Review: Inception

This review may be slightly after the event but in order to do Christopher Nolan’s latest justice I felt a second viewing was required. Points may have been elucidated and the plot may be slightly clearer but overall Inception is still beautifully, tantilisingly hard to pin down. It take stones to make Batman movies replete with reference to US foreign policy and the problems of torture but it takes medicine sized balls to feed a cerebral, original blockbuster on the scale of Inception to the multiplex going public.

A plot summary usually fills this place in a review but it would prove pointless here. Go and see it. Stay as far away from spoilers and reviews as possible. Go to an empty screening at some godforsaken time in the middle of the day. Sit in the middle of the biggest, darkest, loudest screen you can and simply enjoy it. Take someone with you – Jesus knows you will both need each other to fill in the blanks afterwards. That isn’t to say that Inception is confusing. Confusing is an adjective that should only be attached to shoddily made, poorly thought out affairs – the film is neither. Complex, challenging, intricate it may be but everything in the labyrinthe that Nolan creates makes absolute sense.

Ostensibly it is a film about dreams that is in equal parts indebted to Sigmund Freud and Michael Mann for its intellect and action sequences respectively. Leonardo DiCaprio is superlative in the central role as tortured corporate espionage type Dom Cobb. It is a testament to the esteem that Nolan is currently held in that the cream of the young talent in Hollywood is there to support him including a solid but under-used Joseph Gordon- Levitt and a sublime Tom Hardy. It is Hardy’s dry wit that almost steals the show but the films central performer is it’s very premise. The central idea is incredible but the main triumph is Nolan’s ability to thread this together with an authentic emotional sub plot that genuinely makes you care for his well drawn protaganists.

So thematically it is genius, emotionally it keeps you interested and then there is the small matter of action sequences. Action alone cannot bind a film together but when drama of the heft that Nolan is creating is interspersed with zero gravity fist fights and razor sharp snow sport shoot outs then they become something more – they add to the film and are part of the narrative instead of becoming excuses for someone to shoot the shit out of something.

It is hard not to descend into hyperbole when describing Inception, as no doubt I have done in this review. Despite this I defy anyone to see it and not be astounded it by the originality of it’s ideas and the scope of it’s ambition. Each of the two showings I have now been to have been packed out. A film as difficult as this should not be drawing the multiplex hoardes that it has. Christopher Nolan has peformed a rare alchemy in taking his uncompromised vision and making it with mass appeal. That is the mark of a special film maker and it can only be good for the future of clever, beautiful cinema.