5/5
Christopher Nolan's Inception is a near-perfect film. It follows a thief named Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team of extractors (Gordon-Levitt, Hardy, Rao, Page) as they invade people's dreams and steal their secrets. They are hired to carry out a new kind of job called inception: implant an idea in someone else's head through their dreams. In order to do this and convince the dreamer that it is their own idea, they must go three levels deep--a dream within a dream within a dream. With each level removed from reality, time slows down exponentially, such that entire lives can be lived within mere seconds. Imagine the life you're living now; imagine dying 80 years after being born and then waking up to find yourself still young. And that is the idea from which this entire movie stems, from which it will no doubt be compared to the likes of The Matrix. But what Inception has over The Matrix is that we all dream, and we all know what it's like to wake up from a dream. We can imagine that what we're living in now is just a dream, and maybe--just maybe--we can wake up and get a second chance at life.
The cinematography in this film is crisp and direct. Except for the impressive and awe-inspiring gravity-defying action scenes in the hotel, it's merely adequate. It's not particularly cumbersome nor is it particularly artistic, but it gets the job done. The acting feels much the same. It is written well enough to make the characters distinct and separate, but they never feel like more than just archetypes. Even DiCaprio's character, by far the most complex and mature, feels like a rehashing of the tormented soul he played in
Shutter Island. And Marion Cotillard, whose acting I fell in love with in
Nine, plays a representation of an idea instead of a real human being. But these are the weakest aspects of the movie.
Inception's strengths are its storytelling, directing, and editing. The story, as I've described above, is what will win this movie its fans and its cult following. The plot, compelling as it is, exists solely to propel the idea that the world we think is real may just be a dream. And as Cobb warns us in the film, an idea is the most dangerous, insidious, persistent threat to our health and wellbeing that we can imagine. The story is combined with precise editing to create an airtight film that never lets you catch your breath or blink your eyes. It is nonstop intellectual and visceral action from beginning to end, with stunning efficiency and economy. And Nolan's directing puts this movie together into an unforgettable whole, with nary a missing piece or unseen error. This is a movie that was not thrown together in a day; it took years of planning and execution and is all the better for it. No, it's not a perfect movie and it may not be for everybody, but it's one of the most riveting, revolutionary movies I've seen come out of Hollywood in a long, long time. I suggest you watch it as soon as possible, before all the water cooler chatter about it ruins the film for you.
IMDb link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
