Inception Review

I really want to talk about Inception… But it’s important to know as little as possible going in. So here’s what I’m going to do. This review is going to be short and sweet. And then in a couple of weeks I’ll write a few thoughts about the film that will go into some spoilery detail about the story as there really is a lot to talk about.

The long and the short of it is that Inception really delivers. It’s an intelligent, exciting, thought provoking film, utterly unique amongst modern Blockbusters. Slightly overlong perhaps and I’m not sure it’s the instant miracle, modern classic, solution to life’s problems some have made out. Also much has been made of Nolan’s slightly cold, distant approach to his stories in the past and many of the reviews have pointed to the warmth and humanity in Dom Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio's) journey in this film. This is actually the weakest stuff for me. Plot wise, story wise and ideas wise it’s absolutely great, but I never really felt anything for the characters and their story.

But Christopher Nolan has demonstrated once again that he is a great film maker with great ideas. His central concept here, entering people’s subconscious through their dreams is great but to put that in the milieu of industrial espionage is a stroke of genius and the film plays like a heist thriller with Cobb assembling his team so that, rather than stealing an idea, they can carry through inception, planting an idea in a person’s mind. We get an opening heist to bring us into the world, the assembling and training of the team, which does go on a little long. But the last hour or so is the heist itself and once this begins it really doesn’t let up. The dream world and its rules have been meticulously thought through and Nolan obeys his own internal logic at all times. The best part of this is how there are different levels of dreaming and what is happening in one level impacts upon the next. The high point of this is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s zero gravity fight in a hotel corridor but that whole last hour, while maybe not being quite as tense as I’d hoped (or for that matter as James Newton Howard’s bombastic score wants you to think it is) is Hollywood at its best and Nolan utterly confident in what he is doing.

This is perhaps the most exciting thing about watching Inception. You get the sense that we are watching a film maker now at the peak of his powers. For all its faults I absolutely love The Dark Knight but much of what is wrong in that film is corrected here. I’ll return to The Dark Knight more often for the atmosphere and action and I’ll return to Inception more often for its ideas. How this film got made is a miracle because, while The Dark Knight is a Summer movie with a brain in its head and some good ideas, Inception is an ideas movie with some action in it released in the Summer.
Don’t misunderstand, there is plenty of action; that last hour is basically one, sustained action set piece. But it’s for its ideas that Inception should be credited. As with every good heist movie, once they start their plan it all goes wrong and watching the way the team improvises is incredibly impressive from a writing perspective. Nolan has set up the rules of the dream world and is now free to bend our expectations of them to provide the team ways out of their problems that are plausible, that never cheat and are utterly compelling.

This review was supposed to be short! Go into Inception prepared to do a little work, pay attention to it, and you’ll be utterly rewarded. And once you’ve seen it, let the debate begin about just what it all means. Inception is fantastic, deserves its hype and is a call to every other studio and film maker in Hollywood that this is what is possible with a large budget. And there is simply no excuse for bad storytelling in any films, including big budget ones. Roll on Batman 3!

8.5/10