"An elegant solution for keeping track of reality"

Rating: 8/10 (28 July 2010)

Inception (2010) Christopher Nolan has often explored the relationship between human perception and reality. 'Memento (2000)' was told backwards, forcing the viewer to rely upon the damaged first-person memory of its amnesiac protagonist. 'The Prestige (2006)' concerned misdirection and trickery, highlighting the role of the movie director as a magician, a shyster, a charlatan, deftly blurring the line between what the viewer is shown, and what actually is. Even 'Batman Begins (2004),' via the Scarecrow's creepy hallucinogenic toxin, hinted at how the human mind could unwittingly distort one's perception of reality. 'Inception (2010)' once again brings Nolan into familiar territory, an action film dripping with metaphysical philosophy: what is a dream? Why do we dream? And are you dreaming right now?
Philip K. Dick succinctly described reality as "that which, when you stop believing it, doesn't go away." Our dreams are manufactured realities that seem every bit as expansive and convincing as our everyday lives, namely because the brain shuts off the segment of our brains responsible for logic (indeed, in one dream, I've walked through my front door, come out into a football stadium, and thought nothing of it). Who's to know whether or not I'll wake up in 70 years time, laugh to myself, and think "blue skies? How absurd!" Shifting levels of consciousness have become common fodder in science-fiction (see, for example, 'Dark City (1998)' and 'The Matrix (1999),' but here I loved how Nolan twisted and warped the fabric of his cinematic universe like an Escher lithograph. Buildings leans and distorts; gravity shifts or disappears; in one particularly magnificent sequence, the Paris skyline seems to fold in upon itself, encapsulating "reality" into a self-contained cube.