inception film review essay

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It's said that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing his screenplay for "Inception." That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire. The film's hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.

The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all. Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act, and Nolan may have considered his " Memento " (2000) a warm-up; he apparently started this screenplay while filming that one. It was the story of a man with short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.

Like the hero of that film, the viewer of "Inception" is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don't know that when you're dreaming. And what if you're inside another man's dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?

Cobb ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) is a corporate raider of the highest order. He infiltrates the minds of other men to steal their ideas. Now he is hired by a powerful billionaire to do the opposite: To introduce an idea into a rival's mind, and do it so well he believes it is his own. This has never been done before; our minds are as alert to foreign ideas as our immune system is to pathogens. The rich man, named Saito ( Ken Watanabe ), makes him an offer he can't refuse, an offer that would end Cobb's forced exile from home and family.

Cobb assembles a team, and here the movie relies on the well-established procedures of all heist movies. We meet the people he will need to work with: Arthur ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ), his longtime associate; Eames ( Tom Hardy ), a master at deception; Yusuf ( Dileep Rao ), a master chemist. And there is a new recruit, Ariadne ( Ellen Page ), a brilliant young architect who is a prodigy at creating spaces. Cobb also goes to touch base with his father-in-law Miles ( Michael Caine ), who knows what he does and how he does it. These days Michael Caine need only appear on a screen and we assume he's wiser than any of the other characters. It's a gift.

But wait. Why does Cobb need an architect to create spaces in dreams? He explains to her. Dreams have a shifting architecture, as we all know; where we seem to be has a way of shifting. Cobb's assignment is the "inception" (or birth, or wellspring) of a new idea in the mind of another young billionaire, Robert Fischer Jr. ( Cillian Murphy ), heir to his father's empire. Saito wants him to initiate ideas that will lead to the surrender of his rival's corporation. Cobb needs Ariadne to create a deceptive maze-space in Fischer's dreams so that (I think) new thoughts can slip in unperceived. Is it a coincidence that Ariadne is named for the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth?

Cobb tutors Ariadne on the world of dream infiltration, the art of controlling dreams and navigating them. Nolan uses this as a device for tutoring us as well. And also as the occasion for some of the movie's astonishing special effects, which seemed senseless in the trailer but now fit right in. The most impressive to me takes place (or seems to) in Paris, where the city literally rolls back on itself like a roll of linoleum tile.

Protecting Fischer are any number of gun-wielding bodyguards, who may be working like the mental equivalent of antibodies; they seem alternatively real and figurative, but whichever they are, they lead to a great many gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, which is the way movies depict conflict these days. So skilled is Nolan that he actually got me involved in one of his chases, when I thought I was relatively immune to scenes that have become so standard. That was because I cared about who was chasing and being chased.

If you've seen any advertising at all for the film, you know that its architecture has a way of disregarding gravity. Buildings tilt. Streets coil. Characters float. This is all explained in the narrative. The movie is a perplexing labyrinth without a simple through-line, and is sure to inspire truly endless analysis on the web.

Nolan helps us with an emotional thread. The reason Cobb is motivated to risk the dangers of inception is because of grief and guilt involving his wife Mal ( Marion Cotillard ), and their two children. More I will not (in a way, cannot) say. Cotillard beautifully embodies the wife in an idealized way. Whether we are seeing Cobb's memories or his dreams is difficult to say--even, literally, in the last shot. But she makes Mal function as an emotional magnet, and the love between the two provides an emotional constant in Cobb's world, which is otherwise ceaselessly shifting.

"Inception" works for the viewer, in a way, like the world itself worked for Leonard, the hero of "Memento." We are always in the Now. We have made some notes while getting Here, but we are not quite sure where Here is. Yet matters of life, death and the heart are involved--oh, and those multi-national corporations, of course. And Nolan doesn't pause before using well-crafted scenes from spycraft or espionage, including a clever scheme on board a 747 (even explaining why it must be a 747).

The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. "Inception" does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in "Memento:" How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there's a hole in "Inception" too, but I can't find it. Christopher Nolan reinvented " Batman ." This time he isn't reinventing anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle "Inception." I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Inception (2010)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout

148 minutes

Michael Caine as Miles

Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer Jr.

