INCEPTION review

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Inception Movie Reviews, Pictures – Rotten Tomatoes.

Inception reviews

74

8.3 User Score:

Generally favorable reviews

Based on 42 critic reviews

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Movie Info

Genre(s): Mystery | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller

Written by: Christopher Nolan

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Release Date:

Theatrical: July 16, 2010

Running Time: 148 minutes, Color

Origin: USA | UK

Summary

RATING: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb’s rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible—inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming. This summer, your mind is the scene of the crime. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

via Inception reviews at Metacritic.com.

The “Inception” reviews are in… and mostly positive, despite a few who were less than impressed (maybe they were just confused?). If you’ve got “Inception” on your must-see list, you’re not alone, but are the Inception reviews enough to get your butt in a theater seat?

For the most part, critics have praised “Inception” – despite a running time of almost 2.5 hours and the possibility of needing second viewing to fully understand it – proving that it lives up to the hype of being, you know, a truly original concept (how refreshing!).

Here’s the rundown on some of Inception’s reviews… leave us a comment to let us know what you thought of Inception:

RottenTomatoes.com ranks Inception at 83% on the Tomatometer, with an average rating of 8.1/10.

Metacritic gives Inception a score of 76 (Generally Favorable Reviews), based on 39 critic reviews. 58 users, thus far, have earned Inception a 9.4 out of 10.

Variety, Justin Chang – “If Inception is a metaphysical puzzle, it’s also a metaphorical one: It’s hard not to draw connections between Cobb’s dream-weaving and Nolan’s filmmaking — an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression. Mission accomplished.”

Empire, Nev Pierce – “With physics-defying, thunderous action, heart-wringing emotion and an astonishing performance from DiCaprio, Nolan delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country.”

Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert – “Inception does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does.”

Time, Richard Corliss – “Inception is precisely the kind of brainy, ambitious, grand-scale adventure Hollywood should be making more of.”

Rolling Stone, Peter Travers – “In this wildly ingen­ious chess game, grandmaster Nolan plants ideas in our heads that disturb and dazzle. The result is a knockout. But be warned: Inception dreams big. How cool is that?”

Slate, Dana Stevens – “At the end of Inception, I hadn’t lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I’d seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.”

The New York Times, A.O. Scott – “Though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires.”

New York Magazine, David Edelstein – “Inception manages to be clunky and confusing on four separate levels of reality.”

via Inception Reviews Mostly Positive.

23 July, 2010 1:38PM AEST

Movie Review: Inception

Review by Gabrielle Rumble

A sci-fi movie with a complex plot that’s meant to confuse and leave you guessing.

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Film Details

* Season: July 2010

* Actors: Leonardo di Caprio, Ellen Page, Jospeh Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Pete Postlethwaite

* Director: Christopher Nolan

* Duration: 140 minutes

* Classification: M

* Rating: 4 stars

It’s a tricky premise and really after leaving the cinema you’re still not completely sure what’s what.

Leonardo di Caprio plays Cobb who is set the task of subconsciously planting an idea in the mind of a businessman. To do this he assembles a team of dream hackers who all link themselves in sleep to perform the task. Got it?

Although this film is tricky to explain, it actually joins a long list of films I’ve enjoyed that have been a bit weird and difficult to explain. One UK company have compiled a list of films that have left punters confused and I found a few of my favourite films on the list – Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, The Matrix, Memento. All of them involve dreaming and switching from dreams to reality which causes the confusion, but also creates a fascinating place to play.

Christopher Nolan directed this film – he also directed Memento and has created an avid fan base for himself after The Dark Knight. He works well with special effects which are used to great effect here. In a dream landscape the impossible is possible the world he creates is quite amazing. I particularly like the zero gravity sequence.

There is a star studded cast here – Leonardo di Caprio, Michael Caine, Ellen Page, Marion Cottiliard, Pete Postlethwaite, Tom Berenger, Cillian Murphy… the list goes on. All of them do a pretty good job, but Leonardo di Caprio is definitely the star of the show. His boyish good looks are definitely fading, but the acting chops are still there.

