Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception

 Inception is a labyrinth, a mental puzzle about the puzzle of the mind. Puzzled? You will be, but if you pay close attention, you will escape the maze wholly satisfied in the experience, awed by the extraordinary things you have seen.

In the opening act, the audience is led to the center of the labyrinth and spun around three times. Something about invading others’ dreams, stealing ideas from the sleeper… It’s fragmented and dizzying. Don’t panic. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a tortured soul, who has been in the business of “extraction” since it became a business. Extractors are trained to enter into and manipulate the dreams of others in order to steal their secrets. Typically, they are contracted to extract from the minds of powerful CEO’s and politicians. As the onset of computer viruses created the need for anti-virus solutions, the business of extraction has created a counter-business of subconscious protection. Targets of extraction can be trained to project heavily-armed defenders into their subconscious to protect them from from this malware of the mind. The presence of these defenders leads to some traditional action movie mayhem, guns and explosions.

The system of extraction and it’s complicated set of rules are fascinating, original, and almost plausible. By the end, I half-believed extraction might already be in use in the world today. The credit for this level of detail and imagination goes to Christopher Nolan who both wrote and directed Inception. This marks the first time since his first feature film, Following, that Nolan can claim the sole credit for the story and screenplay. This is Nolan’s film through and through, and he comes out looking like a genius.

Chris Nolan on set of Inception.

Extraction however, as fascinating a concept as it is, is merely the framework of Inception. The plot centers on a job assigned to Cobb and his team of extractors. Rather than steal information like usual, the team must invade the mind of Fischer, a corporate heir played by Cillian Murphy, and implant an idea so subtly that Fischer believes it is his own, then exit undetected. To do so, they will have to create dreams within dreams and fend off the militarized protectors of Fischer’s subconscious. It’s a high-stakes heist in dreamspace.

Visually, Inception is as revolutionary and mind-blowing as The Matrix was in 1999. Nolan rightly looks down on CGI that reads as CGI and strives for photorealism in his work, often choosing to spend more time and money to achieve spectacular visual effects in-camera. In a movie about dreams, fantastic visuals are a must if the movie is to compare to our real dreams. Audiences going into Inception expect those wild visuals and would make provisions for the intrusion of computer-generated effects, but Nolan chooses photorealism to make an unreal world seem possible. He filmed Inception in 6 different cities including Tokyo, Tangier, and Calgary to give the movie a larger-than-life, baroque quality. He used super-high speed cameras and “anti-gravity chambers” to achieve a weightless, liquid slow-motion. The dreamy violence of a zero-gravity fight scene in a spinning hotel hallway between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and some goon is one of the most dazzling, spellbinding moments I’ve ever witnessed on the silverscreen.

Zero gravity fight. Totally brill.