Inception

**** stars

Thank you Inception, for reviving the movie industry.

Before this visually exhilarating masterpiece, this year of movies was dead on arrival. Not only will this film take your dreams and show them to you, it feels almost guaranteed that no other film will come close to matching Inception’s emotional complexity, at least this year anyway. This is the movie event of the moment, the most satisfying film of the year, and an instant classic of the sci-fi genre. It’s James Bond plus The Matrix, with a pinch of Stanley Kubrick, and thrown into a blender controlled by Christopher Nolan.

Leonardo Dicaprio amazes me. He’s been on an absolute roll (including this year’s Shutter Island) and there’s no stopping him here as Dom Cobbs, a professional subconscious extractor who steals peoples dreams by breaking into them. During the dream state, the mind is at its most vulnerable, and Cobb has nearly perfected his skilled thief ability. However, he is running from his past after a job in corporate espionage turned him into an international fugitive. Losing his wife in the process, Mal (played remarkably by Marion Cotillard), Cobb must take one final job to get his life back.

Alright, that’s the basics. Well, then again, there are no basics when it comes to Inception. Whether or not you understand the plot is irrelevant. There are dozens of scenarios going on at once, and it is the viewer’s choice to decide which one they want to follow. It doesn’t matter which one. They all have one hell of a payoff. You could follow Cobb’s tragic story of losing his loved one. You can take the journey with Cobb and his dream team of specialists where instead of pulling off a heist to steal an idea, their task is to plant one in someone else’s mind (aka Inception). Or even follow the layers of a dream and how the deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes of ever coming out of one.

There has always been a beauty to Christopher Nolan’s screenplays. There is more to see than meets the eye. There is more to feel than meets the heart. There is more to dream than meets the mind. Inception sneaks into your thoughts and ignores any request of extraction.

Dicaprio and Cotillard are on fire, and with the combination of them and an A-list cast including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy, there’s a certain maturity to this film that moviegoers these days can only seem to dream of. Luckily for us, the dream is real. If someone told me that there was a film out there that could possibly reach the blockbuster heights of The Dark Knight, I’d say that only Christopher Nolan would be able to do it. He may have just done it. Maybe I’ll know for sure after a necessary second or third viewing.

In the words of my friend Vincent Pisacane, “Inception saves the summer from all the shitastic shit that came out before it.” Amen, Vince. Amen.