Inception (2010)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine etc.



-Why is it so important to dream?

-In my dreams we are still together.

Dom Kobb's (Leonardo DiCaprio) profession is this: he can invade people's dreams and steal their secrets from their subconscious. In other words, he practices the art of extraction: he inserts his self into a subject's dream and he can obtain hidden information without the subject knowing. 

He is working with his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is very good at this job. But Kobb is wanted by the police for his wife's (Marion Cotillard) death. He has run away after her death and he hasn’t seen his children since then. Now Kobb is being offered a chance to take his life back by going back home. 

The Japanese business man, Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) is making a deal with Kobb in exchange his free pass to US. He is asking from Kobb to do the reverse: not steal information but plant an idea into the subject's subconscious, which is called Inception. Saito wants to destroy Fischer's empire, a huge energy business empire who is about to rule the world. 

Now that father Fischer is dying, Saito wants to plant the idea at Fischer's son to destroy his father's business. But inception is so difficult procedure so Kobb needs to find people with special skills to recruit his team: except for Saito and Arthur, he collects a young intelligent student, Ariadne (Ellen Page) for dream designer. Her job as architect will be to design dreams and create virtual mazes for the dreamer’s subconscious to inhabit. He also offers to Eams (Tom Hardy), a former friend, a place to the team as an imitator, which means that he can imitate other people in dreams either for distraction or for stealing information. Yusuf is a local chemist who is offered to help them by giving them a very strong sedative that is needed for a three-layered dream. Although in dream-sharing, if you get killed in the dream, you just wake up, it’s not the same in this job because they go deep down in subconscious: if they get killed in this dream, they will be lost in Limbo, they will lose their minds. They have a certain time to wake up and if they don't manage to be synchronized in all the levels with the "kick", the time to wake up, they will be lost in Limbo, But they have an even more difficult problem to deal with: Kobb's wife's projection, who is keep coming in the dreams. Kobb has to choose between what is real and what is dream and where he wants to live.

Genre: Although it's said to be adventure & mystery I would put it more in Sci-fi & action genre.

My comments

Clever. Complicated. Intelligent. Thought provoking. Full of surprises. Absorbing. And I can go on forever with positive adjectives about this movie. I didn't expect anything less by Chris Nolan. The visual effects are amazing and not exaggerated so they can let the smart dialogues of the movie pop up. And let's go to the topic: performances. Well.. i have no words for Leo. Maybe I'm already positively prejudiced towards him, but again in this movie he blew me out. He is powerful, charismatic and he is doing a great job in dramatic scenes. The whole crew contains charming and talented actors. I must also say that the plot is kinda complicated and the end is confusing (this is and the beauty of the movie). Actually confusing isn’t the right word but it just leaves you with doubts about if it was a dream or reality. Many people are arguing over this and giving their proof (nothing can be proved if you think the fact that the writer himself (Nolan) didn’t take a stand on this and he wanted to leave the end of the movie open so he would make the viewers use their brain and think). What I’m saying is that it doesn’t even matter. People obsess to find out clear answers and they lose the whole point of it. This movie is amazing because it teaches you one great lesson: reality is a relative concept. Who says where the dreams stop and the reality starts? The reality you believe to be is the only reality that exists, and this is what matters. If this movie opens up your brain and leave you full of doubts about the meaning of life, and the concept of reality then it has succeeded its goals. So I totally recommend to watch it, but be sure to have a clear head and be focused to every detail so you won’t get lost.