INCEPTION review

PLOT: A corporate spy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who specializes in the art of “extraction”- where he can enter a persons dreams and steal secrets from their subconscious, is hired by a mysterious business mogul (Ken Watanabe) to carry out the near impossible task of “inception”. This means, rather than extract a thought, he has to plant one, in the mind of the son (Cillian Murphy) of a dying CEO.

REVIEW: “I feel like this movie had sex with my brain!” That was how INCEPTION was perfectly summed up to me by a loyal JoBlo.com reader, after leaving an advance screening of what’s easily one of the most mind-bendingly brilliant blockbusters I’ve ever seen. I really find it hard to put into words how truly exceptional this film is, but I’ll say this: INCEPTION is the antidote to every brainless, piece of crap blockbuster we’ve seen over the last few months.

Walking into INCEPTION, I actually had butterflies in my stomach. My expectations for this film were set so incredibly high after watching the trailer dozens of times over the last few months that I felt there was no way this could measure up. To everyone fearing the same thing, rest assured: this film delivers, and then some. Remember the jaw-droppingly awesome shot from the trailer featuring Paris folding up onto itself. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet, as this film is full of incredible shots like that, that I’ll try not to ruin here.

INCEPTION is simply incredible in every conceivable way. It truly feels like everyone involved knew they were working on a classic, so the film is brilliant on every possible level. DP Wally Pfister outdoes the amazing work he did on THE DARK KNIGHT, with the absolutely stunning way he photographs this film. Sadly, I was not able to catch the IMAX version for the purposes of this review, but even on conventional 2:35:1 35mm, this film was a feast for the eyes. That said, I’ll be seeing the IMAX version of this on Friday, as I’m sure I still haven’t gotten the full intended effect.

As far as the acting goes, INCEPTION offers one of the best ensemble casts I’ve seen in a while, led by a rock solid lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio, that’s comparable to his best work with Scorsese. If anyone still has any doubts as to whether or not DiCaprio’s one of the best actors currently working, this will convince them that he’s everything he’s cracked up to be and more. Nobody plays tortured like DiCaprio, and this gives him a lot of material to work with. At it’s heart, INCEPTION is a story about his character’s guilt over the loss of his wife- played by Marion Cotillard, and his quest to return to his family no matter what the cost. It’s a great role and I doubt there’s anyone out there that could have played it better than him.

Meanwhile, this film is also a great showcase for the excellent supporting cast that makes up his team. As DiCaprio’s longtime partner, and most trusted confidant, we get the great Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who gets one of the most talked about action sequences in the film – the spinning hallway fight. Ellen Page

, who up to this point is mostly known for being JUNO, should be able to escape the typecasting she’s suffered from since then, as this is a major departure from that role. While some have complained that she’s only around to explain things, I think she’s extremely necessary, as it’s through her that we really get an understanding of what exactly INCEPTION is.

As the forger, we get Tom Hardy, who blew me away in BRONSO and is now set to be the next Mad Max in FURY ROAD. Hardy actually gets a couple of really good action scenes of his own toward the end of the film, when he takes part in the incredible snowbound set-piece that evokes memories of ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (Bond fans are going to love this). Hardy’s downright electrifying here, and I think within a few years, he’ll become a mega star.

Rounding out the cast is Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, and in a small role, Michael Caine. I don’t want to go too much into detail with these characters, as the less I reveal about the plot, the better, but all three are terrific. Watanabe in particular, has a much more three dimensional role that you’d expect judging from the trailers, and he makes an incredibly smooth and mysterious employer for DiCaprio’s team.

Another element of the film that has to be mentioned is the incredible score by Hans Zimmer, that ranks with his best work. It manages to be both evocative of the amazing scores John Barry wrote for the Bond films, while at the same time being distinctly Zimmer, and maintaining it’s own identity. It’s so good that as I write this, I’m listening to the score on my iPhone.

As for Christopher Nolan

, well, what can I say? The man’s a genius. With THE DARK KNIGHT, I truly believe he made THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY of the superhero genre, but this is something altogether different. While it has the scale of THE DARK KNIGHT, thematically, and construction wise they couldn’t be more different. Essentially, that was a straight-forward, film, but this is probably more in line with MEMENTO or THE PRESTIGE, albeit if done with a $200 million budget, and explosive action scenes. It’s a great marriage of his different aesthetics, and I truly am in awe of the way he was able to pull this film together. I know this is probably one of the most uncritical reviews you’ll ever read, but this film has truly left me stunned. Regardless of whether or not this makes any money (if there’s justice, it’ll outgross AVATAR), I truly believe INCEPTION is fated to be regarded as an all-time classic. It’s a masterpiece.

RATING: 10/10

via Review: Inception – JoBlo.com.

Plot

Corporate spy-for-hire Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) steals ideas in dreams, but then he’s hired to achieve the impossible: “inception” – planting an idea in the mind of a target. If he succeeds, he can see his estranged children. If he fails, he’ll be trapped forever.

Review

If you know nothing else about Inception, at least know this: it is not a trick. It is ingenious but not crafty, knotty but not duplicitous. It has neither Memento’s method conceit nor the smoke and mirrors of The Prestige. To contrast it with the latter, in particular (fine film though that is), is to appreciate the difference between stage-magic and a real miracle.

The director-as-magician analogy feels least tired when applied to Christopher Nolan, given his body of work, its formal and mental layers and precisely engineered reveals. At best, this approach can be exhilarating. At worst — as with the narrative drip-feed of Insomnia, his weakest picture — it is obfuscation masquerading as artistry, aka not half as bloody clever as it thinks it is. Given its setting is largely the subconscious, though, Inception can’t work with a rug-pull denouement. Every scene — let alone the movie — could be punctured with that postscript beloved of primary school story scribblers: “And I woke up and it was only a dream…” So, don’t brace for a “ta-dah!” moment — it will impede your enjoyment and waste your time. Instead, marvel at the effrontery of a filmmaker who asks you to emotionally invest in avowed mental constructs — and succeeds. In one sense, admittedly, this is what every filmmaker asks us to do: engross ourselves in their imagination. The movie, then, could be interpreted as being about craft and inspiration — one character even says, of constructing the architecture of dreams, “It’s just… pure creation.”

