 Tagline: The dream is real. Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan directs an international cast in this sci-fi actioner that travels around the globe and into the world of dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best there is at extraction: stealing valuable secrets inside the subconscious during the mind's vulnerable dream state. His skill has made him a coveted player in industrial espionage but also has made him a fugitive and cost him dearly. Now he may get a second chance if he can do the impossible: inception, planting an idea rather than stealing one. If they succeed, Cobb and his team could pull off the perfect crime. But no planning or expertise can prepare them for a dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy only Cobb could have seen coming. Storyline: Former dream architect Dominick "Dom" Cobb and business partner Arthur perform corporate espionage using an experimental military-developed machine to infiltrate the subconscious of their targets and extract information while dreaming, their latest target being Japanese businessman Saito. Tiered dream within a dream strategies are used and dreamers awaken by a "kick" or by dying in the dream. If the dreamer is the one who dies, the dream "collapses". Each extractor carries a totem, a small object the behavior of which is only predictable to its owner, used to determine whether a dreamer is in someone else's dream. Cobb's totem is a spinning top that perpetually spins in the dream state. The extraction fails due to Mallorie "Mal" Cobb, Cobb's deceased wife, whose memory projection sabotages the mission. Saito reveals, after Cobb's and Arthur's associate sells them out, that he was actually auditioning the team to perform the difficult act of inception: implanting an idea into a person's subconscious while they sleep. --- Saito wishes to break up the energy conglomerate of his ailing competitor Maurice Fischer, by planting the idea in his son and heir Robert Fischer to disintegrate his father's company. Should Cobb succeed, Saito would use his influence to clear a murder charge against Cobb, so he can return to the United States and his children. Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: Eames, a conman and identity forger; Yusuf, a chemist who concocts the powerful sedative for a stable dream within a dream strategy; Ariadne, an architecture student tasked with designing the labyrinth of the dream landscapes; and Arthur. Saito accompanies so that he knows whether or not Cobb and his team succeeded. --- When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney and his body is flown back to Los Angeles, the team share the flight with Robert Fischer and Cobb sedates him, bringing him into the shared dream. At each stage, the member of the team generating the dream stays behind to initiate the "kick", while the other members sleep within the dream to travel a level deeper. In the first level, Yusuf's rainy downtown dream, the team abducts Fischer. However Fischer's trained subconscious projections attack and severely wound Saito. Eames temporarily takes the appearance of Fischer's godfather, Peter Browning, to suggest Fischer reconsider his father's will. Yusuf drives the team in a van as they are sedated into Arthur's dream, a hotel, where the team recruit Fischer, convincing him his kidnapping was orchestrated by Browning. In the third dream level, a snowy mountain fortress dreamed by Eames, Fischer is told they are in Browning's subconscious, but they are really going deeper into Fischer's. Yusuf, under assault by trained projections, initiates his kick too soon by driving off a bridge, sending Arthur's dream world into zero-gravity and causing an avalanche in Eames' dream. Arthur improvises a new kick using an elevator that will be synchronized with the van hitting the water, while the team in Eames' dream races to finish the job before the new round of kicks. --- Due to the effects of heavy sedation and multi-layered dreaming, death during this mission will result in entering Limbo, dream space of unknown content where the dreamer could be trapped. Elapsed time in each dream level is roughly twenty times greater than in the level above it; in Limbo, the deepest level of all, 24 hours of outer-world time would be experienced as about half a century. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he spent "fifty years" with Mal in Limbo constructing a world from their shared memories whilst seemingly growing old together. After returning to the waking world, Mal remained convinced she was still dreaming and committed suicide, trying to persuade Cobb to do so by retroactively incriminating him in her death. He fled the U.S. and left his children behind, ostensibly in the care of his father-in-law. --- Saito succumbs to his wounds, and Cobb's projection of Mal sabotages the plan by killing Fischer, sending them both into Limbo. Cobb and Ariadne enter Limbo to find Fischer and Saito, while Eames remains on his dream level to set up a kick by rigging the fortress with explosives. Cobb confronts his projection of Mal, who tries convincing him to stay in Limbo. Cobb refuses and confesses that he was responsible for Mal's suicide: having convinced her to leave Limbo by using inception to plant the idea in her mind that the world they had been living in for fifty years was not real, and hence the need to kill themselves in order to return to the real world, once back in the real world she continued to believe dying would wake her. Mal attacks