Dominic Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) sees a lot more action than your average white-collar criminal. Why? Because the setting for his thefts is the subconscious, where everyone's secrets may be laid bare. Trouble is, no matter whose dream Cobb is breaking into, his own deep dark secret - a dangerous lost love - keeps getting in the way. When Cobb's team takes the biggest assignment of their lives, their new architect (Ariadne, played by Ellen Page), in charge of designing the layout of the dream, may endanger the job with her curiosity - or perhaps she'll save Cobb from himself after all.
Everything you've been told about Inception is wrong. Okay, not everything - I'm just being a bit overdramatic - but this film keeps getting billed as a mind bending psychological thriller. It's not. It's an action movie. It's an action movie with a gorgeous, indulgent backdrop of expansive dream-scapes, made tangible partially due to director Christopher Nolan's preference for real sets over CG. An action movie with a cast good enough to instill a lifeless script full of stock characters with real depth. An action movie rich in imagery, with carefully designed lighting and color palettes. Its strength is that it believes in itself, in its own complete fantasy of a premise, with the gravitas required for the audience to suspend disbelief.
...Well, sort of. Because Inception dreams are not like your dreams or mine. They are lush, on a larger-than-life scale. They have more or less complete internal coherency, interrupted only by big stuff - explosions, freight trains, entire armies. What happened to the dreams I know, where individual identities shift and reform? And why does everyone's secret always appear in a really obvious place? (There may be an explanation for this one in-movie. Maybe.) In-movie, the further you go into someone's subconscious, into dreams within dreams, the larger amount of time passes within the dream. This completely falls apart when you realize that dreams actually only seem to involve a large time scale because the dreamer fill in the gaps in the dream. Well, okay, you say, maybe that's just not how dreams work in this universe - but unfortunately, they do, because one of Cobb's tricks for determining whether he's in a dream is trying to remember how he got to where he currently is. An actual knowledge of dreams completely shatters the plot and the premise of this film. Enjoyment will hinge on how much you can sit back, ignore reality, allow for the probably 30 minutes' worth of unnecessary action sequences, and just enjoy the fun story and the big shiny scenery.
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