Absolutely Brilliant.

Rating: 10/10 (11 March 2011)

I saw the poster in the Friday's paper. "Inception; From the director of Dark Knight; Starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I wasn't aware of such a film. I've seen Christopher Nolan's Memento, the Batman movies & Prestige all of which were, mind-blowing. Later that day I started receiving SMSs and saw Facebook status updates praising the film. It was the trending topic on Twitter. So, I decided to check it out. On Sunday, I was inside the Shenoys theater, for the 3 o'clock show. I had a friend with me who was seeing it the second time. So naturally, my expectations were quite high though I told myself to keep it low. But what the movie had to offer me was beyond my expectations. Man, what a great ride I had at the movies. The freshness and the originality of it totally blew me off. Kudos to Nolan for conceiving such a phenomenal, high-concept, Sci-Fi heist film.
It tells the story of a group of men skilled at extracting confidential information from dreams of their target by entering into his/her subconscious. Mind crimes. But this film is mostly about planting a new idea in the mind of the target. Hence the name Inception. Unlike Nolan's Prestige or Memento, narrative structure here is pretty much linear. But that doesn't make it any easier to fathom. We're taken into dreams within a dream within a dream and no 'Totem' is provided to the audience to know whether the scene is taking place within a dream or in reality.
You could draw some similarities between this film and Matrix. But in the world of Matrix anything is possible but here in Inception you are limited to a certain rules. Any serious physical changes made in the dream could result in the failure of mission. The use of CGI was impressive. I mean there was no overplay but all the fantastic aspects of a dream were shown. I loved that scene where the point man fights off the projections of the sub-conscious of Fischer (Cillian Murphy) amidst constantly shifting gravity.
I felt the acting was great. I've only seen Leonardo Dicaprio giving his fullest to a character (Titanic, Gangs of New York, Catch Me If You Can, Aviator, Departed, and Blood Diamond). His Cobb is no exception. Cobb, the leader of the team, is a man who as he gets in and out of dreams, loses his grip on reality and dreams, and constantly checks his totem. The Point man and the Forger nicely played by Joseph Gordon Levitt and Tom Hardy, provides the comic relief. Ken Watanabe plays Saito who gives the team such a proposition. Ellen Page( Juno) plays a lovely young, Adriane the architect of the dreams. Cillian Murphy is another talented actor I noticed. He not only gave Fischer the necessary strength of a man who leads a business empire but also a certain vulnerability. And then we come to Cob's wife played by Marion Cottilard, who seems like a troubled and menacing character at first. Like all of Nolan's work, this one is also extremely well written. This movie demands repeated viewing. There are few things in the movie which still confuses me every time I think about it. The ending is something that will be debated upon unless there is a sequel coming up. There will be many blogs in future giving out explanations of various sorts about the movie. It'll be long before the heat created by the movie cools down. I don't really wish for a sequel but a series which delves deeper into the stories surrounding each character & explain some of the confusing details would do. All said and done, this is by far the best film I've seen this year.