Movie Review: 'Inception'

In my humble opinion, Christopher Nolan is the single greatest filmmaker working today. Yes, even better than Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. No one can tell a story quite like Nolan can. In Memento, he took us through the film completely backwards in order to identify with its main character who had no short-term memory. In The Prestige, he slowly unveiled a story of two rival magicians where things were not quite what they seemed. This time around, he takes us to the land of dreams and beyond.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an expert at extraction, the art of invading someone's dream and stealing their hidden secrets. The film begins with him doing just that to a businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who has secrets that another company wants. However, after this mission, Saito wants to hire Cobb, not for extraction, but for the infinitely more difficult mission of inception, the planting of an idea in someone's head in such a way that it seems to have been created naturally.

The man Saito wants to do this to is Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the son and heir to a wealthy businessman who owns a business empire and is very close to death. The idea that he wants inserted is to have Robert break up his father's company in order for Saito's business to be able to compete. To do this, Cobb collects a team of experts: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his partner-in-crime, Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architect who can create the dream environment, and Eames (Tom Hardy) and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who handle other parts of the process.

While it's not really clear what his team would get out of it besides a fascinating experience, Cobb has a personal stake in this mission. We learn that he has been on the run for awhile because of his trips into dreams, but if he is able to complete inception, Saito claims that Cobb can go back to his regular life.

The strongest attribute that Inception has to offer is its amazingly intricate story. Nolan tends to create films that work on different levels, but in his latest, he takes that to a new literal extreme. Simply going into somebody's dream wouldn't be good enough. There has to be more, there must be layers. In order to achieve the ultimate goal of inception, there's not one layer, or even two, but four (if I'm even counting these layers correctly).

Nolan juggles all of these layers so very carefully to make them connect and make sense since each previous layer has a profound effect on the next which leads to some of the film's craziest moments, but more on that later. It is said that Nolan worked on this screenplay for about ten years, which is understandable. Trying to put this entire vision together could not have been an easy task. If he changed even one thing, he would have to see how that would affect the other layers of the story.

For example, in their regular missions of extraction, something like a fall or dipping into a pool of water would cause someone to wake up, but these rules begin to change for the crew when they take on the task of implanting an idea, something that has to be done so deep that it requires sedation. An example of the rules in this mission occurs during a car chase where there is a momentary loss of gravity. However, when this affects the next layer, the effect is compounded.

This is something else that Nolan explores throughout the film, time within dreams. On the first layer, we are told that an hour in a dream is equal to about five minutes in reality. Now imagine this effect compounding down through different layers of dreams (the best way I can think of describing it is as the subconscious, sub-subconscious, etc.). A few seconds in one layer is equal to a few minutes in the next layer is equal to even more time in the next layer.

Nolan uses ideas like this, not merely for convenience, but because they make perfect sense. When you dream, are you ever aware of how much time has passed? Dream time can seem infinite, whereas not much time might have passed back in reality.

This idea of extended time is one of the things that leads to another great attribute of Inception, that being its special effects. The most notable sequence where these are used (I say "used" and not "shown off" because the effects are necessary to the storyline) involves a battle in a hotel corridor, where the laws of physics don't seem to apply, and the events surrounding it. Small parts of this sequence had been used to tease eager film-goers, but to see it play out is more wondrous than one could have imagined.

This is a film that will no doubt spark debate, especially with the ending, which is left open to interpretation, begging the same question that floats in everyone's mind throughout the film: Is this reality or merely a dream? It's a lot to take in on one viewing, so more than likely it will take two or more to discover the depths of interplay between the different levels of the subconscious.

One thing's for sure, Nolan has cemented himself among the great filmmakers of our time, not only with this film, but with most of his other works as well. I eagerly anticipate Nolan's next project, whether it be the sequel to The Dark Knight or another completely original work like this one. With Inception, the peak has been set for 2010. Will other films dare to dream as big? 4/4 stars.

Starts today at theaters everywhere.

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