I think a second viewing of Inception is required to get all the ins and outs and the pieces you missed the first time. Watching a film twice does require commitment, but that won’t be a problem for my fellow movie companions last night – a packed theatre with lots of chatter after the closing scene.

Strong fans of the sci-fi genre will give this film 5 stars. I’m a moderate fan, but it was very well done.

4 stars

via Movie Review: Inception – ABC Canberra – Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

It’s said that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing his screenplay for “Inception.” That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire. The film’s hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we’re lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.

The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all. Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a breathtaking juggling act, and Nolan may have considered his “Memento” (2000) a warm-up; he apparently started this screenplay while filming that one. It was the story of a man with short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.

Like the hero of that film, the viewer of “Inception” is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don’t know that when you’re dreaming. And what if you’re inside another man’s dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate raider of the highest order. He infiltrates the minds of other men to steal their ideas. Now he is hired by a powerful billionaire to do the opposite: To introduce an idea into a rival’s mind, and do it so well he believes it is his own. This has never been done before; our minds are as alert to foreign ideas as our immune system is to pathogens. The rich man, named Saito (Ken Watanabe), makes him an offer he can’t refuse, an offer that would end Cobb’s forced exile from home and family.

Cobb assembles a team, and here the movie relies on the well-established procedures of all heist movies. We meet the people he will need to work with: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his longtime associate; Eames (Tom Hardy), a master at deception; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a master chemist. And there is a new recruit, Ariadne (Ellen Page), a brilliant young architect who is a prodigy at creating spaces. Cobb also goes to touch base with his father-in-law Miles (Michael Caine), who knows what he does and how he does it. These days Michael Caine need only appear on a screen and we assume he’s wiser than any of the other characters. It’s a gift.

But wait. Why does Cobb need an architect to create spaces in dreams? He explains to her. Dreams have a shifting architecture, as we all know; where we seem to be has a way of shifting. Cobb’s assignment is the “inception” (or birth, or wellspring) of a new idea in the mind of another young billionaire, Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), heir to his father’s empire. Saito wants him to initiate ideas that will lead to the surrender of his rival’s corporation. Cobb needs Ariadne

to create a deceptive maze-space in Fischer’s dreams so that (I think) new thoughts can slip in unperceived. Is it a coincidence that Ariadne is named for the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth?

Cobb tutors Ariadne on the world of dream infiltration, the art of controlling dreams and navigating them. Nolan uses this as a device for tutoring us as well. And also as the occasion for some of the movie’s astonishing special effects, which seemed senseless in the trailer but now fit right in. The most impressive to me takes place (or seems to) in Paris, where the city literally rolls back on itself like a roll of linoleum tile.

Protecting Fischer are any number of gun-wielding bodyguards, who may be working like the mental equivalent of antibodies; they seem alternatively real and figurative, but whichever they are, they lead to a great many gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, which is the way movies depict conflict these days. So skilled is Nolan that he actually got me involved in one of his chases, when I thought I was relatively immune to scenes that have become so standard. That was because I cared about who was chasing and being chased.

If you’ve seen any advertising at all for the film, you know that its architecture has a way of disregarding gravity. Buildings tilt. Streets coil. Characters float. This is all explained in the narrative. The movie is a perplexing labyrinth without a simple through-line, and is sure to inspire truly endless analysis on the web.

Nolan helps us with an emotional thread. The reason Cobb is motivated to risk the dangers of inception is because of grief and guilt involving his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), and their two children. More I will not (in a way, cannot) say. Cotillard beautifully embodies the wife in an idealized way. Whether we are seeing Cobb’s memories or his dreams is difficult to say–even, literally, in the last shot. But she makes Mal function as an emotional magnet, and the love between the two provides an emotional constant in Cobb’s world, which is otherwise ceaselessly shifting.

