Inception review

“Your mind is the scene of the crime”. For months that tagline was all that film fans, eagerly awaiting Christopher Nolan’s Inception, had to work on.The cast announcements came fast and early on. Di Caprio. Watanabe. Page. Gordon-Levitt. Cotillard. Then came the trailers, abstract affairs that gave off shades of that other break-out Warner Bros hit The Matrix. Yet chances are that even if you absorbed every bit of information released about Inception pre-release, the film in your head will bear little relation to Nolan’s perfectly tuned sci-fi. Or is it a drama? Or an action thriller? It’s definitely brilliant, but what it is yet I haven’t quite decided.

That this film even exists is a miracle in itself. After the huge critical and commercial success of The Dark Knight it was expected that Nolan would want to do a smaller, more personal film to recharge his batteries before moving onto Batman 3. That this is more personal there is no doubt, with a script that took a reported eight years to craft into shape, but with a budget of $170 million this is an indie movie with summer blockbuster backing. Kudos must go to Warner Bros, who are proving themselves to be one of the bravest distributors in Hollywood after this and Watchmen.

At it’s most reductive Inception is a heist movie, albeit one where the aim is not to steal but to plant. Set in a world where the ability to share dreams is a reality, Di Caprio’s lead character Cobb heads up a team whose job it is to plant an idea in another person’s mind, the so called ‘inception’ of the title. To elaborate any further than this would be a disservice to both the film and your enjoyment of it, but it is a densely layered affair that is complicated without being confusing, exposition heavy without being wearying and possibly Nolan’s most satisfying story yet.

Nolan has always been highly regarded for his technical achievements as a director, his film worlds being detailed constructs that hold up under scrutiny (just compare his vision of Gotham City with Tim Burton’s) yet Inception’s is one so fully realised as to have you swearing that he has his own dream machine squirreled away somewhere. Imagination may be allowed to run rampant within the dream worlds but there are clearly defined rules that serve to ground proceedings, set out in a walk around Paris that has more than a hint of Morpheus leading around Neo about it. Understanding of the film hinges around this scene: nip out for a toilet break and you will be left floundering worse than a man in a zero-gravity corridor. However, pay attention and you will be rewarded with cinematic moments that will linger in your mind far after the end credits: this is a film that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Amongst the spectacle Nolan never forgets his characters, and this really is the Di Caprio show, his dream thief Cobb given the film’s main dramatic arc as he deals with his mysterious wife Mal, played with alternately vulnerable and homicidal tendencies by Marion Cotillard. It is another stunning turn from the former Titanic star in a year where he has already done great work with Shutter Island. The rest of the cast do great jobs with roles that are essentially ciphers to allow the story to progress, with Tom Hardy having great fun playing James Bond and Joseph Gordon-Levitt allowed the movie’s standout action sequence to play around in.

Yes, that sequence, in which his character finds himself fighting off bad guys while gravity continually changes around them. It is a sequence so brilliantly insane, and so ‘how-did-they-do-that’ clever, that it easily seals its place among the greatest action scenes of all time. There have been anti-gravity fights done before, but never so seamlessly. Seamless is a word that works across the film as a whole, from the editing that never leaves the audience lost even when crossing between up to five different realities, to Hans Zimmer’s superlative music. It is a score to which I can pay the greatest complement: it worked so well that I never noticed it once.

The question still remains of what exactly the film is about, but the truth is that it is about lots of things. It is a sci-fi that poses questions about the reality around us. A tragedy that deals with loss and grievance. You could even argue that it is a meta-critique of our belief as an audience in the constructs presented by cinema. Above all this though, it is a film that reminds me why I still spend hard money to go the cinema, and one that I know will be talked about for years to come. Bravo, Christopher, bravo.