But there are bigger things in play here than simply Art, and Nolan isn’t given to self-referential indulgence. This is about life and death and what might be beyond and between. It is also about blazing gun battles, zero-gravity fist fights and stars you’d like to sleep with. Fret not, Batfans — Nolan hasn’t turned into Andrei Tarkovsky. The muscular action that distinguished his Bruce Wayne pictures is again in evidence, but whereas Gotham in the Nolanverse is bound by at least some constraints — you know, little things like physics — here all bets are off. It’s not that Inception doesn’t have rules: like any convincing science-fiction, it has rules and boundaries it will not break. But those boundaries are pretty broad — they are the limits of each character’s imagination. The images deserve to be untarnished by much explanation — you should see them for yourself and on the biggest screen you can (it’s coming to IMAX — book now) to best appreciate Wally Pfister’s excellent, expansive photography. Funny, though, how moments that make the memory boggle when you recall them pass naturally in the moment because you are rooted in the world Nolan has created, in the reality(s) of the characters. This is testament to the physical prowess of the production and thorough thought that’s created this world, but also to the actors.

Some rise to particularly fascinating challenges (hello, Tom Berenger) and some surprise — principally Cillian Murphy, who can do danger and insolence in his sleep, but here shows a tenderness and vulnerability crucial to the story. Others exert a personality and appeal on parts that on the page would have played very close to ‘types’ — particularly Ellen Page, exuding a prim sexiness as, really, Basil Exposition, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who somehow manages to appear both ambiguous and dependable as essentially a sidekick. The pair share one of the movie’s best comic beats, too, though most of the sly laughs come from Tom Hardy’s roguish Eames.

It will be fascinating to read the hypotheses that percolate about Inception after release and no doubt what characters are called will be explored. That Page is Ariadne — the name of a figure in Greek myth who guides a hero from a maze — has already been noted. Eames shares his name with seminal designers/architects Charles and Ray, who made a celebrated short film, Powers Of 10, about the magnitude of the universe. Marion Cotillard is Cobb’s wife, Mal — which means “bad”, but can also derive from the Hebrew for messenger or angel. Cobb itself comes from Jacob, who, when fleeing from his murderous brother in the biblical book Genesis, dreamt of a ladder to heaven…

Based on his previous behaviour, Nolan isn’t likely to explain what he thinks Inception is actually about, but it’s certainly possible to see it as a blockbuster allegory about grief, faith and the desire for an afterlife — to be reunited with those we love and have lost (those with even a passing knowledge of Catholicism may note an interesting use of the word ‘limbo’). You could argue it’s about suicide and the fears and hopes that can both power and prevent it (for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?), just as was Soderbergh’s Solaris. Nolan, though, doesn’t muse; he motors. This is no sombre meditation. The themes are there to be explored (there will be more theories about this movie than about the killing of JFK), but you can just as well sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

And what a spectacle.

n terms of scale and style it is, as Nolan intended, comparable to Bond’s best excursions — yet filtered through a brain-frying, subconscious-spelunking, time-dilating structure that boldly frames action sequences around each other. So we get an explosive Arctic mountain vault-storming within a zero-gravity scramble within a vehicle-crunching chase. In effect, the set-pieces are simultaneous. Which is insane, but brilliant as, while he at times boggles through the necessarily complex editing, Nolan never corrupts his multiverse’s internal logic.

When you’re not basking in the visuals, you can always lean into DiCaprio and appreciate the emotion. He anchors everything. An actor who has long borne the blessing and the burden of being hailed a genius before he was even a man, he has never been less than good, but can appear either callow or try-hard, like a child dressing in daddy’s suit. Not here. He shows a depth of feeling rivalled only by his work in Shutter Island. To deliver two such turns in a career would be impressive. In a year, it’s just showing off. What makes it work, really, though, is how unfussy he is, how unselfish — there’s no showboating. Good as he is in The Departed or Gangs Of New York, you could sometimes feel the Weight of his Acting. Here, paradoxically, he appears effortless, even though he’s the beam on which the whole mighty edifice rests. It’s because you believe his journey, his heart, that you buy into Inception. If he failed, so would the movie. This isn’t the sort of performance that usually wins Oscars — it’s not ostentatious or superficially transformative, but by God it is brilliant. The strength of it is that you remain emotionally engaged, even if you’re not entirely sure what’s going on. The third act makes Memento seem about as complex as Bear In The Big Blue House. And while there is remarkable clarity given the complexity, you are pummelled with information and have to keep up — pay attention, figure it out.

Only repeat viewing will reveal if this comparison is truly justified, but it feels like Stanley Kubrick adapting the work of the great sci-fi author William Gibson (Neuromancer) — except Nolan appears to like people more than the 2001 auteur. So, you have a film that embraces intellect and emotion but also sheer entertainment — that can include a character staring at what looks like one of Francis Bacon’s tortured self-portraits, but also has the best EXPLODEY BUILDING sequence since Zabriskie Point. That film was a notorious bomb, ignored by audiences and pilloried by critics. And some, who may find Inception exposition-heavy and bewildering, will no doubt argue that, drunk on the freedom of The Dark Knight, Nolan has spent $170 million disappearing up his own arse. He hasn’t. On this form, wherever he goes next, be it Batman 3 or something else, we’ll be the first in line to follow.
Verdict
Like The Matrix mated with Synecdoche, New York — or a Charlie Kaufman 007. To paraphrase Casino Royale’s Vesper Lynd, it’s a meaningful pursuit in a summer of disposable entertainments. With physics-defying, thunderous action, heart-wringing emotion and an astonishing performance from DiCaprio, Nolan delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country.

via Review of Inception.

