Nolan's masterpiece.

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2012)

Writer-director Christopher Nolan explores the realm of dreams in Inception, his first film since his acclaimed box office juggernaut The Dark Knight. The sci-fi thriller's premise sounds simple enough, but its execution by Nolan is anything but. Ostensibly an international heist caper, Inception follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an "extractor" whose form of corporate espionage is to invade the dreams of the rich and powerful and pluck their most tightly guarded secrets from the depths of their subconscious. "A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules," Cobb says at one point.
Cobb is an international fugitive due to a dark deed from his past that prevents him from being able to return stateside to see his children. A shady corporate titan, Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe), offers Cobb a chance to wipe his past clean and go home. The job? Inception -- planting an idea into a mark's subconscious rather than stealing one. Saito wants Cobb and his longtime point man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to invade the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to an energy conglomerate who is also riddled with daddy issues. Saito wants to take out the competition so to speak.
Cobb and Arthur assemble a team that includes the forger Eames (Tom Hardy), Yusuf the chemist (Avatar's Dileep Rao), and newcomer Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architect who will literally design and build the world of the mark's dreams. Shadowing Dom in the dream realm is the enzymatic Mal (Marion Cotillard), a woman from Dom's past who threatens the entire operation. (Michael Caine, Pete Postlethwaite, Tom Berenger and Lukas Haas pop up in small roles.) The deeper Cobb and his team venture into Fischer's subconscious, the more dangerous the mission becomes and the more likely it is that they could all end up trapped there -- a seeming eternity in the time of the mind and a fate that could render them all vegetables in the real world.
With Inception, Nolan has made his equivalent to The Big Sleep (ironic given the subject matter of Nolan's film), a thriller whose near indecipherable storyline will boggle minds for decades to come -- or even his 2001, a genre opus guaranteed to confound or amaze viewers. Or is it Nolan's finally realized attempt at making a James Bond film? Or a heist thriller to rival Heat? A better version of Dreamscape? Inception is all of the above, and yet it's also a singular accomplishment from a filmmaker who has only gotten better with each film. Indeed, Inception could very well be Nolan's masterpiece.