Tom Berenger as Browning

Marion Cotillard as Mal

Ellen Page as Ariadne

Dileep Rao as Yusuf

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur

Tom Hardy as Eames

Pete Postlethwaite as Maurice Fischer

Ken Watanabe as Saito

Written and directed by

• Christopher Nolan

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‘inception’: film review.

In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes 'Inception,' easily the most original movie idea in ages.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes Inception , easily the most original movie idea in ages.

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. The Bottom Line In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes "Inception," easily the most original movie idea in ages.

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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.

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.

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.

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'Inception' A Masterpiece? Only In Someone's Dream

David Edelstein

While You Were Sleeping: Leonardo DiCaprio plunges into people's minds while they sleep in order to extract corporate secrets in Christopher Nolan's sci-fi flick Inception. Warner Bros hide caption

While You Were Sleeping: Leonardo DiCaprio plunges into people's minds while they sleep in order to extract corporate secrets in Christopher Nolan's sci-fi flick Inception.

• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Genre: Action, Science-Fiction
• Running Time: 148 minutes

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'I Need An Architect'

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'I Am The Most Skilled Extractor'

'You Create The World Of The Dream'

In Christopher Nolan's Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, whose name sounds like it should evoke something -- a colleague suggests dummkopf, but I doubt that's the intention -- and whose specialty is plunging into peoples' minds while they sleep and extracting corporate secrets. His new client, a business titan played by Ken Watanabe, wants Cobb not to steal an idea but to plant one in a rival's head. That's called "inception," and it's believed, even in this futuristic world, to be impossible.

Frankly, I got hung up on that. Why should "inception" be harder than extraction? "The subject's mind always knows the genesis of an idea," one character explains, but that strikes my mind as dead wrong. I'm highly suggestible. I don't always know where my ideas come from.

But there's one thing I'm sure of: Inception doesn't all come from Nolan's head. It's a clunky mix-'n'-match of other mind-bending blockbusters like Mission: Impossible, Fantastic Voyage, Dreamscape and The Matrix, with some Freud and Philip K. Dick thrown in. It's not terrible -- just lumbering and humorless and pretentious, with a drag of a hero.

Cobb accepts the job of planting an idea in the mind of a man named Fischer (Cillian Murphy) because he longs to see his two little kids in the U.S. and is forbidden to return on account of a Crime To Be Revealed Later -- and his new client can make the legal problems go away. The best part of the movie is Cobb assembling his team, among them Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the point man. And Ellen Page's character, an architecture student named Ariadne, has two functions: dream-world designer and exposition magnet. She's the newbie, so Cobb has to explain how the science works.

It takes a lot of explaining.

"You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious," Cobb says, as the two share a drink at a cafe.

"How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?" she asks.

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"Well, dreams -- they feel real when we're in them, right?" he explains. "It's only when we wake up that we realize something is actually strange. Let me ask you a question: You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."

"I guess, yeah."

"So how did we end up here?" he says, pausing.

"Well, we just came from the ..." -- she looks around, suddenly confused.

"Think about it, Ariadne. How did you get it? Where are you right now?"

"Are we dreaming?" she asks.

"You're actually in the middle of the workshop right now," he says. "This is your first lesson in shared dreaming."

Mind Games: Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (left) co-stars as DiCaprio's wife — and nemesis — in an action thriller that has layers within layers. Warner Bros hide caption

Mind Games: Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (left) co-stars as DiCaprio's wife — and nemesis — in an action thriller that has layers within layers.

That's my favorite scene in Inception, because it ends with the dream city exploding in puffs of debris and the anticipation of magic to come. But Nolan thinks like a mechanical engineer. Instead of creating one dream that's really evocative, he opts for ordinary-looking dreams within dreams ... within dreams.

See, in a dream, you can fall asleep and have another dream, in which you can fall asleep and have another dream -- except time works differently at different depths. A minute in the waking world might be 10 minutes in the dream, an hour in the dream-within-a-dream, and in the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream, years.

