You May Never Sleep Again

Rating: 9/10 (16 July 2010)

Inception (2:28, PG-13) — 9 — Science Fiction; biggie; original
2009 was an amazing year for SF&F movies, with 7 original films (Avatar, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Inkheart, Star Trek, Up, and Watchmen) getting my top rating of 9. 2010 so far has been disappointing, with only 4 (How To Train Your Dragon, Kick-Ass, Shrek Forever After, and Toy Story 3) getting as high as 8. But the dry spell is finally over, and in absolutely smashing fashion.
Christopher Nolan has a grand total of 9 films to his credit, but they include such outstanding productions as Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). Furthermore, in addition to directing, he co-wrote the screenplays for those movies with his brother Jonathan. They were marvels of intricacy, with layer upon layer of hidden meaning and nuance, slowly revealed as the story progressed. Now, as solo screenwriter and director, he has produced a masterpiece, the mind-blowing Inception.
He takes an idea which I 1st read about in Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and turns it into a riveting drama. Hofstadter wrote about a storyteller who gets his protagonist to a cliff-hanger point in a story, then has him start telling another story, which in turn leads to its own crisis, and then again, and then again. After the crisis is resolved at the final, deepest level, we go up and up and up again, and finally out. Only then does Hofstadter call our attention to the fact that we went down 4 levels but only came back up for 3 of them.
Nolan uses this same idea (along with some Escherian visuals) with a wrinkle: It's not a story, it's a dream, and the dreamers are wired together so they share each others' experiences. Furthermore, there's a time-dilation effect (familiar to most people from their own dreams at least as far back as Mark Twain's "The Great Dark") in which an hour in dreamland is only 5 minutes in the real world. And if a person in dreamland goes into a deeper dream, the effect is compounded, so that a seeming lifetime can pass during only a short nap.
In the near future, a small coterie of researchers has gotten good at this, and they make some shady money extracting hidden memories from the subconscious of people whose dreams they invade. Then a new proposition comes along. Wealthy power-company tycoon Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants to do the opposite — not to retrieve a memory but to plant one in the mind of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the heir to the rival Fischer-Morrow Corp. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is confident it can be done, despite the misgivings of the rest of his team, but he warns that it will require going down multiple layers, for 2 reasons: (1) the new idea has to be so subtly insinuated that the target will think he came up with it himself, for reasons he would find credible, and (2) Fischer has undergone training to resist this very kind of dream incursion, and his subconscious comes equipped with alarms and security guards to snap him out of any ordinary dream state.
But wait, there's more! Normally, when you're "killed" in a dream, you just wake up. But this endeavor involves not merely multiple levels but also a powerful anesthetic, and the combination means that anyone "killed" in dreamland will stay there forever, in a kind of limbo, lost to reality.
And still more! Cobb's dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) shows up every time he enters dreamworld, whether he's the primary dreamer himself or piggybacking on someone else's. Even tho she's just a figment of his imagination, he's got a really GOOD imagination, and she has her own reasons for wanting to keep him in the dream state, so she's always trying to thwart his best-laid plans. So Cobb himself can't have TOO much knowledge, in his waking state, of whatever imaginary world they're planning to take the target into. But, while he recognizes this in himself and compensates for it, he has other blind spots that could endanger his entire team. Fortunately, he's engaged the brilliant young architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) to design his mazes for him, and she tumbles to some of his personal demons.
But wait, there's STILL more
And so it goes, layer upon layer, complexity atop complexity, and you start to think you shouldn't be able to tell the players without a scorecard, but somehow Nolan gives you just enuf visual cues to help you keep straight at least 4 simultaneous story threads, as he intercuts rapidly between them.
It is a tour de force, the best SF&F movie of the year. It's not for slow learners, but anyone who's easily bored will have absolutely no problem staying awake. Indeed, after this, you may be reluctant to ever fall asleep again.