneously plays in four or even more different level of subconscious but with the real feelings and emotions. It is spectacular. It is the best Christopher Nolan's film I've seen and in the very end of his film he wants us to acknowledge that everything we saw has been designed by him. He is the architect of all layers of dream. We are in his dream and that's why the totem keeps spinning and never stops as the screen turns black.