In terms of sheer originality, ambition and achievement, Inception is the movie of the summer, the movie of the year and the movie of our dreams. Director Christopher Nolan’s heist film about a group of dream extractors who can invade a person’s subconscious to steal-or plant-vital information may remind you of James Bond, The Matrix, or even Nolan’s own Memento, when in fact it’s unlike any other. A bold, inventive, audacious entertainment, Inception charts a new course for motion pictures and sets the bar very, very high. Matrix-style business should be in order, even though audiences will have to pay strict attention to get the full experience (perish the thought). Simplistic moviegoers who like their blockbusters cooked in predictability may not get it but Nolan fans and those who like their action married to new ideas will flock to multiplexes for repeated viewings.

A plot that’s been in Nolan’s head for eight years, it took a few drafts and the global success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to enable the director to get Warner’s and Legendary Pictures to cough up the considerable mega-budget to bring his dizzying and remarkable vision to screens. The wait was well worth it. On its surface, Inception is an Ocean’s-like heist film set in the mind instead of a casino. Nolan’s clever, complicated story revolves around Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a super thief who specializes in dream extraction, a service for which he steals secrets buried in the subconscious while a mark is asleep and most vulnerable. Essentially this talent has turned Cobb into a fugitive who is banned from the U.S. and, as a result, prohibited from seeing his family. When powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers him an opportunity to turn that around and get back home he jumps at the chance, but it means reversing course and instead of extracting info, he has to insert a certain idea that will mess with the head of a key rival and soon-to-be heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). With something more valuable than money as the end game, Cobb sets about putting his team together, including point man Arthur (a scene-stealing Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a forger and veteran in the game named Eames (Tom Hardy) and young architecture student Ariadne (Ellen Page) who almost serves as the voice of the audience when she asks questions like, “okay just whose subconscious are we in right now?” Also important to the mix is Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who creates the drug that enables multiple people to share dream states.

Shot in six different countries, Nolan has infused his project with one triumphant set-piece after another and truly stunning action sequences that will have you on the edge of your seat. But Nolan’s careful never to let us know the difference between the dreams and the reality; this keeps a viewer on his toes throughout. Like Stanley Kubrick did 42 years ago in 2001, Nolan masterfully uses our confusion like it’s a piece in his hard-to-solve puzzle.

Highlights include a spectacular sequence shot in the snow-filled mountains of Calgary, Canada and an awesome fight involving Gordon-Levitt that has him literally defying gravity in a hotel hallway. Inception has a strong emotional core and oddly affecting love story between Cobb and his wife, Mal (a terrific Marion Cotillard) who is the essence of a femme fatale and appears mysteriously in different states ranging from evil to tender. Nolan is careful never to let the scope of the film overwhelm the human element and this is a key reason Inception works as well as it does. The acting, from a great ensemble led by DiCaprio, is as good as it gets. Special shout outs to Wally Pfister’s extraordinary cinematography, the challenging and intricate production design of Guy Hendrix Dyas and Han’s Zimmer’s haunting score, which is his best in years.

For audiences looking for a break from the usual summer dish Hollywood serves, Inception is a wildly entertaining and dazzling mind-trip not to be missed. Kubrick would have been proud.

via Inception — Inside Movies Since 1920.

As much as I want to describe in meticulous detail the ways upon ways that I loved Christopher Nolan’s Inception, there’s a part of me that almost wants you to not read this until you’ve seen the film itself. Not unlike Warner Brothers’ marketing campaign has suggested, it’s a film that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it before seeing it, because its individual twists and turns are almost as exciting to discover as their cumulative visceral, intellectual and emotional impact. In which case, I will do my best for those continuing to read further to avoid too many spoilers or specifics in the service of proclaiming Inception a stunning achievement and the most completely entertaining film I’ve seen in years.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, an expert in what the film calls extraction, the theft of secrets or information from the subconscious mind. After botching a job thanks to the intrusion of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb finds an unlikely opportunity for redemption from one of his former victims: Saito (Ken Watanabe), CEO of a flourishing multinational, offers him amnesty in exchange for planting an idea – known as inception – within the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), one of Saito’s competitors. Enlisting the help of teammates Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Ellen Page), Eames (Tom Hardy), and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Cobb reluctantly agrees to the mission, only to discover that the mind’s defenses are more formidable than any physical threat he could face.

Heist-movie plot details notwithstanding, the above description scarcely scratches at the surface of what’s in the film, and certainly reveals nothing of the deeper conceptual and thematic dimensions of its story. Nolan, working with the sort of confidence (not to mention free financial reign) that comes from making a studio a mint on one’s previous picture, crafts an amazingly sophisticated, subversive, thoughtful, and even occasionally confusing (albeit in only good ways) tale about the layers of reality in the mind that calcify and crumble when constructed from the raw materials of memory and emotion. At the same time, he’s made an utter crowd pleaser, an epic piece of entertainment that ultimately feels so simple precisely because of all of its complexity, and one that rouses and inspires and excites in the same way as blockbusters comprised of pure spectacle.

Watching the film, there’s a palpable sort of glee that Nolan takes in setting up the rules for his mental universe and then betraying them, contradicting them, or destroying them outright. In several successive scenes, Cobb describes the process by which something is supposed to, or must happen, and then something occurs that makes all of his expository admonitions pointless. In a lesser film, such contradictions would be deficiencies – the inability of a screenwriter or filmmaker to deliver upon the promise of a premise – but Nolan seems to relish the opportunity to take his own questions, those pesky, legitimate quandaries of coherence, logic, or even morality, and turn them into plot points. After only one viewing, it’s admittedly impossible to determine precisely how perfectly its internal logic works, but the fact that Nolan hermetically seals the world both with dexterous plotting and rich emotional substance answers many objections before they even arise.

