Inception follows the attempts of Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) and his crew of mind hackers trying to plant an idea in a business tycoon’s head, in order to break up a business empire, and hopefully in the process, earn Cobb the ability to return home after years in exile.

    There are many, many layers of dream within dream in Inception and already a lot of interesting theories are sprouting up online debating whether everything in the film is a dream, who at which point is actually doing the dreaming and how to resolve some of the more nagging plot-holes.

    Though undoubtedly smarter than your average blockbuster (does that really mean much these days?)  Inception dangles the tantalizing potential of exploring in depth both visually and psychologically the subconscious and the layers of psyche but ultimately rejects these ideas in favour of action set-pieces.

    It feels as though inclusion of multiple dream layers is only there to create the illusion of depth. The cinematic language stays the same at each dream level, as do the characters.  There is no change of mood or tone as we delve deeper into the dark reaches of the psyche.

    Despite this the film holds together (at least on the first viewing) and does offer some interesting food for thought on the nature of shared/collective dreams and acts as a meta-commentary on the power of cinema to implant ideas in people.

    Any one who has seen a David Lynch film knows that the potential for applying the visual and spatial logic of dreams to cinema can yield baffling, terrifying and rewarding results, but Christopher Nolan seems to have a fairly odd idea of how dreams look and feel.

    It might just be me but my dreams don’t consist of minimalist furniture, five star hotels and rain lashed car chases.  They also don’t follow the causal temporal logic of the real world and the details tend to be much murkier.  Films like Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Paprika have both taken much more interesting looks into the nature of dreams and memory, mainly by making dreams terrifying and revealing rather than elaborate playgrounds.

    Regardless of the films intellectual merits, which could be debated ad-infinitum; visually, Inception is far and away the best film so far this year.  The effects are done mainly in-camera and are nothing short of breathtaking.  The early scenes where we follow Ariadne (Ellen Page) being taught how to create dreams and the later fight scenes in the Hotel are master class set-pieces and demand to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

4/5 Stars