The gimmick lets Nolan have three clocks ticking down instead of one -- which should be killingly suspenseful. But he's too literal-minded, too caught up in his tick-tock logistics, to make a great, untethered dream movie. The tone is impersonal, the action disjointed.

There is a nice Freudian touch, a female saboteur who keeps popping up in Cobb's unconscious: his wife, Mal, played by Marion Cotillard. She has a great first scene, surveying her Mal-evolent handiwork with glittering eyes. But then the Mal subplot turns grim. She's the key to what eats away at Cobb, so as the team prepares to jump into the head of Fischer, Ariadne has to play therapist. "As we go deeper into Fischer," she tells Cobb, "we're also going deeper into you. And I'm not sure we're going to like what we find." Dialogue like that does nothing for an actress, and it's the only kind that Page gets.

Apart from Cotillard, the cast is colorless, including DiCaprio, who's often terrific but is weighing himself down with guilt-trip roles.

Look: I, too, wanted to surrender to Inception. But even with some amazing effects -- like a city that folds over on top of itself -- it never cuts loose the way The Matrix or Joseph Ruben's jolly B-movie Dreamscape did. If you're hoping for a thriller that will take you into another realm, well: Dream on.

The Film “Inception” by Christopher Nolan Essay

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Touching upon the issues of the Unconscious and contemporary theory of dreams, Inception , a recently released film by Christopher Nolan, can be considered a flow of fresh air into the sci-fi genre. It was a long time since I enjoyed a movie which was truly original in its concept and at the same time was interesting to watch. The film has a brilliant cast, headed by such actors as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and others.

It can be stated that besides incredible acting talent, it was the original script that gave the room for the acting abilities of the performers to flourish. Being impressed by the development of the actions, intriguing themes and non-linear structure of the movie, the viewers find and interpret the moral message conveyed by Nolan realizing the importance of distinguishing between dreams and reality

With the movie being single-viewed, I can state that the identification of its theme might be a challenging task. The one that can be identified right away is the theme of dreams and the thin, if any, distinguishing line with reality.

The interrelation of dreams’ different levels makes it difficult for the viewers to differentiate between dreams and reality, which can be assumed to be one of the motifs of the film. Additionally, the connection between the present and past, with past haunting the present, is another interesting motif that could be identified. The film’s emotional effect can be identified through the mood of the audience in the theater.

In that regard, although the genre was identified as scientific fiction, the mood in the theater might lead to the film being considered as a psychological thriller category. Thus, for me Inception is an ideal balance between a great original and challenging idea of intentional influencing the sphere of person’s Unconscious, with a perfect technical realization by combining elements of sci-fi and thriller genres and intriguing the audience up to the last moment of the film (Nolan & Thomas, 2010).

What the film means to me can be explained through the statement that this motion picture was the ideal form to realize the ideas conveyed in the script, which could not be a book. However, if these ideas were originally in a book, it could not have been transferred into a movie better than Nolan did it, making dreams really close to the way I personally perceive them.

The plot of the movie is original, telling the story of a group of experts in stealing ideas from people’s dreams. The exposition of the film might make the audience frustrated at once, with fast introduction of new characters, time, place, and ideas, which are hard to follow.

Nevertheless, the exposition ends with a dialogue which answers all the questions which the beginning of the film created, explaining the characters and putting them in a believable time and place (Boggs & Petrie, 2008). The title of the film becomes understood during the complication of the film.

The group of experts is given the mission to perform a non-traditional task of “incepting” an idea into one’s mind, the accomplishment of which is the main complication of the film (Nolan & Thomas, 2010). The main ideas of the plot are delivered to the audience in gradual portions, being simple enough not to make the audience be distracted from watching the film, and complex enough just to keep the suspense of waiting for the climax of the story (Boggs & Petrie, 2008), and not being lost within the details.

The nonlinear structure is hard to be related to any other film. Although the film contains traditional flashbacks, one of the common examples of nonlinear structures, the utilizations of three dream levels in the film, when falling asleep at one level, the main characters find themselves at another one, while each level runs through its own time pace, cannot be compared to anything close in terms of structures.

