Film Review: Inception

Director: Christopher Nolan

Inception is the big budget creation of Christopher Nolan who had the idea back in 2001 about dream stealers and decided to develop the idea. He wanted to work on some bigger productions so delayed development whilst he worked on the Batman series to increase his experience before coming back to the idea behind Inception. After its release it became one of the highest grossing films of all time and won four Oscars.

Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in the hotel room while the others dream

The film follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo Di Caprio) and business partner Arthur (Jospeh Gordon-Levitt) who perform illegal espionage by entering people's subconscious to steal crucial information. They use a ''dream within a dream'' strategy to gain this information. Dom struggles with the memory of his dead wife who frequently appears in his dreams and sabotages his plans. They are hired by the wealthy Mr Saito (Ken Watanabe) to perform the art of ''inception'' where they plant an idea into somebody's subconscience and make them believe the idea was their own.

The narrative becomes reasonably complex as the team must enter many dreams within a dream to convince the victim that he really did conceive the idea himself. This requires Ariadne (Ellen Page) to create various complex dreamscapes for these dreams to occur in which vastly differ in background. It sets up some stunning visual aspects especially with each dream affecting the dream being had beneath it so the van they have that gets flipped upside down causes a superb fight scene in a hallway which sees the two men fly around as if in zero gravity. The intriguing and complex narrative combined with superb visual effects create one amazing movie to watch.

Dom (Leonardo Di Caprio) with his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard)

Some say it is an achievement that a film as complex as this was such a hit at the box office with all this talk of dumbing down at the cinema, I personally think the issue is more a case of the movie industry just under-estimating how intelligent the average person is. A clever moment is when Cobb asks Ariadne how they got to a certain place and that people only remember the middle of the dream and not the beginning which is very true. Tom Hardy who plays Eames, a sharp tongued Englishman, was somebody who grew on me a lot throughout the movie after I was initially annoyed by his character. Marion Cotillard is also great as the femme-fatale Mal.

With a film this ambitious in plot as well as being highly regarded by critics and fans alike, it's hard not to want to find criticisms with Inception. Some of the casting was slightly dubious in my eyes, with Ellen Page being the main culprit, but I did feel some of the ''rules'' regarding entering dreams were just created purely to facilitate big budget special effects. There isn't really any mystery to solve within the film, it's more of an action heist movie with a complex narrative.

3.5/4 Superbly clever and innovative movie