Despite its intellectual sophistication, Inception is no mere mental workout. On a purely visceral level, Nolan unassailably conceives and delivers a series of set pieces that build dramatic energy directly from that thoughtful foundation; the return to a shot previously abandoned midway inspires excitement, both because of the anticipation of its eventual payoff and because you’re so engrossed in whatever happened in the meantime you forgot this or that was going on at the same time. Then, of course, there’s the centerpiece zero-G fight between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a mental henchman, which Nolan wisely doesn’t hang the film (or even its primary story) upon and yet it nevertheless qualifies as some of the most bravura, involving filmmaking in recent memory. That it’s seamless and totally believable not only sustains the integrity of the mind-exercises Nolan puts on screen as some sort of genius-level jacob’s ladder, but further reiterates the completeness of Nolan’s ideas in both conceptual and physical terms.

As if it could possibly be subordinate to the rest of these theoretical and technical considerations, then there’s the world, the dream world, which Nolan defines and then dedicates to the telling of this story. A colleague described the experience more accurately as psychoanalysis than immersion in full-fledged dreams, but what it lacks in surreality, Nolan’s film more than makes up for with a seemingly legitimate emotional architecture. More specifically, he doesn’t create dreams that feel dream-like, but it’s because they’re meant to be a form of reality, whether they’re an inhabitable world where thought and memory are procurable objects, or a refuge or sanctuary from the cruelties of a person’s actual life.

Moreover, Nolan conceives a physical universe where technology and intellectual discipline has made it possible for people not only to control their own dreams, but enter the dreams of other people, and then manipulate those mental realities to accomplish their own goals. Suffice it to say it produces a vertiginous, doubt-filled spiral of questions where those dreams end and reality begins, but it’s so interesting and again, entertaining, that getting lost is sometimes part and parcel with the fun in the film, so to speak.

I wasn’t the only critic who prophesized (and later admitted to) weird dreams afterwards, and that’s the legacy – immediate and lasting – that Inception has on the viewer: it haunts them, makes them ruminate and think, and leaves them with the kinds of explanation and answers whose questions are invigorating with or without them. It’s a sort of deconstruction of the motives and meanings we assign to our dreamtime behavior – the guilt, liberation, fear, regret, empowerment we enjoy when we’re processing our physical experiences during sleep. It’s a joke, a sort of commentary on our own self-imposed limitations, and a glorious payoff to one dream sequence when Hardy’s character Eames chides Gordon-Levitt’s to “dream bigger, darling,” before lifting a fairly massive gun into frame and picking off an attacking adversary.

Meanwhile, only in a film this rich and interesting could Nolan and his work overshadow that of the actors – in a review, anyway. DiCaprio is the film’s default star, and his own emotional journey gets inadvertently grafted onto the heist he and the team undertake; as a companion piece to his earlier 2010 film, Shutter Island, his work here functions on multiple levels, effectively exerting control over an environment even as it swallows him, and eventually, vice versa. DiCaprio continues to subject himself to tougher and tougher acting challenges, and aside from the comparatively more manageable challenge of determining between different levels of dream logic, the juggling of his character’s extremely troubled and complex interior life results in some of the most heartbreaking and affecting moments of his entire career.

While the remainder of the cast more than matches DiCaprio’s commitment and effectiveness, two actors in particular – Gordon-Levitt and Hardy – give performances for which phrases like “star-making turn” were invented. The secret to Gordon-Levitt’s success, interestingly, is that he doesn’t try to compete with DiCaprio, even though Cobb is precisely the sort of out-of-control boss that demands an intervention; the young actor maintains composure and a cool kind of professionalism – both as the character and as an actor – that distinguishes him, and pays off gorgeously when he’s given a physical and dramatic showcase like the aforementioned fight scene.
Hardy, meanwhile, plays Eames as some kind of no-nonsense dandy – a guy who’s unflappable in almost any situation, and sort of relishes the chance to indulge in James Bond-esque silhouettes both in dreams and his real life. Although he’d given great performances in Marie Antoinette and RocknRolla, his breakthrough last year as the star of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson was an explosive demonstration of his charisma, and he transforms himself into someone completely different in this film without sacrificing that underlying appeal and intensity. It’s details like his ongoing antagonism of Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur that makes him such an *sshole and a charmer, but he generally establishes Eames’ personality so effectively that no matter how much or little the actor actually did during, say, a snow-capped dream-sequence siege, the character far or near feels recognizable and more importantly connects with the audience through the action.

As amazing as these performances are, however, Inception is Nolan’s show, and he exerts control of every detail in the film effortlessly, whether he’s setting up some subconscious concept, destroying a character’s emotional security, or merely demolishing a city block from top to bottom. It’s in this multi-dimensionality that the film works so brilliantly – it’s 360 degrees of thought, feeling and action – and which works together in concert to make the overall experience comprehensible (and indeed, relatively uncomplicated if looked at as a whole). Again, that completeness of vision is not just what makes it a great movie, it’s what sets it apart from every other movie this year, and most of them from the last decade.

Ultimately, Nolan’s is probably not the kind of movie that should be written about after just one viewing, and shouldn’t be viewed even once with any preconceptions or expectations, sky-high as I may have made them for folks who read this far. Hopefully, after seeing the film at least once, you’ll revisit this review and – agree or disagree – compare your reaction with mine. But in the interim, and hopefully without providing too many specifics, it will nevertheless suffice to say without considering it exaggeration or unsupported hyperbole that Inception is nothing short of a stunning, spectacular, visionary achievement.

via Review: Inception – Cinematical.

At times evoking the works of Jean Cocteau, Stanley Kubrick, and Michael Mann, Nolan has crafted an elaborate cinematic labyrinth where, like the dreams the protagonists are invading, there are different levels, each with its own distinct palette and style. As confusing as the film can be at times (there’s one point where there are at least four different storylines going on simultaneously), one never senses that Nolan himself is lost, and that’s the difference between a brilliant, multi-layered narrative and a movie that’s just a mindjob for the sake of being clever.

Inception may be a cerebral film, but it’s still one that knows how to entertain. There are shades of the Ocean’s films in the heist sequences, The Matrix at other points, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service during the snowbound finale (with Hardy as 007). And unlike some of Kubrick and Mann’s films, Nolan manages to keep the viewer emotionally invested in his amoral characters, particularly Cobb, and doesn’t ever let the film become too cold or remote. His top-notch cast helps him achieve that.

