It's turtles... turtles all the way down

Rating: 5/10 (30 July 2010)

Inception is a relatively simple story made complex by the way that it is told. In that respect it is unsurprising that it was conceived at the same time that Christopher Nolan was making his breakthrough project Memento, again a simple story rendered complex by its presentation
SPOILER
Inception is about an attempt to insert an idea into the conscious mind of a dreaming subject in such a way as to make him believe that the idea is his own or originated from his own subconscious. This is the titular "inception". The subject is Cillian Murphy, heir to a vast corporate empire which is close to achieving a monopoly of power generation. The idea to be implanted is that he should break up his father's corporate empire. The prime motivator is businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) who hires ideas thief Dom (Leonardo diCaprio) after the latter botches an attempt at extracting information from Saito's own dreams.
Dom assembles a team comprising an architect who will design the dream spaces (Ellen Page), someone who can impersonate others in dreams (Tom Hardy) and a drug specialist who can keep them under long enough to achieve their goal. Along for the ride is Dom's long suffering partner in crime Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Saito himself. Whether the scheme succeeds and how the story plays out I will leave to the viewer to discover.
END SPOILER
Much of the film revolves around explaining the process of entering and monkeying with people's dreams. In this Nolan is clever as dreams are a universal shared human experience. Thus the sensation of falling which often wakes people becomes a core element of the process of stepping up out of dreams and seems entirely convincing. Whilst we know that this is fantasy it has that crucial ring of believability to it and obeys its own laws so far as the requirements of narrative and suspense allow.
I suspect that people who have seen this film will fall into three categories. Males aged 14 - 21 will probably treat this film as a religious experience, ascribing it with all manner of "important" philosophical "truths". Males who were 14 - 21 in 1999 will, I suspect, hate it - accusing it of being a rip off of the "masterpiece" of their generation, The Matrix. Anyone else will probably see it, enjoy it and then forget it. I suspect that there is a pseudo- philosophical action film for every generation and this is simply the latest.
For all that, Inception is an enjoyable film. It is roughly 43% as intelligent as it thinks it is but it is well crafted, nicely filmed and excellently acted.
Leonardo diCaprio seems to have built a career out of playing damaged people with dark secrets in their past (his characters in Shutter Island, Blood Diamond, The Departed and, in fact, just about everything he has done in the last decade or so) but he is reliably good at it and is so here. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is brilliant as always, although sadly relegated to a side role. Ellen Page is good but her character simply exists to have the mechanics of the world explained to her and the audience, thus she has little chance to shine. The show-stealer is Tom Hardy who has almost all of the film's funny lines and all but one of the funny moments.
The special effects are impressive but restrained, as with the best films they support the story rather than become the point of it.
The weakest element is the plot which is very simple but then maybe it needs to be. With the added confusion of different layers of reality intermingling anything more complex would have required that moviegoers be handed a flowchart on leaving the cinema (which would have been very welcome in the case of 2004's Primer http://xkcd.com/657/large/).
In closing I'd like to add my own slant to the debate as to the closing scene. It strikes me that what is important is not whether it falls but the fact that Dom doesn't care if it does or doesn't. Perhaps the message is that reality is what we decide it is.