Review: Inception

Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard
Released: 16/07/2010
Rating: 12A

Have you ever had a dream so good that you really hated waking up from it just because it meant it was over? Well in terms of film: that dream is Inception. Christopher Nolan has created in this cinematic masterpiece one of the most complex and intelligent movies of recent years.

The story centres on Mr Cobb (DiCaprio), a highly skilled thief who can literally enter your dreams and extract thoughts and ideas from you – the ultimate espionage. But while extraction is difficult, there is a greater skill he possesses, a skill thought by many to be impossible – the skill of Inception. The art of inserting an idea into the complexities of the human mind and making the mind in question believe it was self-generated.

The mind we learn has ways of recognising foreign elements and a well trained mind can put up security against them – projections of people the dreamer knows in real life, who can step in and try and stop the infiltrator before it’s too late. Mr Fischer – the man who Cobb and his team must infiltrate –  has had this training.

If you have seen the trailer for this film you will have seen the mindbending gravity defying visuals. In the trailer they somehow seem out of place, with so little idea what the story is and so much emphasis on the visual.  But every single one makes sense in the movie because they take place on various levels of this dream world, and the events in one are all intertwined with those of the others and so on. Nolan has admitted he rewrote the script numerous times, and I can imagine that every time he made a slight alteration somewhere half the script needed a rewrite – everything is so completely and irrevocably linked together.

There has been much talk since it’s release on what the end means, but this movie is as much about the journey to the end as it is about the final twist – I could tell you the end now and you’d probably still not lose anything from the power of the film.

The supporting cast of Page, Gordon-Levitt, and Michael Caine are all used to great effect – especially Page, in what will undoubtedly surpass Juno as her definitive role to date – and Marion Cotillard’s performance as Cobb’s late wife is both tragic and insane.

This is a movie which had such hype that I simply could not believe it would live up to the expectations. I was right, it didn’t. It surpassed every single one.

James Gordon

Tags: christopher nolan, ellen page, inception, leonardo dicaprio