Chris Nolans masterpiece(s)

Rating: 10/10 (19 August 2010)

Inception is both a very entertaining and a very clever movie. It's a massive declaration of love for the film media, and it contains tons of references to other great movies, both visually and auditive. I recommend you listen to Hans Zimmer's soundtrack, it's amazing and also packed with hints to other movie soundtracks - Vertigo, Blade Runner. And notice how the soundtrack discretely forms a loop from the final number "Time" to the start "Half remembered dream".
The elements and ideas just keep twisting and turning throughout the entire movie. For instance, some of the key words, for describing the visuals, could be mirror, echo and resonance. The crucial scene, where we witness Mal's suicide, is a mirror shot with Cobb and Mal juxtaposed, somehow with the void between them. A visual hint, telling us that this could be a false flashback, - just another trick image from Cobb's imagination. If you accept the idea, that the whole movie is Cobb's dream, this movie is in fact a feast of false flashbacks, linking it closely to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the movie where Hitchcock invented and introduced the false flashback. In short Vertigo is a story about a dead man, trying to come to terms with the fact, that he's dead. You can view Inception in a similar way, but Nolan takes the story a level higher.
Cobb is a kind of God in his dream world, as modern man is God. But he want's to go home - he wants to quit the job. In the closing shot Cobb leaves the spinning top, his totem, (- witch the movie cleverly reveals he stole from Mal, in witch case it never did function at all as a totem, according to the dreamworld rules -) because it doesn't matter to him anymore if it spins or not. What matters is that he's home - in heaven. And therefore, presumably, he must be dead.
If you read a translation of Édith Piaf's song "Non, je ne regrette rien", it fits that story. The person in the song is free of guilt, and gives him or herself to God.
But of course that's too simple. This movie is a work of art, and you can keep interpreting the elements indefinitely. The children, for instance, what are they? Well, children are very physical ideas. So returning home could also mean that Cobb returns to his own imagination.
I could go on about this movie - the vertical/horizontal split, where the water and the city is found - the mix of the elements in limbo and on and on.
In short, Christopher Nolan does exactly with Inception, what great directors do with their most important work: reinvent our perception of the movie as an art form.