I’m a bit behind on my movies, so I didn’t see Inception until it showed up on HBO this weekend. I was a little wary of it since it had such great reviews and I was worried that it couldn’t live up to the hype. Now, I”ve been a Christopher Nolan fan since Memento. I enjoyed The Dark Knight, but was disappointed by Batman Begins*. So I jumped head first into Inception and was somewhat surprised.


*Why did everyone seem to like Batman Begins? It’s a cut rate poorly made Batman: Year One and, for some idiotic reason, Nolan kept up the stupid tradition of Batman pulling his mask off for every cute girl that wandered by. Half of Gotham City probably knows his identity now.

Inception starts in a dream (truly more of a dream within a dream) and we are introduced to the basic concept (a group of people go into someone’s dream to steal some information from their mind) and the cast headed by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as the main con men trying to steal a secret from Saito (Ken Watanabe).

Saito then contacts Cobb and proposes a much bigger deal. Saito will get Cobb’s arrest warrant in the US erased in exchange for doing an Inception, planting an idea into someone to make it seem like it’s their own. In this case, Saito wants the son of a competitor to sell the business he will inherit and it has to seem like it’s his own idea. Arthur claims it’s impossible, but Cobb has his own reasons to believe it isn’t. Through Cobb’s father (Michael Caine) they recruit a helper Ariadne (Ellen Page) to design the dream levels, a chemist((Dileep Rao) to make sure that the son (Cillian Murphy) sleeps long enough and a forger (Tom Hardy) to help out.

But the mission is threatened because of Cobb’s late wife who is haunting his dreams and causing their well-planned mission to go off course. The plan is to put the son into a dream within a dream within a dream and that is where the challenge of the movie comes in. How can Nolan keep four levels of consciousness (three dream and one reality) straight for the viewer. He does this by using different locations, clothing and color schemes for each level, so it is obvious to the viewer where they are without having to think about it too much.

Nolan has a complicated plot and visual palette to manage and his script and direction keeps it all straight for the viewer. The story itself (besides the normal twists and turns) is fairly mediocre. I was expecting the basic plot to be much better than it was. But the plot was good enough to be buoyed by the ideas and the acting and the special effects. It was a fun movie that seems more confusing than it really is and makes dream sequences not as bad as TV and movies usually make them. Overall it’s a well done effort by Nolan who introduced us to new technology, the rules, the characters and the layers of reality while making it seem effortless. Other writers and directors should be taking notes on how to construct a movie. But, on some level, I was expecting more. I don’t know if it was all the great reviews I had seen or just my expectations from Nolan’s previous work, but, while I enjoyed the movie, it never struck me as being a great movie. I’m still a huge Nolan fan and am planning on seeing his new movies (Batman and non-Batman). Recommended.