Cobb but Ariadne shoots her. Through his confession, Cobb attains catharsis and chooses to remain in Limbo to search for Saito. Ariadne pushes Fischer off a balcony, bringing him back up to the mountain fortress, where he enters a safe room to discover and accept the planted idea: that his father wishes him to be his "own man", and that splitting up the conglomerate might not be a radical notion. --- All of the team members except Cobb and Saito ride the synchronized kicks back to reality: Ariadne jumps off a balcony in Limbo, Eames detonates the explosives in the fortress, Arthur blasts an elevator containing the team's sleeping bodies up an elevator shaft, and the van in Yusuf's dream hits the water. Cobb eventually finds an aged Saito and the two remember their arrangement, presumably killing themselves and awakening to outer-world reality on the airplane. Saito honors the arrangement and Cobb passes through U.S. customs once the plane lands in Los Angeles. Before reuniting with his children, Cobb tests reality with his spinning top, but he turns away to greet them before observing the results. As he plays with his children, the camera pans to the top, which is still spinning, at which point the film ends. From Wikipedia. Ambiguous Ending: We never know if the final shot, in which Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is reunited with his children, is the real thing or if Dom has decided to live the rest of his days in a dream. The thing about this is that it's kind of the whole point. We're not supposed to know. The ending of the film is meant to be ambiguous. Or, to put it another way, it's a choose-your-own-ending kind of movie. If we want to believe that Cobb is living in a dream world, that's fine. If we want to believe that he finally has his children back, that's okay too. It's up to us, and we're right either way. The Team: "Dom" Cobb - master dream architect. Arthur - Dom's business partner. Eames - a conman and identity forger. Yusuf - a chemist who concocts the powerful sedative for a stable dream within a dream strategy. Ariadne - an architecture student tasked with designing the labyrinth of the dream landscapes. Saito - Japanese businessman who hired Cobb and who accompanies the team to know if it succeeds. ----------------------- The Antagonist: Mallorie "Mal" Cobb - Cobb's deceased wife and whose memory projection sabotages missions. Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Kenneth Brown on November 24, 2010 -- There is a small, militant camp of malcontents who despise everything Christopher Nolan has ever committed to film, and their numbers only seem to grow as countless critics and the movie-going masses at large declare him to be one of modern cinema's greatest visionaries. They see Memento as pretentious, arthouse drivel; Batman Begins as a serviceable but unspectacular foray into comicbook adaptations; Insomnia as bland and uneventful; The Prestige as an over-scripted mess with three twists too many; and The Dark Knight as an overblown, over-hyped cash-in that doesn't deserve the accolades it's received. To them, Nolan's latest buzz-earner, Inception, is either a dull, confounding, over-plotted misfire or a convoluted, self-important, superficial brain-bender. My apologies if you're one of these disgruntled few... I can't come out and play today. I've long been one of the masses, willingly drinking more and more of Nolan's Kool Aid with each passing film. As far as I'm concerned, Inception not only stands as the pinnacle of a master filmmaker's canon, but as a cerebral masterpiece in its own right; one that's far and away my favorite film of 2010, and a strong contender for my favorite film of all time. And believe me, that isn't the sort of statement I ever make lightly. Anyone who can pen a concise, revealing, spoiler-free plot synopsis of Inception is a far better writer than I. After eighteen scrapped variations, here's my best (and, ironically, shortest) effort. Hoping to implant an idea in the mind of a recently deceased entrepreneur's heir (Cillian Murphy), a rival businessman (Ken Watanabe) hires a team of highly skilled thieves -- sullen team leader Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), master forger Eames (Bronson's Tom Hardy), dreamscape architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) and chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) -- trained in invading other people's dreams. But dream-diving isn't an easy task, especially when the goal is to plant an idea rather than extracting information from the target's conscious. Complications abound of course: the creation of an elaborate array of dream worlds is required to pull off the job, subconscious projections pose a serious threat, and waking up isn't always as simple as it sounds. Nor is Nolan's intricate film. Part heist flick, part densely plotted sci-fi genre pic, part dramatic character study, part action thriller, part cinematic enigma, Inception braves intertwining paths most films would avoid altogether. And Nolan? The famed writer/director toys with everything from perception to reality to time itself, all within the span of two-and-a-half perfectly paced, magnificently constructed hours. Even if you don't enjoy Inception's story as much as others, it's difficult to walk away without some appreciation for its balance, artistry and spectacle. Imagine a film like Shutter Island (with which Inception shares a few small but potentially distracting similarities) as a straight line comprised of