Inception

 

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.

Christopher Nolan’s made some good movies. These include Memento and The Dark Knight. Those two movies in particular are important to mention in reference to this movie, because it probably wouldn’t exist without them; it is in a way the combination of the first’s cerebral jack-hammering and the latter’s enormous action-film scope. Nolan’s been working on this for a while, and 10 years after its inception (heh), it’s finally come to life and the big screen.

The conceit (yay new word) of the film is that there’s this new technology of some sort that allows people to insert themselves into other people’s dreams, and sometimes have rather extensive control over them; seemingly the most profitable use of this tech is to extract information from a sleeper’s mind. Leonardo DiCaprio has taken this as his main gig. His life is pretty screwed up though, and this screwed-upness starts leaking into his carefully constructed mental heists. With the help of a fantastic cast including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page, Leo attempts to pull off one more caper without destroying himself while under the influence of heavy sedatives.

Dreams are weird. The movie deals a whole lot with lucid dreaming and that thing where you keep waking up over and over before you actually wake up, which has always bugged the hell outta me. Since pretty much anything can happen in a dream, this makes the possible roads the movie could take pretty limitless; of course it is limited by a ~2.5 hour timespan and a budget less than the United State’s national debt, so it can’t be that amazing. Still, it’s pretty darn. There’s lots of antigravity stuff and neat architectural tricks, and a healthy dose of explosions and gunfire.

Aside from the action there’s some very nice and sometimes subtle emotional stuff going on, which I thought made the movie all that much better. The best part of it though is the uncertainty of what’s actually happening; there’s really no way to be sure if any of it is actually happening outside of someone’s mind. I got a big kick out of the audience’s reaction at the end. There are probably going to be a lot of people who hate it just because of that.

Anyway. Best movie of the year so far. Go see it.