DiCaprio finds the tortured center of his character, a man who is part thief and part spy and whose own guilt-ridden subconscious stands to destroy his chances of succeeding at the proverbial one last job. Inception is sort of a companion piece in a way to Shutter Island, the year’s other mind-bender DiCaprio thriller. Gordon-Levitt — who, like DiCaprio, was a child sitcom actor — continues to prove he’s one of the brightest up and coming dramatic actors with his turn here. And although she has less screen time than the rest of the cast, Cotillard shines as the film’s closest thing to a femme fatale. She’s certainly better served here than she was in Public Enemies (and she’d make one helluva Catwoman, but I digress).

- Warner Bros.

Click for more images from Inception.

Page has left her Juno persona behind and graduated into her young Jodie Foster period, and she is solid as DiCaprio’s protege of sorts and the audience stand-in for all the necessary exposition. It was great to see Watanabe get more screen time here than he did in Batman Begins, and he finds the humanity in a greedy captain of industry out to destroy another (and possibly better) man’s life and livelihood. (That’s the thing to remember about these characters: They’re actually bad guys who are out to ruin an innocent person’s life, and yet we like them.) The biggest surprise in the cast is Hardy, who plays the suave badass of the group; seeing as how general audiences probably didn’t see him in Bronson, this will be their introduction to him. If Bronson was his Layer Cake, then this is his Munich (so when Daniel Craig is no longer 007, EON would do well to hire Hardy).

On a technical level, the dreamworld special effects, score by Hans Zimmer, and cinematography by Wally Pfister are all superb. It may seem far too soon to speak of awards consideration, but Inception could be the film to do what Dark Knight didn’t do for Nolan (i.e., win him an Oscar — or at least a nomination). His decade-long commitment to this project, the depth of originality and intelligence he’s brought to it, and the confidence and skill he shows not only behind the camera but as a writer demands recognition of the highest order from the industry.

Simply put, Inception is a breathtaking achievement and a movie-going experience well worth your time and investment. In a year full of 3D remakes, reboots, sequels, and empty star vehicles, one hopes audiences will reward such terrific but challenging original entertainment with their wallets.

via Inception Review – Movies Review at IGN.

Does “Inception” live up to expectations?

Could any movie hit a bar this high?

Christopher Nolan’s cerebral thriller has long been the most eagerly-awaited film of the summer, a new outing from the director who created a classic mind-puzzle in “Memento” and made a superhero film into a critical and commercial sensation with “The Dark Knight.”

In a summer of disappointing sequels and stinkers ravaged by the critics, his film – largely kept under wraps during production, with only teasing glimpses offered into its world of industrial spies operating inside people’s dreams — was going to be something different.

InceptionFans hoped that Nolan would come through with another smart blockbuster. That it’d be an awards film brightening a dismal landscape of dumb action flicks. That “Inception” would be an original movie at the height of an unoriginal season.

Those are awfully high expectations to put on any movie. But now that Warner Bros. has now quietly started to screen “Inception,” and lifted the embargo on reviews a week-and-a-half before its July 16 release, we can try to answer a few of the burning questions surrounding the summer’s biggest question mark.

Is it the first great movie of the summer?

* Box Office: ‘Eclipse’ Tallies $175.3M; ‘Airbender’ Hits $70.5M

* ‘Inception’: The Selling of a Brainy Blockbuster

No. “Toy Story 3” is. But “Inception” is probably the second great movie of the summer.

Understand, a single viewing is hardly enough to come to terms with the film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy as a crack team that invades Cillian Murphy’s dreams and find unimaginable perils in the subconscious.

But that first viewing is enough to realize that “Inception” is a dense, stylish, thorny, dazzling film that delivers as a thrill ride but gives viewers lots to chew on and puzzle through.

It is not a typical summer movie, but it’s bold and imaginative in the vein of the best summer movies; it’s way too big and spectacular to be an art film, but it can leave you scratching your head in a good way.

It’s not perfect – thinking about it afterwards, you may find yourself suddenly stumbling on inconsistencies that didn’t bother you in the heat of the moment – but it’s damn good: challenging and stimulating and, in the end, surprisingly emotional.

And a couple of sequences – particularly a lengthy tour-de-force that shifts between four different dream states, each with its own rules and its own sense of time – are as dazzling as anything since “Avatar,” without the one-dimensional script that undercut that film’s visual pleasures in my book.

Is it comprehensible?

Wellll … Yes. But the bigger point might be that it’s enjoyable even if you don’t comprehend the whole thing.

The film is certainly dense, and complicated, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the rules of the dream world through which Leo and crew navigate.

Death, limbo, gravity, time … They’re all subject to change, and viewers can be forgiven for occasionally wondering, Whose dream is this, anyway?

But the fact is, “Inception” is a pretty terrific roller coaster even if you don’t have it all figured out.

via Burning Questions About ‘Inception’ … Answered | TheWrap.com.

I’m going to do this without spoiling the movie for you, because I think this is one of those films you should experience as free of fore-knowledge as possible.

Christopher Nolan has been making the same basic film since the beginning of his career, and one of the things that makes his filmography compelling is the way he circles the central idea in his work.

“Inception,” like his earlier work, deals with a broken man, determined to fix his mistakes but only making things worse in the process. That could easily describe “Memento” or “The Prestige” or “The Dark Knight” or even his one remake, “Insomnia.” Yet even with him returning to this idea, worrying at it, exploring different ways it can play out, he doesn’t feel like he’s stuck or marking time. I’d argue the opposite is true: by refining this idea over time and over different films and in different ways, Nolan is becoming merciless in his ability to engage both intellectually and emotionally. As a result, “Inception” flattened me, and even now, more than a week after my first viewing of it, I find myself turning over images and ideas from the film almost constantly.

