A compelling Nolan masterpiece, where the dream is very much real....

Rating: 10/10 (28 July 2010)

There a very few film directors in this world that are allowed to pitch a complex and completely original concept to a studio and walk away with a budget to the tune of $200 million and make it, that said your name is Christopher Nolan and your last movie was The Dark Knight that did break all box office receipts, so exception granted.
With Inception Nolan invites you into the world of the dream to explore alternate realities where the rules don't exist and this all sounds intriguing for a film that is essentially at it's core is a perfect classic heist story.
The story sees Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is an extractor paid by sinister corporations who makes a questionable living by stealing the innermost ideas of powerful tycoons. He does so by infiltrating their dreams with the help of a team of operatives and a mysterious dream-sharing device. But then, as if fate had decided after a failed attempt at extracting information from one business executive Saito (Ken Watanabe, The Last Samurai), he is offered a job by the very same man. This time, however, must plant a new idea 'Inception' in the competitor's mind of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy, Batman Begins), rather than extract it.
Nolan has ensemble a stellar cast to play out this story but it DiCaprio who gives an astonishing almost flawless like performance and his best since Blood Diamond to steal the show and surely it is finally time for that first Oscar to be awarded. He is backed up by his right hand man, the Organiser Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer), Forger (Tom Hardy,RocknRolla) who gives a humorous performance. Marion Cotillard (Public Enemies) gives the film its emotional weight playing Cobb's wife Mal, Ellen Page (Ariadne) finally manages to step out from under the Juno stereotype, playing the Architect who is suspicious of Cobb's motives. Then there are the Nolan regulars Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine, all of whom are vastly underused but nevertheless are still a pleasure to watch.
The visual effects in 'Inception' are nothing short of breathless and are of the original kind that haven't been since like the Matrix, where you have exploding buildings, folding cities to zero-gravity suspended bodies. If that's not enough, there is also one sequence reminiscent of a James Bond movie with the team members decked out in matching winter gear and skis, fighting their way across a snowy landscape, whilst all the time these effects are beating to a pulsating Hans Zimmer score.
Nolan really as outshone himself here since creating that near perfect movie of The Dark Knight two years ago, Inception is a bold, inventive and complex piece of film at heart and one that will take multiple viewings to fully appreciate beauty and genius from different perspectives that was much needed like The Usual Suspects and to flush out any flaws, if any. We know Christopher Nolan has signed on for Batman 3, but can he really top this5*****