“Inception” works for the viewer, in a way, like the world itself worked for Leonard, the hero of “Memento.” We are always in the Now. We have made some notes while getting Here, but we are not quite sure where Here is. Yet matters of life, death and the heart are involved–oh, and those multi-national corporations, of course. And Nolan doesn’t pause before using well-crafted scenes from spycraft or espionage, including a clever scheme on board a 747 (even explaining why it must be a 747).

The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. “Inception” does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in “Memento:” How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there’s a hole in “Inception” too, but I can’t find it. Christopher Nolan reinvented “Batman.” This time he isn’t reinventing anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle “Inception.” I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.

via Inception :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews.

Bottom Line: A devilishly complicated, fiendishly enjoyable sci-fi voyage across a dreamscape that is thoroughly compelling.

In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes “Inception,” easily the most original movie idea in ages.

Now “original” doesn’t mean its chases, cliffhangers, shoot-outs, skullduggery and last-minute rescues. Movies have trafficked in those things forever. What’s new here is how writer-director Christopher Nolan repackages all this with a science-fiction concept that allows his characters to chase and shoot across multiple levels of reality.

This is, in some ways, a con-game movie, only the action takes place entirely within the characters’ minds while they dream.

Following up on such ingenious and intriguing films as “The Dark Knight” and “Memento,” Nolan has outdone himself. “Inception” puts him not only at the top of the heap of sci-fi all-stars, but it also should put this Warner Bros. release near or at the top of the summer movies. It’s very hard to see how a film that plays so winningly to so many demographics would not be a worldwide hit.

Not that the film doesn’t have its antecedents. “Dreamscape” (1984) featured a man who could enter and manipulate dreams, and, of course, in “The Matrix” (1999) human beings and machines battled on various reality levels created by artificial intelligence.

In “Inception,” Nolan imagines a new kind of corporate espionage wherein a thief enters a person’s brain during the dream state to steal ideas. This is done by an entire team of “extractors” who design the architecture of the dreams, forge identities within the dream and even pharmacologically help several people to share these dreams.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a master extractor, who is for what initially are vague reasons on the run and cannot return home to his children in the States. Then along comes a powerful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who offers Dom his life back — if he’ll perform a special job.

Saito wants Dom to do the impossible: Instead of stealing an idea, he wants Dom to plant one, an idea that will cause the mark, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to break up his father’s multibillion-dollar corporation for “emotional” reasons.

Meanwhile, you meet the other team members — Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Dom’s longtime point man; Eames (Tom Hardy), the forger; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the chemist; and Dom’s father-in-law (Michael Caine), who is not on the team but the professor who taught Dom to share dreams.

Dom’s late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), haunts his own dreamworld like a kind of Mata Hari, intent on messing with his mind if not staking a claim to his very life. He doesn’t let on about this, but Dom’s new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), figures it out — which makes her realize how dangerous it is to share dreams with Dom.

A good deal of the first hour is spent, essentially, selling the audience on this sci-fi idea. As you witness an extraction that fails and then Dom’s recruitment of his new team around the world, the movie lays out all the hows, whys, whos and what-the-hells behind “extractions.”

If you don’t follow all this, join the club. It will perhaps take multiple viewings of these multiple dream states to extract all the logic and regulations. (At least that’s what the filmmakers hope.)

Something else might come more easily on subsequent viewings: With incredibly tense situations suspended across so many dreams within dreams, all that restless energy might induce a kind of reverse stress in audiences, producing not quite tedium, but you may want to shout, “C’mon, let’s get on with it.”

This is especially true when the hectic action in one dream, a van rolling down a hill with its dreamers aboard, causes a hotel corridor to roll in another, producing a weightless state in the characters. Even Fred Astaire didn’t dance on the ceiling as much as these guys do.