Shrouded in secrecy during production, the film isn’t really built as a narrative shell game with mind-blowing twists and turns so much as it is a logical and orderly descent into a trippy but airtight exploration of the way we frequently chase illusory versions of the people in our lives while ignoring the real flesh-and-blood imperfections that we don’t want to acknowledge. Taken as a simple exploration of a marriage that has imploded, “Inception” is harrowing and brutal, and all the SF trappings layered in on top of that only serve to make that stark emotional truth palatable in some way.

The film intentionally dislocates you in time and space with the opening fifteen minutes or so, laying groundwork for the ride you’re about to take, and I’m impressed by the way the film avoids any easy structure. Nolan wants to tell you a very particular story, in a very particular way, and there’s little about it that’s familiar in terms of Hollywood structure and storytelling. Right from the start, Dom Cobb (Leonard DiCaprio) is a haunted man, but Nolan makes you work your way gradually towards understanding what it is that damaged Cobb so deeply.

I’ll give you a hint: this would be a fascinating double-feature with “Shutter Island.”

As trippy as the film can be at times, and the last forty-five minutes or so of the film is just one long reality-bending set-piece, the movie really is a very direct piece of storytelling. Dom Cobb is the head of a team of specialists who steal ideas out of the subconscious of sleeping targets. They are approached by someone who they tried to steal from with a unique proposition. He wants them to invade the dreams of a business competitor, but instead of stealing an idea, he wants them to plant one. Dom has his reasons for thinking that’s a bad idea, but he agrees to the job, hoping that it will finally wipe clean a legal record that has kept him on the run and away from his family for years.

It’s interesting to look back at the ad campaign they’ve run for this film after finally seeing it, because I think they’ve been very accurate to the content of the film, selling the big images, making sure you understand just how visually compelling it is, but the result is that there’s a sort of “Matrix” action movie vibe about the campaign, and despite some wild visual moments in the film, I wouldn’t describe this as an action film at all. There are action beats in it, but all of them are ultimately in service of the emotional journey that Dom takes in the film, and as a result, the stakes seem so much higher than they would if it was just another movie where people were chasing around some empty Macguffin. Everything in this film… cities folding in on themselves, buildings filling with sudden floods of water, gravity that stops working, reality fraying at the edges… ties back in to whatever happened between Dom and his wife Moll (Marion Cotillard) years ago.

Cotillard spends the entire film as a ghost, an echo, a memory that manages to keep opening fresh wounds in Dom’s heart and his mind, and it’s agonizing work to watch. All of the film’s mysteries hinge on Cotillard’s character, and I’m amazed how uncomfortable she made me in the film. There’s no make-up on her, no special effects to make her frightening. It’s the emotional content of the sequences she’s in that left me deeply unsettled, and in a way, my one hesitation about the film is just how raw and difficult it is. It’s not a “summer movie” by the conventional definition, and Nolan never lets you off the hook. He never tells you that it’s all a dream, all something you can shake off. He wants it to hurt. He wants this one to ricochet around inside of you. He wants it to scar. Remember the image at the start of “The Prestige,” with all the top hats on the ground? Well, in this film, it’s that tiny gray gunmetal dreidel that sums up the film’s most chilling ideas in a single image, and it’s just as powerful in hindsight as those hats were.

The entire cast does great work.  Ellen Page plays a new recruit to the team, and Dom’s scenes with her serve as a primer for the audience, teaching them the rules of how this dream invasion works.  Joseph Gordon Levitt is Arthur, Dom’s right-hand man, and they’re a great on-screen team, with energies that are nicely complimentary. Tom Hardy damn near steals the movie as a very crafty member of the team, and he’s the one person in the entire film that seems to be having fun as a character and as an actor.  His character, Eames, relishes his abilities inside the dream, and takes full advantage of it.  Michael Caine makes a brief appearance, and he’s fine, but he isn’t terribly consequential.  Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger, and Dileep Rao all lend strong support to the film, playing key roles in the “heist,” and everyone seems to understand exactly what it is that Nolan’s doing, adding just the right grace notes to each role, each sequence.

Wally Pfister is easily one of the most impressive cinematographers working today, and his collaborations with Nolan have allowed him to push his craft right to the bleeding edge.  Here in particular, he creates some truly original imagery, and yet it never feels like spectacle is the point.  It’s fair to compare this to Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” another film that uses SF trappings to explore elemental notions of love and sorrow and loss and pain, and I think Nolan may manage to lure people in with the promise of the surreal James Bondian adventure in a way that Aronofsky couldn’t.  It’s just as difficult an experience, and I found the last few shots of “Inception” to be positively devastating.  Nolan isn’t interested in offering you up easy comfort at the end of this experience, and he doesn’t care about making you feel good.

I’m going to revisit the film with a spoiler-heavy review on opening weekend, something I don’t do frequently, but with a film like this, it’s going to be exciting to dig into both the text and the subtext, and I hope you’ll join me then for what I suspect will be a spirited, heated conversation about what the movie says and how and why.  Until then, suffice it to say that “Inception” is an exhilarating cinematic experience that suggests there is still room, even in the blockbuster world, for big ideas and dangerous emotions, and that may be the single most thrilling thing about it.

via Review: Leonardo Di Caprios Inception bends brains, breaks hearts – HitFix.com.

No movie this year comes freighted with greater expectations than Inception, Chris Nolan’s follow-up to the global blockbuster The Dark Knight. Happily, the movie delivers and then some—thanks to clever original screenwriting and exhilarating mise-en-scene—in 2D.

When it opens July 16, this eye-popping film will wow moviegoers all over the world—its complexities will only encourage debate and repeat viewings—and should also score well with critics and year-end awards groups. Oscar nominations in technical categories are a certainty, but Inception is also a strong contender for multiple nominations, including Best Picture.

