by Pete Hammond

In terms of sheer originality, ambition and achievement, Inception is the movie of the summer, the movie of the year and the movie of our dreams. Director Christopher Nolan's heist film about a group of dream extractors who can invade a person's subconscious to steal-or plant-vital information may remind you of James Bond, The Matrix, or even Nolan's own Memento, when in fact it's unlike any other. A bold, inventive, audacious entertainment, Inception charts a new course for motion pictures and sets the bar very, very high. Matrix-style business should be in order, even though audiences will have to pay strict attention to get the full experience (perish the thought). Simplistic moviegoers who like their blockbusters cooked in predictability may not get it but Nolan fans and those who like their action married to new ideas will flock to multiplexes for repeated viewings.

A plot that's been in Nolan's head for eight years, it took a few drafts and the global success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to enable the director to get Warner's and Legendary Pictures to cough up the considerable mega-budget to bring his dizzying and remarkable vision to screens. The wait was well worth it. On its surface, Inception is an Ocean's-like heist film set in the mind instead of a casino. Nolan's clever, complicated story revolves around Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a super thief who specializes in dream extraction, a service for which he steals secrets buried in the subconscious while a mark is asleep and most vulnerable. Essentially this talent has turned Cobb into a fugitive who is banned from the U.S. and, as a result, prohibited from seeing his family.

When powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers him an opportunity to turn that around and get back home he jumps at the chance, but it means reversing course and instead of extracting info, he has to insert a certain idea that will mess with the head of a key rival and soon-to-be heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). With something more valuable than money as the end game, Cobb sets about putting his team together, including point man Arthur (a scene-stealing Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a forger and veteran in the game named Eames (Tom Hardy) and young architecture student Ariadne (Ellen Page) who almost serves as the voice of the audience when she asks questions like, "okay just whose subconscious are we in right now?" Also important to the mix is Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who creates the drug that enables multiple people to share dream states.

Shot in six different countries, Nolan has infused his project with one triumphant set-piece after another and truly stunning action sequences that will have you on the edge of your seat. But Nolan's careful never to let us know the difference between the dreams and the reality; this keeps a viewer on his toes throughout. Like Stanley Kubrick did 42 years ago in 2001, Nolan masterfully uses our confusion like it's a piece in his hard-to-solve puzzle.

Highlights include a spectacular sequence shot in the snow-filled mountains of Calgary, Canada and an awesome fight involving Gordon-Levitt that has him literally defying gravity in a hotel hallway. Inception has a strong emotional core and oddly affecting love story between Cobb and his wife, Mal (a terrific Marion Cotillard) who is the essence of a femme fatale and appears mysteriously in different states ranging from evil to tender. Nolan is careful never to let the scope of the film overwhelm the human element and this is a key reason Inception works as well as it does. The acting, from a great ensemble led by DiCaprio, is as good as it gets. Special shout outs to Wally Pfister's extraordinary cinematography, the challenging and intricate production design of Guy Hendrix Dyas and Han's Zimmer's haunting score, which is his best in years.

For audiences looking for a break from the usual summer dish Hollywood serves, Inception is a wildly entertaining and dazzling mind-trip not to be missed. Kubrick would have been proud.

Copyright 2010 Box Office Magazine

Devilishly Complicated and Fiendishly Enjoyable

By Kirk Honeycutt

Now "original" doesn't mean its chases, cliffhangers, shoot-outs, skullduggery and last-minute rescues. Movies have trafficked in those things forever. What's new here is how writer-director Christopher Nolan repackages all this with a science-fiction concept that allows his characters to chase and shoot across multiple levels of reality.

This is, in some ways, a con-game movie, only the action takes place entirely within the characters' minds while they dream.

Following up on such ingenious and intriguing films as "The Dark Knight" and "Memento," Nolan has outdone himself. "Inception" puts him not only at the top of the heap of sci-fi all-stars, but it also should put this Warner Bros. release near or at the top of the summer movies. It's very hard to see how a film that plays so winningly to so many demographics would not be a worldwide hit.

Not that the film doesn't have its antecedents. "Dreamscape" (1984) featured a man who could enter and manipulate dreams, and, of course, in "The Matrix" (1999) human beings and machines battled on various reality levels created by artificial intelligence.

In "Inception," Nolan imagines a new kind of corporate espionage wherein a thief enters a person's brain during the dream state to steal ideas. This is done by an entire team of "extractors" who design the architecture of the dreams, forge identities within the dream and even pharmacologically help several people to share these dreams.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a master extractor, who is for what initially are vague reasons on the run and cannot return home to his children in the States. Then along comes a powerful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who offers Dom his life back -- if he'll perform a special job.

Saito wants Dom to do the impossible: Instead of stealing an idea, he wants Dom to plant one, an idea that will cause the mark, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to break up his father's multibillion-dollar corporation for "emotional" reasons.

Meanwhile, you meet the other team members -- Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Dom's longtime point man; Eames (Tom Hardy), the forger; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the chemist; and Dom's father-in-law (Michael Caine), who is not on the team but the professor who taught Dom to share dreams.

Dom's late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), haunts his own dreamworld like a kind of Mata Hari, intent on messing with his mind if not staking a claim to his very life. He doesn't let on about this, but Dom's new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), figures it out -- which makes her realize how dangerous it is to share dreams with Dom.

A good deal of the first hour is spent, essentially, selling the audience on this sci-fi idea. As you witness an extraction that fails and then Dom's recruitment of his new team around the world, the movie lays out all the hows, whys, whos and what-the-hells behind "extractions."

If you don't follow all this, join the club. It will perhaps take multiple viewings of these multiple dream states to extract all the logic and regulations. (At least that's what the filmmakers hope.)

Something else might come more easily on subsequent viewings: With incredibly tense situations suspended across so many dreams within dreams, all that restless energy might induce a kind of reverse stress in audiences, producing not quite tedium, but you may want to shout, "C'mon, let's get on with it."

This is especially true when the hectic action in one dream, a van rolling down a hill with its dreamers aboard, causes a hotel corridor to roll in another, producing a weightless state in the characters. Even Fred Astaire didn't dance on the ceiling as much as these guys do.

Probably what "sells" this tricky movie is the actors. In his second consecutive movie to question reality -- "Shutter Island" came earlier this year, remember -- DiCaprio anchors the film with a performance that is low-key yet intense despite hysterical chaos breaking out all around him.

Page too displays sharp intelligence and determination in the face of this absolute jumble of reality. Especially surprising is Murphy as the mark; you find yourself genuinely sympathetic to a guy who just wanted to catch a little shut-eye and finds his mind kidnapped.

It also is nice that Nolan strives to keep CG effects to a minimum and do as many stunts in-camera as possible. This photo-realism certainly helps to keep the dream realities looking more plausible.

Credit cinematographer Wally Pfister with so neatly blending the real and surreal without any hokey moments. Ditto that for production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and the various stunt coordinators and effects teams. Meanwhile, editor Lee Smith does a Herculean job of juggling those different realities.

Sometimes originality comes at a cost though: At the end, you may find yourself utterly exhausted.

Copyright 2010 Hollywood Reporter