Inception

Whoops, don't know how I let this review slip by when I first saw it, but having seen it again it's fresh on my mind and time to spit this out.

As my dad remarked when the credits rolled, "That was like watching the Matrix for the first time." And boy is he right, if the feeling you got from watching the Matrix for the first time was "THAT WAS AWESOME".

Inception takes us into a kind of parallel reality where people's dreams can be infiltrated and searched for precious information by skilled professionals. We start the movie with Leo Dicaprio washed up on shore, unconscious, being prodded by a military person with a large temple looking structure in the distance. He is brought before a very old Ken Watanabe, who seems to remember him from a distant past. Skip backwards in time and enter Cobb (Leo) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), two professionals who we quickly learn have infiltrated the mind of a now much younger Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) under the pretense that they are actually trying to help him fortify his dreams against intruders. Yet despite the sudden youth of Saito, Cobb looks the same age...

From that point on, it's hard to say anything without ruining the whole experience of the movie. Saito catches Cobb in the dream and reveals it was a test, and asks him instead of extracting an idea from his target to plant one, a process known as inception. Arthur says it can't be done, but Cobb seems to think otherwise. Soon Cobb is gathering together a team of professionals, each with their own specialization, to put together an amazingly complex plan to plant the smallest seed of an idea in Robert Fischer's (Cilian Murphy) mind: break up your father's company.

Think of it like Ocean's 11 meets the Matrix with a dash of James Bond. Once the action gets rolling and reality gets so twisted that you forget where the dream ends and where reality begins, you just have to stare in wonder as all of it passes before your eyes. Inception uses the concept that 5 minutes in the real world can mean an hour or more in dream time, which leads to its masterpiece when you begin to realize that the last half of the movie actually takes place within something like 10 seconds.

It's literally impossible to know or understand everything that happens in Inception, and I like it that way. It remains just as amorphous, as simple and as complex as a dream itself. By the end it doesn't matter what is a dream and what isn't, what matters is the journey that has happened along the way. And that journey is carried by such a strong cast on all sides (especially the amazingly creepy Marion Cotillard) that you can't help but be swept up right along with them. It's an amazingly complex and creative film, and deserves to be seen by everyone.

Inception gets a 10/10.