Thompson on Hollywood

The movie keeps you on the edge of your seat, focused intently on what’s happening. Otherwise, it would be easy to get lost. Structured like an intricate maze, Inception takes the viewer through interlocking sets of dream realities. (Ellen Page’s character, The Architect, who designs mazes for dream worlds, is named after Greek mythology’s Ariadne.) At the beginning, the movie messes with you, throws you off balance until all the rules are laid bare. They are soon made clear. (Nolan’s recent citation of Last Year at Marienbad is misleading; the cuts from space to space are linear, in their own way.)

Pay attention, and you can keep track of the complex machinations of Nolan’s Dream Team, led by Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, The Extractor, with able support from Marion Cotillard as his wife Mal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as The Point Man and Tom Hardy as The Forger, as well as Nolan regulars Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine and Ken Watanabe.

Thompson on Hollywood

Cobb creates dreamscapes that can be shared—with the help of psychotropic drugs and sedatives—by groups of subjects who fill in their own experiences, images, and secrets. Cobb is an expert at extracting those secrets, usually in pursuit of industrial espionage. His problem, soon sussed out by brilliant newcomer Ariadne, is that he has buried things deep in his subconscious—mainly his wife Mal—that keep intruding on his ability to pull off this last job, which requires not extraction but inception: planting the seed of an idea. Not only his own safety but those of his team are at stake. Those arresting images of scenes flying apart involve a dream that is collapsing. Yes, getting killed in a dream wakes you up, but get lost in one of the deep-level dream slumbers and your mind may never emerge intact.

As intricate as the script is—Nolan worked on it for a decade—the movie is not just a feat of cinematic wizardry, even though it comes close to the level of technological derring-do carried off by the likes of Stanley Kubrick. (Indeed Nolan works in repeated homages to the late great auteur beyond the obvious use of moving sets on gimbles to allow athletic Gordon-Levitt to bounce weightless and walk on walls and ceilings.) The movie also has heart. So that even if you do get confused (as I did in the James Bond snow section, filmed in the Canadian Rockies), the emotional through-line pulls you along. It’s as simple as The Wizard of Oz: The Extractor wants to go home.

This emotional motivation for Cobb—who much like his conflicted family man in Shutter Island, is haunted by images of his beloved Mal and two toddlers—helps to render him more sympathetic. Beyond a taut suspense thriller, Inception is also a moving love story. Composer Hans Zimmer effectively colors the score with varying emotional mood swings (although I question the Edith Piaf reference to Cotillard’s Oscar-winning performance in La Vie En Rose).

Nolan and his production team traveled to exotic locations around the world, from Tokyo, where Watanabe’s corporate executive is based, and Paris, to Tangiers and giant sound stages in England and Los Angeles. The scene when Cobb teaches protege Ariadne to bend reality is stunning, as are the reveals of each successive dreamscape, where anything can happen. Inception not only references the “levels” of complex video gameplay, but also functions as a metaphor for the creative process of moviemaking itself: as The Forger tells The Point Man, as he summons up a huge blaster, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

via Inception Early Review: Nolan Delivers Kubrickian Masterpiece with Heart – Thompson on Hollywood.

INCEPTION is Christopher Nolan’s reward for a commercial assignment profitably executed: the opportunity to realize on a grand scale an idea that has intrigued him for the better part of a decade. In the studio tit-for-tat equation, this is the “one for me”. It’s the reason you start making movies in the first place. It’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. APOCALYPSE NOW. GANGS OF NEW YORK. It’s the the movie you stake your career on. It’s the movie you make now.

For most filmmakers, this project is a gamble; for Christopher Nolan, it’s a shrewdly calculated risk. Though the narrative speeds ahead like a rapidly unfolding lucid dream, INCEPTION uses the familiar vernacular of the heist film to keep less attentive audiences engaged. Unlike other films that traipse across the boundless landscape of the unconscious mind, it’s not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The central concept is simple: plant an idea in a character’s mind in order to manipulate them into behaving in the best interest of a rival party. The particulars may be complex, but there’s an emotional logic that drives the story forward. There are also wildly compelling action set pieces. In this regard, INCEPTION is a miracle: a multi-layered meditation on the unruly clutter of the subconscious that works sensationally well as a classical action film. It plays brilliantly on every conceivable level.

Nolan’s very few detractors have often knocked him for coldly constructing narratives that snap together like traps. His gift for precision is used against him: he’s all brains, no heart. This is a concern of personal preference, I suppose, and generally cited by people who’ve likely never known the icy splendor of a Dashiell Hammett tome. Regardless, it won’t be an issue with INCEPTION, which is built around one man’s quest to see his children’s faces again. And while Leonardo DiCaprio has never been the warmest of movie stars, he’s believably devastated as Dom Cobb, a highly sought after agent of corporate espionage whose facility for navigating dreams has come at an awful price.

It comes as no surprise that lucid dreaming is of particular interest to Nolan (it stands to reason that a control-freak storyteller would be fascinated by the idea of manipulating his unconscious thoughts), but while he goes to great lengths to explain the rules of dream theft, he stays pleasingly vague on the scientific details of entering another person’s mind. This isn’t a cheat. From the beginning, where we meet Cobb and his point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) completing their latest gig, the emphasis is on the obtainment of information (and its attendant perils), not the technology that makes such theft possible. And this works because Nolan has cut the whole film as if it takes place in a waking dream. It’s an ideal use of cinematic language: the mundane details of traveling and arriving are elided in order to keep the dense story skipping along.

Before Cobb can move forward with the mission that might wipe the slate clean and return him what remains of his family, he must enlist the assistance of a brilliant young architect (Ellen Page), who possesses the ability to create elaborate cityscapes that defy logic and trick the mind (M.C. Escher is leaned on heavily here). She’s the audience surrogate to whom Cobb breaks down the do’s and don’ts of dream exploration – one key concept being the potentially adversarial nature of another dreamer’s “projections”. And then there’s Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb’s persistent and pernicious manifestation of the woman with whom he ill-advisedly disappeared into an elaborate, jointly-created world. Mal is the one element of Cobb’s memory that he cannot control; the lost love forever threatening to blow up the gig and keep him from seeing his children again.