Probably what “sells” this tricky movie is the actors. In his second consecutive movie to question reality — “Shutter Island” came earlier this year, remember — DiCaprio anchors the film with a performance that is low-key yet intense despite hysterical chaos breaking out all around him.

Page too displays sharp intelligence and determination in the face of this absolute jumble of reality. Especially surprising is Murphy as the mark; you find yourself genuinely sympathetic to a guy who just wanted to catch a little shut-eye and finds his mind kidnapped.

It also is nice that Nolan strives to keep CG effects to a minimum and do as many stunts in-camera as possible. This photo-realism certainly helps to keep the dream realities looking more plausible.

Credit cinematographer Wally Pfister with so neatly blending the real and surreal without any hokey moments. Ditto that for production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and the various stunt coordinators and effects teams. Meanwhile, editor Lee Smith does a Herculean job of juggling those different realities.

Sometimes originality comes at a cost though: At the end, you may find yourself utterly exhausted.

via Inception — Film Review.

A Warner Bros. release presented in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan. Executive producers, Chris Brigham, Thomas Tull. Co-producer, Jordan Goldberg. Directed, written by Christopher Nolan.

Cobb – Leonardo DiCaprio

Saito – Ken Watanabe

Arthur – Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Mal – Marion Cotillard

Ariadne – Ellen Page

Eames – Tom Hardy

Robert Fischer Jr. – Cillian Murphy

Browning – Tom Berenger

Miles – Michael Caine

Yusuf – Dileep Rao

Maurice Fischer – Pete Postlethwaite

If movies are shared dreams, then Christopher Nolan is surely one of Hollywood’s most inventive dreamers, given the evidence of his commandingly clever “Inception.” Applying a vivid sense of procedural detail to a fiendishly intricate yarn set in the labyrinth of the subconscious, the writer-director has devised a heist thriller for surrealists, a Jungian’s “Rififi,” that challenges viewers to sift through multiple layers of (un)reality. As such, it’s a conceptual tour de force unlikely to rank with Batman at the B.O., though post-”Dark Knight” anticipation and Leonardo DiCaprio should still position it as one of the summer’s hottest, classiest tickets.

As a non-franchise follow-up to the enormous success of “The Dark Knight,” this long-gestating project reps something of a gamble for Warner Bros. at a time when sophisticated original entertainments are neither as common nor as bankable as they once were. Availing himself of the resources that come with a studio’s confidence, Nolan places mind-bending visual effects and a top-flight cast in service of a boldly cerebral vision that demands, and rewards, the utmost attention. Even when its ambition occasionally outstrips its execution, “Inception” tosses off more ideas and fires on more cylinders than most blockbusters would have the nerve to attempt.

Our guide to this world of high-stakes corporate espionage is Dom Cobb (DiCaprio), an “extractor” paid to invade the dreams of various titans of industry and steal their top-secret ideas. Cobb plunders the psyche with practiced skill, though he’s increasingly haunted by the memory of his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who has a nasty habit of showing up in his subconscious and wreaking havoc on his missions.

That’s what happens during a dream-raid on wealthy businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe), who is in fact merely auditioning Cobb for a far riskier job. The target is Saito’s future rival, billionaire heir Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), and the goal is not to steal an idea but to plant one — the “inception” of the title — that will lead to the dissolution of Fischer’s empire.

In Nolan’s hands, this ingenious conceit becomes no more implausible than that of a caped crimefighter, as the writer-director grounds his flight of fancy with precise methodology and an architect’s attention to detail. Indeed, Cobb retains an actual architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), and teaches her how to mentally construct every street, building and room in the artificial world (essential if the dreamer is to be deceived) in a series of visually playful scenes whose trompe l’oeil quality brings Magritte and M.C. Escher to mind.

In classic heist-movie tradition, various brainiac specialists round out Cobb’s dream team: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his longtime organizer; Eames (“Bronson’s” Tom Hardy), a “forger” who can shapeshift at will; and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who supplies the powerful sedative that pulls Fischer and Cobb’s gang into a collective stupor.