The assessment of a director’s style requires studying at least three of his/her films (Boggs & Petrie, 2008). Although the other two films I watched, The Dark Night and Prestige , were not studied, I can state that the created visual style in Inception combined with identifiable structure, have many common elements with Prestige . The main difference might be seen in making Inception more open to interpretation.

The plot is certainly the main focus of the film along with the style, texture, or structure. What makes the film unique is the fact that none of the latter were compromised or overused at the expense of the other. The style of the film was created through beautiful special effects, which nevertheless, are not the main attraction of the film, rather than tools that were used to support the ideas in the film.

The credibility and the believability of the plot are largely achieved through the artistic style implemented in the dreams. Nevertheless, for the plot’s main twists, the credibility might have been achieved through utilizing internal truths of human nature. It can be assumed that everyone in the theater related his/her personal experiences with dreams to some of the notions explained in the film.

I find the movie meaningful to me personally as I always thought that dreams were reflections of the reality. Despite the assessment being personal, I can state that universality can be applied in this case (Boggs & Petrie, 2008), with most people finding some answers to their perceptions of dreams. The desire to remain in a dream, at least for instance, and the severe consequences of such desire shown in the film has a significant meaning to me personally.

The film touches on the idea of people preferring to live in a constructed reality which they can build based on their preferences. With such preference leading to that people stop distinguishing dreams and reality is certainly an idea that has a personal message, at least for me.

The moral of the story in the film can be seen through moral implications, rather than statements, which in this case are twofold. On the one hand, the first implication can be seen in that people should leave their past behind, where the failure to do so might result in that such past might pursue them their whole life.

The other moral implication, which was the one that I consider to be personally meaningful, is not to live in a dream. Both statements might not be so apparent, considering the genre of the movie and its complexity in general. However, the struggles of DiCaprio’s character, the main protagonist the film, might deliver a message to many people. Nevertheless, Nolan does not provide his own judgment on such struggles, where the open-ending in the film, leaves such judgment to viewers’ own interpretations.

I can conclude that the creative approach to most literary elements such as genre, plot, and structure was important for making Christopher Nolan’s Inception a movie interesting from all aspects. The combination of the sci-fi genre with particular components of a psychological thriller that seemed original to me was helpful for balancing the original idea and moral message with their technical realization.

Touching upon the issues of the Unconscious and a thin line between the dreams and objective reality, the film appeals to my feelings and gives food for thought. Coupled with the nonlinear structure and an open ending of the film leaving room for the viewers’ personal interpretations, these literary elements contributed to the lasting impression produced by the film.

Boggs, J. M., & Petrie, D. W. (2008). The art of watching films (7th ed.). Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill.

C. Nolan & E. Thomas (Producers) & Nolan, C. (Director). (2010). Inception [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures.

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IvyPanda. (2019, February 7). The Film "Inception" by Christopher Nolan. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inception-2/

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IvyPanda . 2019. "The Film "Inception" by Christopher Nolan." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inception-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Film "Inception" by Christopher Nolan." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inception-2/.

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Thanks for checking out our Inception Review

Genre: Mystery Thriller Directed by: Christopher Nolan Staring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellan Page, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe Released: July 16th 2010

THE GENERAL IDEA

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb’s rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved.

Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible: inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime.

The Actors. Most importantly I want to address the less obvious. Of course DiCaprio and Gordon-Levitt hit it out of the park but dare I say I was more impressed with Ellen Page. This movie is VERY deep and we are introduced to this completely foreign concept by the introduction of the Rookie. As things are explained to her, they are explained to us. She is SO GOOD in this movie. Love her. Not a shred of her snarky emogirl persona is here.

Then we layer that with the core of the movie and Leo doesn’t do all the heavy lifting. The mix of Tom Hardy, Joseph Godeon-Levitt and Michael Caine (small but effective role) topped off with a less creepy Cillian Murphy all effortlessly carry this movie.

We expected from the trailers for the visuals to be tastey, but those were appetizers. Honestly there is a zero-gravity scene and it blew my mind. Incredible.

