I had a dream all Summer Blocbusters would be this brilliant!

Rating: 10/10 (7 August 2010)

¨Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. ¨ Inception is one of the reasons I love movies so much. This is a really intelligent and smart film that never fails to entertain with amazing visuals, good action sequences, and an excellent cast. Christopher Nolan is without a doubt the best director in Hollywood right now. Nolan's worse reviewed film is The Prestige and that movie was brilliant so that is saying a lot about a director who seems to turn everything he touches into gold. He revived the Batman franchise making it more realistic and believable and made an even better sequel. The Dark Knight was a character driven film that studied the psychological consequences behind each action, Inception is a very different kind of movie that focuses more on the storytelling than on the characters themselves. When Nolan was approached by the studio to try to make it in 3D, he declined saying he wanted the audience to focus on the storytelling and not be distracted. 3D serves for movies that don't have a smart plot and only want to focus on the visuals, however Inception works so well and the visuals are so amazing that they are better than anything I have seen on 3D (yes including Avatar). Even so, the special effects aren't the reason why this film is so engaging. The reason people want to see this over and over again is because Nolan has written a smart plot which took him more than 10 years to write. It is a movie with several layers and depths, a film that you won't want to take your eyes off the screen for even a second, it engages you from the very beginning and draws you into it, it is like a maze you need to solve. In a summer full of remakes and sequels it was really good to see something so refreshing and original, the best film I have seen since Nolan's The Dark Knight.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobbs, a fugitive who can't return to the States to visit his kids because of an incident that isn't explained until halfway through the film. He specializes in retrieving hidden secrets from the subconscious of people's minds and he does this by invading their dreams. While he is extracting secrets from Saito (Ken Watanabe), a millionaire who owns an oil company, something goes wrong and he fails to get all the information he needed. Saito then convinces Cobbs to work for him and he promises him that if he does this one job he will fix his situation in the United States so that he can reunite with his kids again. This time instead of extracting a secret, Saito wants Cobbs to plant an idea on someone's mind, in other words he wants him to perform inception. Cobb's partner, Arthur (JosephGordon-Levitt), says that inception is impossible and that it can't be done because the victim will know that the idea never came from him, but Cobbs says that it's possible. In order to perform inception on Saito's corporate rival Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), heir of his deceased father's oil empire, Cobbs needs to assemble a team. First he finds a young architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page) who is in charge of creating the world in which the dream takes place in, next he hires Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who can create the most powerful sedatives to keep his subjects asleep, and finally he hires Eames (Tom Hardy), an expert in impersonating people. Together they have to try to perform the difficult task of inception, but Cobbs has been having trouble keeping his personal issues outside of the dream world and his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps on invading the dream world and putting the entire mission in danger.
The cast is excellent, but the film really isn't character driven, we are drawn more by the story and the many layers we have to uncover. Nolan has created a maze and we are the one's who have to pay close attention in order to understand the plot. While Cobb teaches Ariadne how the dream world works, Nolan is actually using Page's character to explain to us the complexities of this world he created. It is like in The Matrix where Fishburne's character explained everything to Neo. This is the most original sci-fi film I have seen since The Matrix and I loved every second of this movie. The two and a half hours fly by and the ending leaves you wanting to watch the film a second time. In a time in which Hollywood is running out of fresh ideas, Nolan comes in to bring a refreshing film. When Cobbs tells Ariadne to ¨never recreate places from your memory. Always imagine new places!,¨ it is like Nolan is trying to tell screenwriters to come up with fresh ideas and recreate new things. The story isn't the only refreshing thing about this film. The visuals are also extraordinary and the action sequences are breathtaking. It is exciting to see how Ariadne begins creating the dream world, and the action scene where Arthur fights off the guards in a gravity free hotel is amazing. This is a movie you must see. The best of the year and as good as The Dark Knight was.
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