Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao and Michael Caine.

Nothing prepares you for a film like this. Neither the highly intriguing promos, nor Christopher Nolan’s penchant for making films that make your brain do a double flip. (Those of you who’ve seen The Prestige will know what I’m talking about).
Nothing.

Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is the world’s best “extractor”, a thief who enters peoples’ minds and steals ideas from their subconscious when they’re most vulnerable, while they’re dreaming. In a dangerous new world of corporate espionage, Cobb is the ultimate weapon. But being a high stakes idea thief has come at a price for him – his family, and made him an internationally wanted criminal. So when he’s promised a clean slate and return to his family by a powerful client as the reward for the successful completion of a job, he leaps at it. There’s a catch though. The client expects him to perform Inception, i.e., not the stealing of an idea, but planting it. Thought to be impossible to perform, he nonetheless gets a team together for the task. What he doesn’t tell them, though, is that he has some pretty dark secrets of his own which may jeopardize the mission and everyone involved in it.
Inception is a labour of love from a director right at the top of his game. Said to have been writing the film for almost 10 years, Nolan shows virtuous ease in translating highly complex source material into a refreshing visual idiom while maintaining the pace of an edge of the seat thriller and still somehow, keeping Cobb’s emotional journey the main driving force of the screenplay. He’s helped in no small part by Lee Smith’s incisive editing and Hans Zimmer’s spot on background score, both of which greatly add gravity to the non-linear narrative and heighten the atmospherics that are by now a Nolan trademark.
All in all, Inception is an excellent balance of the visceral and the intellectual, taking your senses for a spin right from go and shaking your notions of reality so hard that you leave the movie hall overwhelmed and slightly perturbed. That’s why it works.
My Rating: 5/5