For a film that’s clearly sprung from the deepest reaches of Nolan’s creative mind, INCEPTION is appropriately enhanced by his boyhood preoccupation with James Bond movies (he admitted as much in a recent interview). During the deliriously intricate set piece which encompasses a good deal of the second act and some of the third, Nolan gets to pay ecstatic homage to ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE – as Hans Zimmer’s score takes on lovely, invigorating John Barry dimensions. For all Nolan accomplishes as a storyteller with INCEPTION, what he pulls off with this extended sequence will be broken down and studied for years to come; this is probably giving too much away, but if you can think of a filmmaker who’s deftly managed four globetrotting layers of interrelating action stretching across increasingly precarious levels of unconsciousness, then I’ll back down from calling Nolan’s achievement one of the greatest action set pieces ever put to film.

Based on one viewing, I’m not ready to break INCEPTION down with any degree of assuredness. But I want to. God, how I want to. I haven’t been this obsessed with a film since PRIMER, which I watched somewhere in the neighborhood of four times before hazarding a review (and ultimately calling it the fourteenth best film of the last decade). What’s most exciting about INCEPTION is that it finds Nolan peaking as a visual artist; he’s using the extravagantly cinematic tropes of other genres to connect with the viewer intellectually. With INCEPTION, Nolan joins the company of Coppola, Lean and not too many others as a filmmaker who treats the big canvas with the respect it deserves – but with the steely verve of a chess player who can see dozens of moves ahead.

Pure cinema at its best feels like dreaming with your eyes wide open. Cinema doesn’t get much purer than INCEPTION.

via Mr. Beaks Reviews INCEPTION! — Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news..

Inception is a masterpiece. Making a huge film with big ambitions, Christopher Nolan never missteps and manages to create a movie that, at times, feels like a miracle. And sometimes it doesn’t even feel like a movie; while presented in woefully retro 2D, Inception creates a complete sense of immersion in another world. The screen before you is just another layer of the dream.

I don’t even know what’s the most remarkable aspect of Inception. It’s huge-budget filmmaking harnessed to tell a personal story that’s smart and uncompromising. That’s certainly remarkable in this age of Hollywood. It’s a production that brought its cameras to six countries, never allowing a backlot to do when a shot could be achieved in a real location. That’s starting to feel unheard of in this day and age. It’s a movie where Christopher Nolan manages to bring together all of his obsessions and quirks, where his personal issues are the life and death issues at the center of the story, and where he has managed to turn every single one of his directorial weaknesses into massive strengths. That, perhaps, is the truest miracle – the auteur finally completed before our eyes.

Every single movie Christopher Nolan has made until now has led to Inception. The fractal, recursive nature of Following and Memento informs the structure of reality in Inception. The exploration of narrative and storytelling in The Prestige leads to this film. And the obsession with control, a throughline that leads from Insomnia to Batman Begins and fully blooms in The Dark Knight, takes Nolan directly to the drama at the heart of Inception.

The advertising for Inception presents the film as a dream-based heist thriller, which is true enough in a larger sense. But the heart of the movie is psychoanalysis presented as kick ass action. Nolan’s interest in dreams doesn’t come from the surreal nature of them (in fact very early on Nolan, who wrote the script, presents an in-universe rule that makes the dreams be as realistic as possible) but from what they say about the dreamer. Nolan is looking at dreams as the entryway to the subconscious. They’re the gate through which a repressed, emotionally distanced person can access the feelings that trouble them deep inside.

And that’s the genius of the film. Nolan is a director who has always been chilly; some may kindly call him restrained. While visually he is an unabashed pupil of Ridley Scott, Nolan is a student of the Stanley Kubrick school of emotion, and Inception reminds me of The Shining in that the emotional content isn’t subtext or nuanced but rather blaring, plot-motivating text. Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, the best extractor in the world. A dream thief, Cobb and his team get into your mind during sleep, when it’s most vulnerable, and they find and steal information they need. But Cobb has a problem – he can’t keep his own subconscious under control, and his repressed feelings about his wife keep manifesting themselves in the dream space, becoming more and more aggressive and dangerous.

In another film that’s the subtext, the subtle motivation behind Cobb’s character. In Inception it gradually becomes everything, and it is explicitly dealt with as a part of the plot. By making the pain deep inside Cobb another element of the heist movie structure, Nolan is free to deal with it analytically, with a cold eye for what it means to Cobb as a contained man. Like in The Dark Knight the greatest danger isn’t external, it’s completely internal – the loss of control. In The Dark Knight that loss of control was represented by the dual figures of The Joker and Two-Face, while in Inception that loss of control – the scariest thing Nolan can imagine, it seems – is represented in the haunting beauty of Marion Cotillard.

All of this happens against the backdrop of a gripping thriller. Cobb has been hired by a mysterious businessman, played by Ken Watanabe, to perform the most difficult dream job there is: they are not going to steal something from the mind of industrialist heir Cillian Murphy but rather leave something there. They are going to go deep into his subconscious and plant an idea that will blossom into something that will benefit Watanabe; it turns out that the planting of an idea – inception – is markedly more difficult than the stealing of one. And so Cobb must gather a crackerjack team of dream experts to get deep into the mark’s mind – many layers deep into his subconscious – and give him an idea so firmly rooted that when he awakes he’ll be convinced it’s his own.

I loved Inception. I loved seeing the world Nolan created. I loved visiting the locales and spending time with the characters. I loved every moment of the waking dream, every frame of the celluloid reality. Cinema is dreaming, and Nolan understands this implicitly and completely. While Inception didn’t remind me of many dreams I’ve had, it reminded me of many incredible, transporting moments spent in movie theaters. I’m glad that Nolan opted not to post-convert his film to 3D, as that process would only distance the audience from the movie. By shooting on 65mm film, Nolan has created a massive, immersive and complete visual experience. I actually can’t wait to see this movie again but in IMAX, to be completely enveloped in the universe that Nolan, the year’s leading cinematic dream architect, has created.

10 out of 10

via REVIEW: INCEPTION.