As the motley crew comes together, so does our understanding of this strange, mercurial world (which owes something to the virtual-reality dystopia of “The Matrix”) and the rules by which it operates: the consequences of dying in a dream; the nature of dream time vs. real time; and the perils of layering ever more elaborate dreams within dreams. Numerous laws and paradoxes come into play once Cobb and Co. plunge down the rabbit-hole, at which point “Inception” takes on dizzying levels of complexity as the characters navigate the chambers and antechambers of Fischer’s mind.

It’s heady, brain-tickling stuff, and like the spinning top that serves as a key plot device, it seems forever on the brink of toppling over, especially toward the end of the nearly 2 1/2-hour running time (editor Lee Smith has his hands full, at one point cutting feverishly among four parallel lines of action). The sheer outlandishness of the premise may open it up to some narrative nitpicking — why do these dreams, for instance, so closely resemble action movies? — and attentive viewers will have a grand time “aha!”-ing at certain points and poking holes in others.

But even when questions arise, one so completely senses a guiding intelligence at the helm that the effect is stimulating rather than confusing. Never one to strand the viewer in a maze, Nolan remains a few steps ahead, keeping total comprehension just out of reach but always in view; like a mechanical rabbit on a racetrack, he encourages us to keep up. As dreams go, “Inception” is exceptionally lucid, especially compared with the more free-associative nightmare logic of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” or “Inland Empire.” Those were movies to get lost in; here, it pays to stay focused.

Like Nolan’s 2001 indie breakthrough, “Memento,” the film toys with themes such as the blurry line between perception and reality, the insidious nature of ideas, and the human capacity for self-delusion; significantly, it also focuses on an antihero captive to the memory of his dead wife. Because the picture privileges the mind over the heart, Cobb’s unresolved guilt, intended as the story’s tragic center, doesn’t resonate as powerfully as it should, though the actors certainly give it their all: Cotillard is a presence both sultry and menacing, and DiCaprio anchors the film confidently, if less forcefully than he did the recent “Shutter Island” (in which he also played a widower at the mercy of dark visions).

Supporting roles are thinly written but memorably inhabited: Gordon-Levitt cuts a dashing figure; Hardy tears into his smartass supporting role with lip-smacking gusto; Watanabe brings elegance and gravity to his corporate raider; and Murphy plays the unsuspecting dreamer with poignant reserve. Page’s repartee with DiCaprio could have been sharper in places, but the appealingly plucky actress makes Ariadne an ideal stand-in for the viewer.

Shot across four continents by Nolan’s regular d.p., Wally Pfister, and outfitted by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, “Inception” is easily the director’s most visually unbridled work; its canvas stretches from the skyscrapers of Tokyo to the bazaars of Tangiers, from an amber-lit hotel corridor to a snowy mountain compound (a setpiece that plays like an homage to “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”). Pic has arresting effects and images to spare, such as the sight of Paris folding in on itself like a book or Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur performing a fight scene in zero gravity (the explanation for which is even more dazzling).

Hans Zimmer’s surging score trumpets danger and excitement with near-operatic fervor, at times suggesting the world’s most portentous foghorn, while Edith Piaf’s recording of “Non, je ne regrette rien” serves as an ironic motif (and sets up a nice inside joke with “La Vie en rose” star Cotillard).

If “Inception” is a metaphysical puzzle, it’s also a metaphorical one: It’s hard not to draw connections between Cobb’s dream-weaving and Nolan’s filmmaking — an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression. Mission accomplished.

via Inception Movie Review – Read Variety’s Analysis Of The Film Inception.

Whose subconscious are we going into exactly?” asks a character in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller “Inception.”

This gets a big laugh in a sublime brain-twister of a movie that plays out so intricately on so many levels simultaneously that a bathroom break comes at your own peril. Text for a few seconds and you may miss a key development.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of high-tech corporate saboteurs who descend deep into a target’s dreams — with quite a few detours, some of them roadblocks set up by DiCaprio’s late wife (Marion Cotillard).

