Merrily Merrily Merrily Life is but a dream

Rating: 10/10 (16 July 2010)

Christopher Nolan pushed his film-making to new heights. Without the restriction to the batman plot line his imagination was limitless, and his delivery exceeded his former masterwork The Dark Knight. For the first half hour the story gets ahead of itself, literally, and the viewer doesn't fully understand the complex ideas being explored. Then little by little the story explains itself. I like that the backstory builds on the plot, because memories, especially life-changing ones, reoccur in our dreams. This shows Chris Nolan's genius: that our dreams make the perfect movie.
We use dreams as a way of escaping. When we want to end a bad night we go to bed and that is a very similar trait to movies as well. When we feel down we like to escape in front of a big screen. And I'm sure some people will watch nothing but movies when they are very depressed. Well in Chris Nolan's world of Inception some people will do nothing but sleep, because while we are asleep our imaginations are limitless and we lose the monotony of our daily lives. Our main character may become one of those people, and that is up to the viewer to decide.
Like Chris Nolan says; you end up in the middle of your dream. This skips past the stupid transportation requirements of a regular movie and lands you right in the heart of the action, which goes along perfectly with Chris Nolan's high suspense thrill ride style. But anyone will agree that this is not your usual action-packed blockbuster; this is like the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti of blockbusters.
Once everything gets explained I suggest strapping on your seatbelt because it will be the equivalent to a two-hour cerebral roller coaster ride. I work in a movie theater and I saw people run to and fro the bathroom because unfortunately for them we serve large portions of a diuretic known as beer.
Well in Chris Nolan's philosophy our dreams are our subconscious with no bounds. Because our brains are working at a higher rate time is slower. I experience this first-hand when I'm unexcited about going to school; I'll snap in and out of sleep to look at the clock and minutes seem more like hours. He also goes along with Descartes' philosophy of us not being able to tell our dreams from reality. So in order to extract information (or later plant a memory aka Inception) he has real-life architects design a layout that would either help manipulate the dreamer or make it seem more like a reality. This contains the usual unpredictability of dreams, and saves Chris Nolan from such an accusation. Well these architects are not only able to change the structure of a dream but also its physics, making some really cool scenes. And thankfully he doesn't try to explain the gadgetry necessary to bring others into one person's dream.
Chris Nolan also explores deeper concepts by being able to have a dream within a dream and that way going deeper into your subconscious. The deeper in your subconscious you go the slower time will be. So a vegetable will constantly be in their subconscious and time will move like molasses.
Overall rating 94%; I'm not sure what a perfect movie would look like but this is pretty damn close, and it rises to the top of its genre of summer action blockbusters. Your brain will reel throughout the movie while you watch mind blowing visuals. Now the cons.
Spoilers: For all you people who love technicalities the time and physics concepts had their iffy moments. In a scene, and in the first dream state, Yusuf (Dileep Rao) drives a van off a bridge (to create the sensation of falling to wake them up) and it takes approximately 10 seconds to hit the water. Well, as stated in the movie, that gives Arthur (Joseph Gordon- Levitt) 2 minutes to create the same sensation for the second dream state. This starts when the dream loses gravity (because the van is falling). That means that he beat up someone, tied everyone together, dragged them to an elevator shaft, set charges on said shaft, and blew them up to get it moving and thus creating the sensation of falling with no gravity; ingenious I know but the time tables don't match up.
Another gripe was the physics of the anti-gravity affecting the second dream state but not the third. If there is no gravity while the van is falling for the first dream state it should affect all dream states and not just the second, because in the second the bodies would also be floating. Even when he was pulling the bodies to the shaft the physics remained normal in the second dream state. Although there is a hole somewhere I've never experienced anti-gravity but I'd imagine it would feel much different, even if you were still, than the feeling of gravity weighing you down while you sleep. I wonder if astronauts dream in anti-gravity when they sleep in space.
My theory on the end: he was dreaming. Because when he tried Yusuf's heavy sedative he only saw two images: one of his wife and the other of her laying with her head on the railroad tracks. According to Yusuf this sedative would knock the user out for 4 hours meaning he would be dreaming the equivalent of two days. Since he took the drug he wasn't able to roll the top revealing if it was a dream or not (I think it was really cool how this was also the motif). Well at the end it's spinning for a good 30 seconds and it wavers a bit but doesn't lose this pattern seemingly like it will spin forever.