And then there is the plot. Its not just a story. This is a carefully crafted masterpeice of thematic elements woven together to make a story. Everyone has a purpose, and no one is throwaway. They all matter even though the story is all about Cobb. Its a hard balance to accomplish, and Nolan has never been afraid to get into story and he didn’t hold back here either. This movie is a masterpiece of storytelling.

There is a LOT of explaining going on. This is some serious character driven dialogue heavy storytelling. Its done well but there is a LOT to absorb. As I was leaving the theater there were people raving while others were dumbfounded. I imagine repeat viewings of this movie will reveal even more about the story that I missed because there is a LOT going on, and its all deep. (that might actually be a good part)

This may be too much for some viewers who thought this was just going to be a popcorn visual effects film. So while I had no problem with this depth its fair warning not to take the film lightly. You have to be awake and ready to take in the film, not just watch it.

Go into the theater execting a cerebral film that dishes heavy helpings of the human condition and you wont be disappointed. The visuals there make this heavy film that much more amazing to take in.

All I have to say is that I don’t mind that he put aside Batman 3 to take time to make this. I don’t know if Nolan will ever top this film. He just made his own shoes even bigger ones to fill.

I give Inception a 10 out of 10

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Review by Brian Eggert July 14, 2010

Setting the mind ablaze with inspired dream imagery, thought-provoking notions about reality, action sequences that leave the jaw dangling in wonder, and an emotional undercurrent to tie everything together, Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a masterpiece. It’s an epic of ideas and structure that doesn’t resist engaging the intellect as it amazes with spectacle. And yet, this high-concept adventure into the unconscious assigns every development in the plot a dramatic significance. Through his marriage of style and content, Nolan finally establishes himself as an auteur by drawing on obsessions that exist throughout his earlier works. Disjointed story construction. Altered perceptions of reality. Characters with a desperate need to control, so much so that they invent their own rules. He unites these themes in a breathless harmony of style, composition, and narrative, unmatched by anything else in his short but remarkable career.

Though Nolan, who took ten years to write his screenplay, kept his production hush-hush, and the film’s advertisements reveal little about the plot, the diminutive amount of pre-release information available has left audiences bewildered but intrigued. However, it’s doubtful any plot description could do the film justice. In the broadest of terms, the film is a heist-like science-fiction tale set in the open playground of dreams, where the rules of reality are controlled by a dreamer. This means gravity can be manipulated and cities can fold over on themselves, given the right circumstances. But Nolan avoids falling into surrealist Dali territory, in that the dreamscapes serve as a carefully controlled environment with which to access the subconscious mind. Nolan avoids all imagery typically related to Freudian interpretations of sexual metaphors or repressed desires. The dream world comes with its own set of rules, which the audience learns in the film’s first half in as much detail as possible. This gives way to a brilliant second half, where those rules are explored to their fullest possibility.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a thief who steals ideas from dreams. Cobb engages in a rare form of robbery when he enters the minds of his targets to extract ideas from their subconscious, all without the targets ever knowing. The success of every job depends on how well Cobb can control the dream and manipulate his mark into believing the dream is real. If the target becomes aware of the deception, that they are in truth inside a dream, the dream world falls apart and Cobb wakes up with nothing. Though incomparably talented in his trade, Cobb’s control over his dream worlds is deteriorating; his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) surfaces in jarring appearances in his subconscious, threatening to botch his elaborate dream heists. DiCaprio, who continues his recent unbroken streak of incredible performances, embodies a composed, professional figure defenseless against whatever’s lingering in his head, not unlike his turn in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter I sland from earlier this year.

Cobb’s fading control becomes the sole reason he accepts a risky new job, one that will pay off by allowing him to return home to his family, from whom he’s been separated for some time. An industrial magnate named Saito (Ken Watanabe) proposes that Cobb complete a mission involving ‘inception’ rather than ‘extraction’, the difference being that ‘inception’ demands Cobb implant an idea into the mark’s subconscious, as opposed to stealing it. But in order to successfully complete such a mission, the idea has to be implanted deep into the recesses of the subconscious, where the idea will grow naturally and the mark will never know the idea wasn’t their own. Going that deep also proves perilous, as Cobb risks losing his awareness of being in a dream state; if he forgets he’s dreaming, he may lose himself to his subconscious forever.

