Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 148 minutes
Release Date: July 16th, 2010 (USA)
Studio: Warner Bros.
Director(s): Christopher Nolan
Writer(s): Christopher Nolan

True inspiration is impossible to fake.

Say what you will about Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. While both may be great, they simply show Christopher Nolan’s skill at telling a good story with emotion, action, and drama. What sets the auteur on another level of genius than pretty much anyone working in or out of Hollywood today is the imagination let loose in his original films. The ingenuity of storytelling, intellectual gravitas, and visionary worlds he leads us through are, quite simply, without compare.

No matter how fantastic his career-making Memento remains, however, the revelation that is Inception renders it mere child’s play. Not since his debut Following—a gem in its own right—has he brought a story to screen out of his mind alone. It’s a magnum opus of unadulterated ambition that creates architects of dreamscapes and professionals who are able to mold those fantasies at will. Inception questions reality, morality, physics, spirituality, and love, asking us to stop telling the world and ourselves what we think and instead find what it is we believe.

That which we believe makes us. From an early age, whether due to nature or nurture, we cultivate an inner structure of ideals and truths to live by. Each and every person has their own personal rules and regulations guiding their actions—life, death, existence, they’re all only real if we give them definition and power. And a dream is our subconscious feeding on memory, hopes, fantasies, and horrors to build a construct that tests those values by showing what is, what could be, and/or what hopefully never occurs. It is a realm of secrets—hidden treasures left vulnerable and free to float to the surface due to the safety of being trapped inside our mind.

But what if people had the ability to go inside our dreams? Infiltrating and orchestrating every move we make to discover shrouded morsels of information? What if there were trained extractors who could create worlds to mirror reality, while also changing it to their needs on-the-fly, who brought you unknowingly inside? Without defenses, without the knowledge to build walls or set filters, we’d be sitting ducks willing to say whatever it was they needed. Especially if they could take the form of ones we trust.

Secrets become bought and sold. Kidnappings are now done while the victim’s unconscious and eventually left to awaken without knowledge of what occurred, their memory fuzzy and fleeting as though a dream. Those with means begin to set up ways to combat extraction by hiring extractors themselves to enter their minds and train their subconscious to be vigilant, cunning, and ruthless towards any threat of intrusion. Security literally begins to run around the clock whether you’re awake or asleep.

What could really happen from a secret getting out? Perhaps you lose some money. Maybe a little power. It could be that a truth is uncovered to let justice get served. These truths are there and always will be. And they will more than likely come out by accident anyway … even if coercion fails. The real danger of extraction, then, isn’t what can be taken. It’s what might be left behind. Inception, in theory, is therefore possible. By planting the seed of thought, it’s left to germinate into an idea so powerful that it could alter the subject’s intrinsic make-up. If we were to believe that planted thought was our own, it wouldn’t only reshape our entire course of self-existence, but also potentially become our very undoing.

And this is where Christopher Nolan’s mind becomes one of the most inventive around. He has not only engineered his own sci-fi dream world of the film’s reality—one where the process of artificial dream creation is possible. He’s also laid the process out, created rules for it, and woven a mystery that breathe in life. A story of dreams within dreams that drags its travelers deeper and deeper into illusion, risking their minds to become fractured off in limbo, no longer aware if reality ever existed at all.

But he isn’t done with just the suspense thriller of coercing a mark into manufacturing his own 180-degree reversal of action. He also adds in the overlapping tale of a second man’s past with a history that crippled the greatest extractor alive. It makes the mystery not whether he and his team can prove inception possible, but to see if someone who knows the rules and willingly breaks them in order to reach the only endgame he can fathom is able to find peace instead. Sometimes the only way to get out is to go further in.

I know, it sounds convoluted and impossible to assimilate. It’s why Nolan’s greatest success is his capacity to explain everything simply by not only allowing us to understand what’s happening, but to also enter the world as though we knew it all along. Rather than lecture the physics of an infinite loop, for example, he creates a working example—pretty much a manufactured version of MC Escher’s staircases from “Relativity”.

The character of Ariadne (Ellen Page) is brought in to not only be the fresh-faced member of a team too trusting of one another and the lone brave soul willing to stand against and fight those in power, she is also our entry point into the entire extraction process. To teach the film’s audience, Nolan teaches this new, young architect. We become her, the last visage of comprehending a purity of reality in a community no longer able to easily grasp the edges of a line too often crossed. We are educated with tests and exercises, seeing how the procedure evolves in a controlled state and then its use in the volatile and chaotic realm of live application.

The visceral splendor of the trailer is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the possibilities of bending time and space in dream. With each layer to the mirage comes expanded time. Every motion occurring in the plane above is experienced beneath, (weightlessness or rotating horizons allow for some of the most memorable choreographed fight scenes ever), and that feeling of falling (labeled ‘the kick’)—I know you’ve been jolted awake by it more than once—becomes your only true fail safe of ever waking again.

It’s pure imagination inhabited by characters that understand the rules and exploit them. Tom Hardy lends his sarcastic wit to Eames, the chameleon capable of becoming whomever necessary to disarm a subject. Ken Watanabe’s Saito is a shrewd businessman willing to learn this new technology and even partake in the fun. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt breaks through into the mainstream consciousness, finally seizing the opportunity to show the world his immense wealth of talent that art-house audiences already know. His Arthur is the voice of reason as well as a stoic warrior of strength and intellect who’s working on the fly to allow everything to run smoothly—if that’s even possible.

But besides Nolan’s complete creativity laid bare through script and frame—a detailed story I glossed over rather than spoil while explaining the unique technological process the characters use—it truly is Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb and Marion Cotillard’s Mal who prove the driving forces behind everything. Their intertwining roles co-exist at every level, showing how the bonds of love can break through almost every wall set to destroy it. The two greatest architects the world has ever seen, only Cobb and Mal could uncover a dream’s brightest jubilations and darkest dangers. Once you continue on for too long, the path back to truth becomes blurred as fantasy’s infinite possibilities overwhelm you. There needs to be a way to remember what’s real and what’s illusion, but when all is said and done, does anyone truly know?

Much like you could view this life as a short sojourn before the ever-expansive future of an afterlife—a world we see in our imaginations that belief renders to our every whim—our dreams may serve the same purpose as an escape into true existence. But if a heaven created by our minds awaits, wouldn’t dream become our reality? The world we awaken to morphing into the waiting room before our permanent residence beyond? It all becomes a matter or perception and feeling. Whether what we think is real is just a lie. But if we believe we’re truly happy and in love, should we care? Ask yourself this question when the screen cuts to black after lingering on a final image full of meaning and profundity. The truth is ultimately in us all. Reality exists because we say so. Nothing else matters.

---

LEONARDO DiCAPRIO as Cobb in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ sci-fi action film “INCEPTION,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures