What you dreamed and thought Inception would be is true, but it doesn’t end there. It becomes a vastly complex, imaginative and emotional film, full of rich characters, dazzling action and tight knit drama. Our imaginations are pulled into the minds of the various characters and have us forgetting our own reality. Only when it’s over do we realize that the maze of this complex film was an escapist’s worst nightmare, because despite our nature to just be a casual observer we actually put forth a lot of mental effort to stay engaged during the film or be lost in its limbo.
Diving right into the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe), the epic journey through layers of dreams begins. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads a specialized team that dives into the minds of its targets and extracts their secrets. Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is the right hand man for Cobb and his logistical specialist, both in dreams and reality. By building a dream world for their targets to inhabit and fill with their subconscious, the team can go to work trying to take their deepest and darkest private thoughts. To build this, they need an architect, and that is where Ariadne (Ellen Page) comes in.
Although extraction may be the team’s specialty, the tables are turned when their former target wishes to use them for a conceptual job known as inception. He wants an idea planted in someone’s mind. From there it gets more and more intriguing.
It ends in a very similar place to where it all began. Reminding the audience of the maze our minds will create, to navigate and decipher this complex yet mentally nourishing masterpiece is way more fulfilling then getting lost in a shallow popcorn nightmare.
Where The Matrix used themes of religion and philosophy, Inception takes many branches of psychology and serves them entertainingly to us. This film was desperately needed to fuel the evolution in cinema that has seemed to stand still while it raids the graphic novel and young adult sections of the bookstores in order to keep itself alive.
Much like films such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park and The Matrix, you know when you leave this film the game has been changed. In so many ways this film is a beacon in a time when so many films lack any originality. Inception was the epic film that we all thought Avatar would have been. Without a doubt the finest film created by the master storyteller. Christopher Nolan more than likely walked home with the Best Original Academy Award on Friday. Maybe this will open Hollywood’s eyes to the fact that originality is why we started going to movies in the first place.
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout.
