Review: Inception

Before he became the man who rejuvinated the Batman franchise, Christopher Nolan was always a film-maker who was interested in playing around with the ideas about the human psyche and playing with the film formula as we all witnessed in Memento. Between Batman films he also made The Prestige which I would say has the most in common with Nolan's new film Inception. Of course since Memento, Nolan has made The Dark Knight one of the most succesful films of all time and therefore with his next ideas films he has had a lot more money to play around with so his ideas can now be imagined on a much larger scale. To talk too much about the plot of Inception would be to spoil it but it basically involves a gang of thieves lead by Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb who go into people's minds and steal information while they are asleep. When a businessman, who was previously robbed by Cobb, offers him a deal he can't refuse he jumps at the chance. However the businessman wants Cobb and his gang to plant an idea in someone's mind or inception, something that has been tried before but is incredibly risky. Revealling any more than that would spoil the body of the film and I try as much as I can not to do that.

As it is coming out in the summer and it has a massive budget Inception will be hailed as a blockbuster. And indeed some of the scenes, involving various shootouts and explosions, would be at home in the usual blockbuster dirge that we see every summmer. However unlike your Pirates of the Caribbeans or your Spidermans, Inception is incredibly intelligent and plays with your mind more than Memento did. One of the few problems with the film is that you have to keep up with all the rules we are given about what you can and can't do in dreams or when creating your own dream. After overhearing a conversation between two fellow cinemagoers they had struggled with some of the concepts presented so once piece of advice I would give is concentrate on all of the dialogue from the very beginning or you may well miss something. Although it is incredibly original you could also argue that Inception shares a lot of the same characteristics and protagoinists as the classic heist movie. So you have your front-man, his second in command, the designer of the heist, the forger, the provider of the ingredients of the heist and the money man. And of course it is visually fantastic from beginning to end, the last ten minutes or so particularly will keep you on the edge of your seat and keep you thinking at the same time. But boil this down further and it is a film about simple relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and sons and teachers and pupils something that we can all relate to.

Of the actors themselves DiCaprio is great in the lead anchoring the other characters while dealing with his own personal demons and using that confused face that he perfected in Shutter Island. Ellen Page stars in her first non indie-comedy role since her breakout in Juno, she was previously one of the X-Men but that was much more of a supporting role, here as the trainee dream architect she brings both incredible intelligence and emotional depth to a character that could easily have been forgotten about. Joseph Gorden-Levitt plays the level headed sidekick while Ken Watanbe displays gravitas as the money man and Cillian Murphy is also fairly compelling as the man whose sub-concious the gang invade plus bizzarely enogh their is a decent performance by Tom Berenger. The star of the show for me was Tom Hardy playing Eames the forger, he was quick-witted and stole every scene that he was in, and this could be the role that marks him out as a big star. Marion Cotillard was also as brilliant as ever but to reveal any facets of her character would again spoil the plot.

Overall then this is an intelligent and high-concept summer film that should herald a new era of intteligent blockbusters. I think that it should easily make a mint at the box office because everyone will go and see it twice to see if they understand and work out if that ending made any sense at all. For me this replaces Kick-Ass as my film of the year so far.