most intruguing most compelling movie of the summer

Rating: 9/10 (20 July 2010)

Funny things, dreams. Fascinating for the dreamer, but as dull as a late morning in Slough for anybody else, unless, of course, your guide is Freud. Or, as it turns out, Christopher Nolan, the 39-year-old British director of 'Memento' and 'The Dark Knight', whose solution to the boredom of other people's dreams is to collide their woozy, ever- changing, upside-down and roundabout nature with the thrust of a fast- paced, men-on-a-mission movie and a startling visual language that mirrors their strangeness
Memento is, of all of Nolan's work, the film most structurally similar to Inception; it's a cyclical narrative that aims very directly to evoke that feeling of being lost – lost amongst the lingo of fantastical terms and impossible physics, lost in a story that is layered and folded upon itself four times over. Indeed, Hollywood's obsession with 3D has extended to the storytelling process, and with Inception, it also reminds us that story and characterization still rule in the land of a thousand digital vistas.
In simplest terms, Inception is a crime caper – a classic chase film that pits put-upon lead Leonardo DiCaprio against a dreamscape populated by the darkest parts of his subconscious. That is, of course, also Inception's hook.
There's a subtlety to Nolan's direction that comes from (as obvious as this sounds) actually knowing how to direct a film to tell a story, as opposed to stringing together scenes with a music videographer's mentality. This is subtle in and of itself, but the lack of establishing shots is a great example; without explicitly pointing out the geography, Inception instead sets up the audience to feel dizzy and lost. We're taken through different locations and times that are running in tandem – and the jumps are cut together in such a way as to leave us wondering how we got there in the first place. Nolan throws a perfect storm of stunts, effects, locations and actors at one big idea: that it's possible to pilfer ideas from dreams by a process called 'extraction', which involves hooking yourself up to a drip, falling asleep and entering the world of the subconscious. The holy grail of this process is to reverse it, which is 'inception', the planting of a new idea in another's mind. That's the trick that experts Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), aided by new recruits Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Eames (Tom Hardy), try to pull off while hopping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa. They're working for Saito (Ken Watanabe) in pursuit of business magnate Robert (Cillian Murphy), and their motives vary, from financial to intellectual. But DiCaprio has another driver: the memory of his wife Mal (Marion Cottilard) is haunting him and it's going to take a lot of psychological spring- cleaning for him to reconnect with that lost world. All hail Nolan for mastering a higher class of mass entertainment. Like all good science fiction, 'Inception' demands we pay serious attention to pure fantasy on the back of strong ideas and exquisite craft – but it also combines fantasy with real observations about our sleeping lives. Like a dream, Nolan's film fades swiftly in the light – but while it lasts, it feels like there's nothing more important to decipher.