Often interesting, if dressed up, film doing well to quite literally explore the mind of a troubled lead as it adheres to creative science fiction and heist sub-genre demands.

Rating: 6/10 (15 May 2011)

I enjoy the fact that Inception arrives with some fairly good ideas to it and isn't afraid to have a little fun with them; when several characters are in a deep sleep inside of a moving minivan, which is being chased by would-be mercenaries armed to the teeth and wholly taking advantage of that fact, they are thrown around and thrust about inside of the collective world of their slumbers as if an earthquake were happening therein – all because of the grief their unconscious bodies suffer in "reality". The film is close to all but full of little instances such as these, the bulk of them more interesting that any sort of narrative the writer/director of the piece Christopher Nolan has going on; as indeed are they a great deal more than any sort of attention to character the film has unfolding within it beyond that of its lead's. There is a nagging feeling throughout Inception that somewhere along the line, an original idea mutated into an assembly line actioner; when it's established that anonymous gunmen turn up to fire upon the lead characters having entering somebody's state of sleeping, it is explained they are the subconscious reacting negatively to intruders within the person's mind: neat idea. By the time we're all storming an isolated dream-scape base drenched in Arctic conditions, guns blazing whilst engaging with those gunmen, it's veered away from its smart foundations and become a snow-set Call of Duty level.
Inception's lead is a certain Dom Cobb, played effectively by Leonardo DiCaprio; a man occupying an unspecified future not too dissimilar to that of our own present but which happens to house an invention capable of entering that of a human-being's dream. We begin in the present, the film essentially one long flashback; we see Cobb washed up on a heavily guarded island beach rife with Japanese iconography before taken to meet an elderly man whom reacts to seeing him. When we dart back to before they would have first met, we observe Cobb standing in stark contrast to that of when we saw him during the opening; Cobb here is smart and well dressed and is far better shape; the ability to identify specific British artists of-old when observing a painting at a function suggesting degrees of sophistication in that regard. Inside, Cobb is a troubled man; his dead wife, who's fittingly named Mal – incidentally the French word for "bad", here played by the French actress Marion Cotillard, weaves in and out of his own mind causing havoc in a fairly unique way as he strives to get home to his two young children whom he has not seen in years. The truth with Mal looms over proceedings impressively.
His field is that of essentially thieving, Cobb's crucial piece of kit to his line of work a series of pipes and tubes linked to a machine small enough to fit into a briefcase complete with its own infrastructure and framework; an invention enabling one to connect it to another human and enter their dreams. We have to latch onto things quickly in this regard; the film does not much pause for thought as this utensil is used as it is – it is established to exist; it is established people use it and are familiar with it and we must catch on. Cobb is approached by a rich Japanese businessman named Saito (Watanabe), his idea on this, Cobb's retirement time, to do the seemingly impossible and achieve "Inception"; the placing of a memory or psychological item into that of a person's dream, in this case to make Cillinan Murphy's Robert Fischer, son of a dying billionaire, think he should divide the company up and do all manner of wrongfulness to benefit Saito. Bruce Willis' immortal line to Hans Gruber nearer the end of the first Die Hard seeing him exclaim to us precisely where he stands upon realising everything that had just transpired was, essentially, so as to steal something at this point rearing its head.
The film covers, to varying degrees of interest, Cobb's employment of a team to do the never before attempted. His first is Eames, (Hardy) an ice-cool Brit. whom dwells in the hostile surroundings of African township casinos whom shares some, but not enough, amusing antagonism with Cobb's lifetime work partner in Gordon-Levitt's Arthur. In addition to proceedings, Ellen Page's young Architect Ariadne, whose role it is to literally construct the dream-scape, sees Page lumped with the role of the newbie to the proceedings – a role which we very much map onto ourselves in this regard as she asks all the questions and needs most things explained to her in the manner we do.
Strip away most of the exterior and Inception is a relatively simplistic film; like Gilliam's troubled movie of six months earlier in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, although not as enjoyable, the premise is fairly condensed, if routine, and is near-enough embedded within the realms of straight forward genre – right down to the crew of guys sitting in a warehouse around whiteboards housing plans as they knock around ideas. The kick being that both projects have this wildly inventive item or core idea at the very centre of them, something which cannot help but demand creativity and incident along side dramatic content inducing the odd bout of awe on top of what might be at its heart a very simple story about a love triangle or an affluent but corrupt individual going to a man for one last job and asking him to do "x" and "y" . The film is a sharp, if ultimately overly long, but engaging science-fiction with enough action and familiarised photogenic stars in it so as to draw in the mainstream crowds in that regard; not to sound too dismissive, the film has its merits and its triumphs and is impressively reigned in by its creator but is far from dreamy.