a series of linear scenes. Imagine six of these equally complex lines laid out across one another, arranged symmetrically, and then folded into a Rubix Cube of interlocking twists and turns. Now imagine holding this bizarre little puzzle box and being asked to solve its mysteries as it comes to life in your hands. This, dear readers, is just a taste of what it's like to watch Inception for the first time. Plot points arrive in droves, rules and exceptions to those rules are divulged in quick succession, and psychological analyses come fast and often. All the while, an eclectic ensemble of wounded protagonists, witty heroes and conflicting interests threaten to muddy the waters, but are never given the chance to do so. Nolan's command of his cast is as commendable as his command of his cameras, and their pitch-perfect performances are a testament to his control of an increasingly unconventional production. It's the stuff of nonsensical nightmares and filmmaking failures. Yet Nolan manages to maintain a focused narrative, ably develop his characters, address any and every possible plot hole (at least those that aren't patched by suspension of disbelief), and deliver an incredibly satisfying pay-off. And I have to say: for as many tales of woe that have been written about viewers' first encounters with Inception, I didn't have any problem. I never felt lost or frustrated; I never felt out of my depth or in need of some point-by-point map. (And that's saying a lot considering Nolan simultaneously juggles four time lines, four separate dream levels and four prevailing storylines.) But I was also aware that I wasn't fully digesting every single detail that graced the script and screen; I recognized how much more Nolan's world had to offer that my feeble brain could absorb in one sitting. Was it overwhelming? Yes, but not for the same reasons some outspoken critics have described, and certainly not in a way that disappointed me in the slightest. I felt such an emotional connection to the characters, such an intense fascination with Cobb's quest (both internal and external), and such inexplicable awe at the sheer audacity on display that I reacted accordingly. The hair on my arms and neck stood at attention. Chills ran up and down my spine for the better part of two hours. Tears welled up on occasion, and the film's closing moments were as moving as any in recent memory. It's rare that a film so readily engages my intellect; even rarer that a film elicits such a visceral response from my mind, heart and body. I could go on at length about Inception's casting and performances, its mind-blowing visual and practical effects, its beautiful cinematography or inventive set pieces, the subtleties of its story and themes, its intriguing realities and refined dream mechanics, the driving surge of Hans Zimmer's infectious score, the effortlessness with which Nolan weaves exposition into the fabric of his tale, or the emotional undercurrent that charges each scene. Oh, did I mention the many, many ways in which key aspects of the film are left open to thought-provoking interpretation? Be that as it may, Inception should be experienced and savored; describing anything other than the film's impact would only take away from the thrill of discovering it all for yourself. If I could get away with writing, "you simply must see Nolan's latest tour de force" and nothing more, I would, just in the hope that newcomers would watch the film with as clean a mental slate as possible. So, for what it's worth, "you must see Nolan's latest tour de force." Not only is it an amazing, eye-popping technical achievement -- the likes of which have to be seen to be believed -- the entire film defies explanation and shatters expectations. My advice? Stop reading reviews of the film and tackle it for yourself. The less you know about Inception, the better. Not everyone will fawn over Inception. Some will call it pretentious, others will call its junk-science a deal breaker. Still others will see it as further proof that Christopher Nolan isn't the grand auteur so many believe him to be. However, there aren't many films like Inception -- strike that, there aren't any films like Inception -- and those who yield to its surreal, multi-layered dreamscape, arresting complexities, sprawling set pieces, jaw-dropping special effects and visual wonders will be left in stunned silence. As I see it, Nolan's trippy head-game is cinema in its purest form -- bold, inventive and daring -- and I was completely swept away by its story, momentum and intensity. Better still, Warner's Blu-ray edition is a must-own release. Its supplemental package is a bit lighter than I expected (despite the presence of an In-Movie experience and a second disc of special features, Inception only offers an hour of true behind-the-scenes material), but its video transfer and DTS-HD Master Audio track are both outstanding. Be sure to add this one to your collection as soon as possible. Cast Notes: Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom Berenger (Peter Browning), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Pete Postlethwaite (Maurice Fischer), Michael Caine (Miles), Lukas Haas (Nash), Tai-Li Lee (Tadashi), Claire Geare (Phillipa [3 years]), Magnus Nolan (James [20 months]). IMDb Rating (05/01/16): 8.5/10 from 1,113,890 users Top 250: #62 IMDb Rating (07/24/14): 8.6/10 from 803,445 users Top 250: #50 IMDb Rating (11/03/12): 8.8/10 from 409,313 users Top 250: #29
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