To accomplish the seemingly impossible task of inception, Cobb assembles a team of skilled dream manipulators, all played by actors of the highest caliber. Together they prepare, walking the audience through the maze-like plan that finds intricate ways to implant the idea into the subconscious of their assigned mark, a young industrialist played by Cillian Murphy. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, Cobb’s partner and expert in the dream world’s rules. Tom Hardy is Eames, a master of disguise and forgery. Dileep Rao’s character Yusuf is a chemist who specializes in the drugs that keep Cobb’s team sedated for the dream. And Ellen Page plays Ariadne, an “architect” who designs the labyrinthine dream world for the others with staggering detail.

The film’s third act, where Cobb’s crew follows through with their plan, will have moviegoers floored with its unbelievable sights and clever execution. A virtuoso display of action and ideas, the extended sequence involves layers of subterfuge that take place in a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. Nolan coordinates several overlapping schemes, each linked in a uniquely organic way through masterful coordination—both in terms of story and editing. Three varied action scenes take place all at once: one recalls the bank robbery shootout from Michael Mann’s Heat ; another offers a zero-gravity fight that outdoes anything conceived by The Matrix trilogy; yet another feels like an actionized espionage incursion from a James Bond movie. But despite their likenesses to other material, Nolan lends his personal touch to each scene, allowing his story’s environment and the way they’re coordinated to leave us wowed by their originality. And, as the three sequences unfold, the audience is always aware of the overlaying stakes, and how everything going down onscreen relates to Cobb’s emotional conflict.

The altitudes may go even deeper than we realize in this sequence, but that’s for the viewer to discover. Indeed, the finale plays out much in the order of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ , as the characters (and the audience) question the veracity of this or that reality. Which one is real? And when the characters “wake up” are they really awake? How can they truly be sure? Since Memento , Nolan has always been interested in the mind’s ability to create realities for and deceive itself. It’s a theme that follows through Insomnia and The Prestige  and remains a crucial character trait for Bruce Wayne in the director’s Batman films. Along with his complex narrative, which is divided between reality and several dream realities splitting off from one another, it becomes evident that many of the themes from Nolan’s early work converge here into an impressive whole.

Shot in six countries across the globe, Warner Bros. spared no expense to appease the director of their top-earner The Dark Knight ; perhaps supplying Nolan with no end of large budgetary requirements to realize his very personal vision is their way of saying ‘thank you’. The location photography by Wally Pfister, Nolan’s exclusive cinematographer since Memento , captures each backdrop and immerses you in the environment. And yet strangely, the complex studio soundstage shots, namely those involving weightlessness, are just as immersive. The film has a way of using every method at its disposal, from settings realized through special effects to natural locations, to give the audience the impression that we’re ‘really there,’ because believing that becomes a crucial part of the story as the characters fall dangerously deeper into their dream state.

As much as we’re immersed in this experience visually and emotionally, composer Hans Zimmer’s score plays a vital role in bringing these characters and the various realities together. His persistent music keeps an ever-present tempo, akin to The Dark Knight ’s score, and penetrates the viewer with deep horns that seem to blast straight through, reverberating with the audience straight to the bone. Zimmer’s haunting music transcends the layers of the plot and offers an aural connective tissue for the production. But then, pinpointing all the decisive elements, such as the music, that make the film great proves impossible. So perhaps it’s best to leave a comprehensive analysis for another time and simply say this is a perfect film, Nolan’s highest masterpiece in a career teeming with little else except other masterpieces and, at the very least, other great films. With Inception , he establishes himself as one of the best directors of our time.