In a season of brain-dead spinoffs, “Inception” stands out as a singularly cerebral exception and will generously reward your 148 minutes of undivided attention. I strongly suspect a second visit will pay off even more.

Leonardo DiCaprio is at his tortured-hero best, extracting industrial secrets from dreams, in the sci-fi wonder “Inception.”

Leonardo DiCaprio is at his tortured-hero best, extracting industrial secrets from dreams, in the sci-fi wonder “Inception.”

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MOVIES BLOG: ‘INCEPTION’ GETS 89 PERCENT ON ROTTEN TOMATOES

PHOTOS: MOVIES OF THE MIND

Not weighed down by the comic-book mythology of the two “Batman” movies and given a reported $150-million budget for his original concept, writer-director Nolan is free to let his imagination soar on an epic scale.

Abetted by a world-class team of collaborators, he’s crafted an instant sci-fi classic that surpasses its most obvious recent influences, “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.”

Unlike 99 percent of movies, the less you know about “Inception” going in, the better.

So I’d advise you to stop reading now and head for the theater. OK, so you want more?

DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an expert at entering victims’ dreams and extracting industrial secrets.

He cannot return to the United States for reasons that are initially unclear, but prove to be emotionally resonant.

He’s approached by a wealthy businessman (Ken Watanabe) who wants Dom to reverse his usual procedure and instead implant an idea in a mark.

Dom is to enter the dreams of the heir to an empire (Cillian Murphy) and convince him to dismantle it to the businessman’s benefit.

With a return to the US and a reunion with his two children dangled as the payoff, Dom assembles a dream team.

There’s his longtime organizer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); an architect (Ellen Page) who constructs dazzling dream worlds; a “forger” (Tom Hardy) who can impersonate anyone at will; and a pharmacist (Dileep Rao) who enables very deep sleep.

It isn’t just as simple as putting the victim to sleep for 10 hours. The team and their client not only enter his dreams, but they enter dreams within his dreams and dreams within those dreams — so those 10 hours can translate into 10 years on the lowest level.

Only the architect knows that Dom’s late-wife-from-hell is lurking on all of those levels, and maybe even one below that, to mess with Dom’s mind.

The idea of entering dreams to manipulate someone isn’t new — “Dreamscape” did that back in 1984 — but Nolan raises the stakes with brilliantly deployed effects (Gordon-Levitt walking on ceilings is just one “wow” moment) and a fast-moving, globe-spanning story.

DiCaprio, who has never been better as the tortured hero, draws you in with a love story that will appeal even to non-sci-fi fans. Meanwhile, Nolan ratchets up the suspense as he shifts seamlessly between the different dreams and reality.

He blurs the distinction between dreams and reality so artfully that “Inception” may well be a masterpiece masquerading as a summer blockbuster.

via ‘Inception’ starring Leonardo DiCaprio is a sci-fi thriller – NYPOST.com.

Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche . . . of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an Anglo-American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass-consensus with The Dark Knight.

Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes, and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows—indicators of high-minded artistry, all. Leo DiCaprio has every reason to scowl, shackled with a character named “Dom Cobb.” Fugitive Cobb is a corporate espionage hired-gun expert at “extraction”: lifting secrets out of targets’ minds. Drugging them, then joining them for naptime, Cobb can drop in to guest-star in their dreams, and there pick the locks of his marks’ subconscious—often represented as an actual safebox, as everything in dreamlife is signified by genre-movie totems. Cobb is planning his “last job before he retires,” a mind-cracking with the untested mission of leaving an idea in his mark’s head. The target is the heir to a corporate dynasty, Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), who must be persuaded to abdicate his waiting throne. This will be achieved through running amok in his subconscious and prying in the desired suggestion, using Junior’s daddy issues as a lever. (Do not linger long over the ethics of mental rape; Nolan doesn’t.)

