Inception 

• Warner Bros.
• Inception

Christopher Nolan is nothing if not a filmmaker who demands that you wrestle with ideas. Now, that doesn't mean bowing down to him as pop-culture's answer to Socrates; he's too gifted a showman to make it all about dissecting his koans. But for a decade, Nolan has built a body of work out of how we define our identity and our reality: the self-created memory of Memento; the existential magic trick at the climax of The Prestige; Batman's surrender to what people need to believe in The Dark Knight. Inception finds him again in that familiar territory—and the result is something almost as thrilling to contemplate as it is to watch.

Those who prefer their tabulas entirely rasa may want to exit now, because here's the setup: In an unspecified future, the technology exists for people to enter one another's dreams. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), once a researcher into the technology, has (for initially unclear reasons) become a fugitive, supporting himself as a corporate spy stealing business ideas from the subconscious of executives. But one powerful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), offers Cobb a chance to re-claim his life if he can pull off a harder trick than stealing an idea from the mind of his chief competitor, Fischer (Cillian Murphy): planting one there.

It takes most of Inception's first hour to introduce its characters and the complex rules of its mindscape universe, which could have made for a long slog. Nolan proves too crafty to fall into that trap, allowing his exposition to unfold in a purely visual context that allows us to discover what we need to know along with Cobb's newest team member, Ariadne (Ellen Page). The same approach provides the opportunity to unfold Cobb's crucial, tangled back story, including the events that led to his exile and the role of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who keeps showing up unbidden during his jobs. Considering how much raw information Nolan needs to unloadÑand how easy it would have been to lose momentum, and the audience, during that time—Inception proves remarkably nimble at getting us to the payoff.

And what a payoff it is. The trip into Fischer's head that comprises the final hour-plus of Inception—involving Cobb and his team members, also including his long-time partner (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) and a master "forger" of other personalities (Tom Hardy)—turns into a bravura, jaw-dropping, extended set piece that's astonishing on nearly every possible level. As pure action, it delivers crunching chases, snowmobile pursuits and one gravity-defying fistfight that becomes the final smackdown to every other pretender to the Matrix throne. As imaginative visual showpiece, it gives you a world where stairways bend in Escher-esque directions and a train can come hurtling down a city street. And as an exercise in multilevel storytelling, it should become one for the film-studies textbooks, as Nolan and his editor Lee Smith often find themselves juggling four concurrent cliffhanger plotlines. For more than an hour, Inception maintains a level of breath-holding tension that simply doesn't seem possible.

That should be enough for any movie-lover to ask for—but Nolan gives us more. The emotional weight he adds to Cobb's tale pushes Inception to another level, one in which questions about the way we shape our reality balance the pure adrenaline excitement. It's not necessary to see Nolan's philosophizing as earth-shaking; it does tread into notions he already explored in Memento, and does so with less potency than the simple gee-whiz moments. But, Nolan continues to succeed at what most big-budget filmmakers never even bother to try: trusting that our cinematic sense of wonder doesn't have to be disconnected from our brains. Even if you now know a little about what Inception is about, you don't even know the half of it.

INCEPTION

Scott Renshaw:

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