How rare that a blockbuster of this size results in a thinking person’s experience, filled with emotions and imagination, while also appealing to the more elementary need for thrills. This is the type of big-budget summer entertainment that could have easily reduced itself to a mere action movie, but Nolan makes Inception so much more by involving us in the fates of his fascinating characters and forcing his audience’s participation on intellectual and awe-inspiring levels. When its breezy two-and-a-half hour runtime has elapsed, the audience is left to marvel over Nolan’s production, completely ready to watch the film again as soon as possible and revel in its expert orchestration of ideas and action. To be sure, this film must be revisited, talked about, analyzed, and rewatched again and again. It will surely grow upon each viewing, but it proves instantly enthralling the first time. It’s one of the best films in recent years, and in an underwhelming year at the cinema, it’s something truly extraordinary.

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Understanding One of Christopher Nolan's Greatest Mysteries: An Analysis of 'Inception'

Studying the intricate details of films is a great way of becoming a better filmmaker, and we're definitely big fans of the work  Darren Foley  does in analyzing some of cinema's great modern films.. In yet another great film analysis, Foley breaks down Christopher Nolan's cerebral thriller about dreams within dreams within dreams. Find out how  Inception   lures its audience into their own dream state through "disorientation", as well as the subtle hints that let them know whether what they're watching is real or a dream.

[Warning: There are spoilers ahead!]

Inception  is one of those movies that most viewers have to watch more than once to understand it -- even on a base level. It   has been on my personal list of films that I wanted to really dig into and analyze if only to unravel the mystery behind and complexity of the narrative and story structure. The big questions I've heard about this film revolve around what's real and what's a dream within the diegesis.

This is one of the first aspects of the film that Foley tackles in his analysis by focusing on the presence of Cobb's wedding ring, positing that when he's wearing it, he is in fact inside a dream, and when he's not, he is in reality. This is an important claim, for two reasons:

• Cobb's trusty totem, the top, is actually a red herring that is meant to distract and fool the audience, as well as Cobb himself. The ending is indicative of this. The one thing we are told will let us know whether he's in a dream or not fails to answer the final, most pressing question: is Cobb dreaming at the end of the film? We all read and heard and argued about whether or not the top began to wiggle before the shot cut to black, but Nolan didn't give us the satisfaction of knowing for sure -- because the top wasn't the real totem.
• As the film gets deeper and deeper inside the multi-leveled dreams, it gets more difficult to follow, to where what we know about the story becomes a stack of ideas that quickly begins to tower -- teetering and swaying as we replace and rearrange our understanding as we receive new information. The wedding ring -- the audiences totem to their own "Inception" experience -- is a great visual indicator to let us know for sure if we're on the right track.

Foley touches on many aspects of Inception  to untangle its many mysteries, including how Nolan uses the titles of his films to offer the audience a clue as to what will become an important concept. In the video, Foley mentions the titles of  Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight,  and  The Dark Knight Rises  to explain that each title signifies a key concept within the narrative that you can always go back to if the maze of the story gets too confusing.

Check out Foley's analysis below, and then head on down to the comments section to discuss the intricacies of the film.

[via Must See Films ]

• What is a Red Herring? Definition and Examples ›
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Rebuilding the Film Industry, Closure, Plus a $400 Doc Short

“we’re going to have this feral resurgence of indie filmmaking".

TV is oversaturated. California is too expensive to film in. Many audiences are underserved. It’s time we indie filmmakers rebuild the film industry on our terms.

Plus, we bid farewell to a beloved host of the No Film School podcast.

In today’s episode, No Film School’s Charles Haine, GG Hawkins, Jason Hellerman, and guest Janek Ambros discuss:

• Not waiting on labs or studios to give you the green light
• The influx of people looking for jobs in the market
• Needing better streamer options for indie projects
• The benefits of serving an underserved audience
• Why the distribution process is vital
• Advice for people who think they are finished with their project
• The important reasons Charles insists on working in Davinci Resolve
• Why Charles is leaving the No Film School podcast
• The origin of the short documentary film, Ukrainians in Exile
• Why Janek wanted to keep the movie so simple and so short
• Advice for documentary filmmakers

Ukrainians in Exile : A Documentary Short Film

Follow Assembly Line Entertainment on IG

Follow Janek on X

BlueCheck Ukraine

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This episode of The No Film School Podcast was produced by GG Hawkins .

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Review of the Film 'Inception'

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