Following caper procedure, Cobb assembles a team: his researcher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), mimic (Tom Hardy), apothecary (Dileep Rao), and a novice recruit, Ariadne (Ellen Page), the architect who’ll landscape the dreamworlds that they’ll hunt. Tagging along on her debriefing, we get glimpses of Cobb’s history, his unresolved anguish over the mysterious end of his marriage, from which spring his personal demons that inconveniently invade other people’s dreams in the vengeful form of former wife “Mal” (Marion Cotillard). Cobb also lays down the rules of shared dreaming to us via Ariadne, explaining that “we only use a fraction of our brain’s true potential”—a shopworn line that appears almost verbatim in this week’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, though it’s a sure bet that only one of those movies will be buried in laurels. As Ariadne learns the ropes, we get teasing flexes of the f-x budget, M.C. Escher stairs and Parisian streets folding over themselves like a crêpe. The Hans Zimmer score suggests we shouldn’t be gassed on these images so much as, I dunno, respectful?

The introductions to placeholder characters, the taking notes through the tutorial scenes, it’s all let’s-put-on-a-show buildup to opening night, the heist, the stage for a moviemaker to show his stuff. Cobb slips Fischer Jr. his mickey on a Sydney-to-L.A. flight—it’s like an Olivier Assayas business-class thriller, with context scrupulously removed. Nolan has blueprinted a palatial set piece inside Fischer’s sleeping mind, an involuted whorl of dream-stages leading to deeper dream-stages. Team members break off in rear-guards, defending one level so the rest can continue on in dreams-within-dreams. Nolan cross-cuts between each stage as synchronized alarm clocks tick toward zero, while surface actions send rippling reactions along the chain.

Three set pieces in one! This Neapolitan ice-cream approach is ambitious—and pretty routine when taken apart. Cobb explains his art as “a chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed.” Those so inclined can follow the script’s breadcrumbs and read Inception as a metaphor for the act of artistic creation, with Cobb as director-surrogate—but Cobb/Nolan aren’t constructing things that never existed. Fischer Jr. dreams of a car-chase shoot-out in the pouring rain (better done in We Own the Night, where action was wired to character emotion) and a snowblind siege on a brutalist municipal building. The gun-wielding henchmen in Fischer’s dreams are indistinct from the ones that earlier chased Cobb through picturesque third-world streets in what was presumably reality. It’s telling when one Dream Warrior quips, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger”—and pulls out a grenade launcher.

Like Nolan, the dreamweavers work from their movie memories (the center of Fischer Jr.’s labyrinth is the intersection of Citizen Kane and 2001) and narrative formula. Planning how to get through to Fisher Jr., one conspirator, who’s obviously attended a few screenwriting seminars, offers: “The stronger the issues, the more powerful the catharsis.” Inception is a spectacle about creating a spectacle, and Nolan keeps giving behind-the-scenes glimpses—here, he’s suggesting how we filter life through storytelling, while intending to use these same dramatic rules to move his audience.

That’s the idea, at least. With his inability to let actors occupy a scene together, Nolan couldn’t pass Pathos 101, and here he’s trying graduate seminar stuff. “The catharsis” at the center of Inception is based on Cobb’s choice: whether to go on permanent vacation with his dream-memory of Mal, or to return to real life. It’s deciding between eternity with a bitchy wraith, presumably sexless, like all of Inception‘s subconscious, or . . . that recurring sentimental snapshot-memory of his children? Dad Michael Caine, who drifts through the production? Ellen Page, barely considered for romantic-emotional counterbalance? There’s no push-pull around Leo’s torrid emoting, and when the “We’re awake now—or are we?” kicker catches you in the pants, who cares? It’s obvious that Nolan either can’t articulate or doesn’t believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams—and his barren Inception doesn’t capture much of either.

via The Dream Is Dead: Inception Fails to Get Inside Our Head – Page 1 – Movies – New York – Village Voice.