Incep­tion

Christo­pher Nolan’s film is a mon­u­ment to the awe­some pow­er of the movies, their sin­gu­lar abil­i­ty to aston­ish and amaze. Though it echoes the nar­ra­tive com­plex­i­ty of Memen­to, Nolan’s break­through hit unfold­ed by degrees into some­thing sophis­ti­cat­ed and beau­ti­ful. Incep­tion hits you all at once, a stun­ning blow that leaves you gasp­ing for air just as Leonar­do DiCaprio is left chok­ing on the shore of his own subconscious.

DiCaprio is per­fect­ly cast and utter­ly per­sua­sive as Cobb, a cor­po­rate spy – a dream thief – hired to extract infor­ma­tion from high-val­ue tar­gets. The basics of extrac­tion are revealed in a pre-cred­its sequence that involves shoot-outs, riots and earth­quakes – set­ting a tone of high­brow action spec­ta­cle that is effort­less­ly main­tained through­out the rest of this sum­mer ​‘brain­buster’.

Cobb, how­ev­er, has a secret buried deep in his own sub­con­scious. And when this con­tributes to the fail­ure of a mis­sion he is forced to assem­ble a new team to try some­thing even more dan­ger­ous than extrac­tion: incep­tion. Along­side dreamweav­ing archi­tect Ari­adne (Ellen Page), forg­er Eames (Tom Hardy), chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao), part­ner-in-crime Arthur (Joseph Gor­don-Levitt) and under the direc­tion of for­mer mark Saito (Ken Watan­abe), Cobb must plant an idea in the mind of busi­ness­man Robert Fish­er (Cil­lian Mur­phy). Only then will he be able to return home and see his kids.

Much has been made of the com­plex­i­ty of Inception’s nar­ra­tive struc­ture, and indeed, as we dis­ap­pear down a rab­bit hole of dreams with­in dreams with­in dreams, it is impor­tant to keep your eyes open and mind engaged. But as a writer, Nolan is an expert at par­celling out infor­ma­tion – giv­ing you just enough to keep you hooked but nev­er so much that you are over­whelmed. It’s fair to say that the film is heavy on exposition.

And the whole idea of dream log­ic offers the film­mak­er a get-out-of-jail-free card – just when you think both Cobb and the film have backed them­selves into a cor­ner, some new piece of the sub­con­scious is always on hand to offer a time­ly way out. But so con­trolled, so focussed and so infused with self-belief is Incep­tion, that you will hap­pi­ly be led through these lay­ers, mind buzzing, mouth agape.

Though tak­ing its cues from Michael Mann and unspool­ing like a clas­sic heist film, there are things in Incep­tion that you sim­ply haven’t seen before. The effects are on a scale that is often stag­ger­ing – not least the now-famous trail­er shot of the cityscape fold­ing in on itself. But bet­ter by far is Nolan’s expert visu­al­i­sa­tion of the film’s many action scenes, some spe­cial effects heavy (the best of which is a joy­ous zero‑G fist fight between Gor­don-Levitt and a cou­ple of heav­ies), but oth­ers that are explo­sive­ly real-world.

The film’s final 40 min­utes con­sist of one incred­i­ble extend­ed set-piece stretched out over four dif­fer­ent dream states, unfold­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and shot and edit­ed with the kind of pre­ci­sion that is beyond almost every oth­er film­mak­er work­ing today with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of James Cameron.

All the cast are superb, but Tom Hardy in par­tic­u­lar stands out for his suave con­fi­dence and elec­tric charis­ma. He looks very much like an action star for the future and could, if he want­ed it, make an excel­lent Bond.

But this, real­ly, is Nolan’s achieve­ment through and through. Ten years in the mak­ing, he has rid­den this beast all the way to the screen – and it has arrived wild, proud and unbro­ken. Inception’s world of unhinged imag­i­na­tion is spec­tac­u­lar in the truest sense. It is cin­e­ma to set a new gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers dreaming.