It's impossible not to be immersed within Christopher Nolan's intricate brain teaser that plays out like a blockbuster as devised by Jorge Luis Borges. Milo Wakelin reviews.
Inception is a high-tech heist movie set within the intimate world of dreams, where teams of stony-faced ‘Extractors’ invade their victims’ sleep to purloin high-value business secrets from their subconscious. These dream worlds take the form of labyrinthine cityscapes, full of architectural paradoxes, in which a careless traveller could become lost forever.
In Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), a superhero story played out as a multi-layered drama across a sprawling metropolis, while in Memento (2000), one man’s struggle to regain his memory and avenge his wife’s murder was inscribed in the notes and diagrams tattooed across his body. Inception unites the epic and the intimate – the action is set within vast, teeming cities in which the mind is king, but where personal demons emerge to throw meticulously laid plans into chaos.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an expert Extractor, who is hired, not to steal information, but to plant an idea in the mind of the son of a man’s business rival. To do this, he must recruit Ariadne, a skilled young ‘architect’, to build a series of dream worlds that will strip away different layers of the man’s subconscious. But Cobb’s memories of his wife Mal constantly intrude on his work, threatening his grasp on reality and his assignment’s success.
Inception is immaculately constructed, with each element engineered to the precision of a time-piece, and it is impossible but to be impressed by Nolan’s sheer directorial prowess as he depicts multiple sequences, told in different time scales, without ever losing the sense of the story.
Cobb and Mal’s relationship recalls something of Tarkovsky’s Solaris in which an astronaut is forced to constantly re-live a doomed affair with his suicidal wife, and Marion Cotillard’s chilling intensity dominates every scene. DiCaprio delivers another strong performance which edges, ever further, into Brando territory.
Shot on location across the US and Europe, the film keeps special effects to a minimum. Nolan steers clear of Gilliam-esque fantasy or Matrix-style computer-generated kitsch. Instead, Inception’s dreamscapes are depicted with a crisp, lucid realism. This intelligent, engrossing film is a well- tailored cut above standard blockbuster fare. Milo Wakelin
Extraction Mode: Infiltrate the dreamscape of “Inception” – with this in-movie experience - to learn how Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of the cast and crew designed and achieved the movies signature moments
Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious: Taking some of the most fascinating and cutting-edge dream research to-date on lucid dreaming, top scientists make the case that the dream world is not an altered state of consciousness, but a fully functional parallel reality
Inception: The Cobol Job: Now in full animation and motion, check out this comic prologue to see how Cobb, Arthur, and Nash came to be enlisted by Cobol Engineering and perform an extraction on Saito
5.1 Inception Soundtrack: Composer Hans Zimmer teams up once again with Director Christopher Nolan to create the soundtrack for “Inception”
Conceptual Art Gallery
Promotional Art Archive
Inception Trailers
Inception TV Spots
Project Somnacin: Confidential Files: Get access to the highly secure files that reveal the inception of the dream-share technology. (BD-Live)
Film Description
A blockbuster sci-fi thriller, Inception was written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento).
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a professional thief with a difference: the spoils he goes after are not material objects but the thoughts, dreams and secrets buried in the minds of other people. This rare talent has cost him dear, rendering him a solitary fugitive stripped of everything he ever really cared about. When he is offered a chance for redemption by reversing the process and planting an idea rather than stealing it, he and his team of specialists find themselves pitted against a dangerous enemy that appears to pre-empt their every move. Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine and Joseph Gordon-Levitt co-star.
