Inception Review

 By: Phantom

Inception is a wholly original sci-fi actioner, in an era where sequel-itis rules and cheap CGI special effects come a dime a dozen.  The following review is mildly spolier-y... so jump to the last paragraph if you don't want to ruin anything.  This film is worth going in knowing nothing about other than "It's Good."

The film follows professional Dream Extraction expert Dom Cobb, played by Leonard DiCaprio (Shutter Island), on his latest mind heist.  Extraction in this film means going inside of someone else’s dream to find that person’s deepest secrets…  a profitable business if you can find trade secrets and the like…  After being hired by Saito (Ken Wanatabe), Cobb assembles his Ocean’s 11-like team for “one last job” – only instead of performing an Extraction this time he has to perform a much more dangerous "Inception," the planting of an idea.  Among his team and rivals are Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Berenger and Cillian Murphy.  Longtime favorite of the director’s Michael Caine also drops by for a bit part.
 
The first half of the Inception is tad exposition heavy, explaining how the dream world works for seemingly an hour.   As this hour wore on, I began to get the feeling that this would merely be a decent thriller with some great production values. However, my fears were unfounded, and when the crew enters the final dream sequence, the second half of the film, the movie not only takes off but soars into one of the best films of the year.  

Always one to play with narrative structures, here director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) has his characters go into dreams within dreams, and has each layer of dream interact with each other.  For example if a dreamer is moved to the left by someone, his dream world might experience an earthquake.  The levels of interaction go even further by playing around with time.  If you’ve seen an action move, the chances are that you’ve noticed a sequence where a red countdown timer has 15 seconds to detonation, yet somehow our hero has 10 minutes real-time to get to the bomb.  Here, this phenomenon is exploited on purpose and adds to the time-space continuum bending of Nolan’s film.  By going deeper into dreams (I won’t explain how or why) characters experience a slowdown in time.  So for on one level of a dream someone could have 5 minutes to complete a task where another level of the dream could have up to 20 minutes in the same amount of “real time” (I didn’t get the exact numbers in one of the exposition scene).  The scenes become thrilling to watch and the special effects, while certainly “showy,” work to enhance the concepts and in favor of the world created.

I can’t recommend this film enough.  Now that the academy is choosing 10 films for Best Picture, I would be honestly surprised if this was not listed at one of “blockbuster” picks… I would suggest this film even transcends the blockbuster tag and belongs as an honest contender.  This film is fits safely in it’s PG-13 rating I believe, and anyone over 13 should find something to enjoy.  The screenplay is solid and the acting is Grade A.  As mentioned before, this movie’s special effects work to create spectacle moviegoers haven’t seen before, yet do so in service of the story.  Worth seeing for all but the most jaded of movie fans.

Poster © 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Words © 2010 Beyond the Films.