Inception DVD+Blu-ray

It's impossible not to be immersed within Christopher Nolan's intricate brain teaser that plays out like a blockbuster as devised by Jorge Luis Borges. Milo Wakelin reviews.

Inception is a high-tech heist movie set within the intimate world of dreams, where teams of stony-faced ‘Extractors’ invade their victims’ sleep to purloin high-value business secrets from their subconscious. These dream worlds take the form of labyrinthine cityscapes, full of architectural paradoxes, in which a careless traveller could become lost forever.

In Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), a superhero story played out as a multi-layered drama across a sprawling metropolis, while in Memento (2000), one man’s struggle to regain his memory and avenge his wife’s murder was inscribed in the notes and diagrams tattooed across his body. Inception unites the epic and the intimate – the action is set within vast, teeming cities in which the mind is king, but where personal demons emerge to throw meticulously laid plans into chaos.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an expert Extractor, who is hired, not to steal information, but to plant an idea in the mind of the son of a man’s business rival. To do this, he must recruit Ariadne, a skilled young ‘architect’, to build a series of dream worlds that will strip away different layers of the man’s subconscious. But Cobb’s memories of his wife Mal constantly intrude on his work, threatening his grasp on reality and his assignment’s success.

Inception is immaculately constructed, with each element engineered to the precision of a time-piece, and it is impossible but to be impressed by Nolan’s sheer directorial prowess as he depicts multiple sequences, told in different time scales, without ever losing the sense of the story.

Cobb and Mal’s relationship recalls something of Tarkovsky’s Solaris in which an astronaut is forced to constantly re-live a doomed affair with his suicidal wife, and Marion Cotillard’s chilling intensity dominates every scene. DiCaprio delivers another strong performance which edges, ever further, into Brando territory.

Shot on location across the US and Europe, the film keeps special effects to a minimum. Nolan steers clear of Gilliam-esque fantasy or Matrix-style computer-generated kitsch. Instead, Inception’s dreamscapes are depicted with a crisp, lucid realism. This intelligent, engrossing film is a well- tailored cut above standard blockbuster fare. Milo Wakelin

Milo Wakelin on 21st October 2010
Author of 105 reviews