Inception

A Dream You Don't Want to Forget

In a film world of Blockbuster explosions and sexy US Weekly celebrities, Christopher Nolan has delivered the most mature movie in years. The famed, London-native director who gave us the shrilling laugh of the Joker in The Dark Knight and the reverse timeline puzzle in Memento, has made a film for an educated audience. From the first scene to the haunting last image, he implores the audience to think through the entire 2 and half hour film. Don't worry though, its not like studying for a Latin test, rather its like coming to understand an elaborate riddle, laid out for you piece by piece.

The film follows Cobb (played by Leo), a renegade extractor who specializes in entering people's dreams to "extract" information for high paying clients. He is offered a job to instead of extract information, implant information into a corporate business heir's mind. This practice, called inception, usually stands out of the question, but given Cobb's present fugitive status he consents to the job. So he and his crew (all with different functions) set up a three tiered dream for the mark (ultimately, a dream within a dream within a dream). With his subconscious fixed on his kids at home and dead wife, these obstacles tend to get in the way of his most dangerous job yet and puts him at risk of falling into a prolonged dream state limbo.

Watching it reminded me of Fight Club in that Nolan shoots a lot of quick cut scenes that seem to fill the film's time span with constant intrigue. He sets up an entire reality for you and everything within it from a laws of gravity to the stretched timeline. Its kind of like doing a power hour to one of those Disney dvd's that change every minute. The scene never gets stale and somehow at the end it all makes sense.

What Avatar did to the eyes, Inception has done to the mind. This movie is very comforting to watch, for it pushes no liberal piece of crap agenda or calls into question any moral stake of watching the movie. You leave the theater relieved with the knowledge that there is a filmmaker, such as Christopher Nolan, who can just tell a great story and presuppose the audience's intelligence. The movie has been incredibly well received by its audiences, showing big Hollywood that its audience is not comprised of a bunch of vacuous drones, challenging them almost to make a more mentally in depth film. Frankly, I think the American audience is tired of crying over gay cowboys and laughing over the same old sex joke. Christopher Nolan has raised the bar by stirring a brew of movies like Fight Club, the Matrix, the Cell and Memento together -- out from which came Inception. This is an instant Cult Film and this movie will be puzzled over for years to come.

Jury's Verdict: A-