So are you dreaming, are you awake? When you woke up this morning did you really wake up or find yourself in a dream within a dream....
Basically that's what Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie is all about. He plays Cobb, a thief with a special ability to enter people's dreams and steal information for clients. However, when he's hired to do the opposite and plant rather than remove information, called inception, it all gets a bit complicated, as if it wasn't already.
Basically Dom Cobb and his team (including Juno's Ellen Page) have to get into the head of the son of a multi-millionaire businessman and try to persuade him to disband his father's company. To do that they need to go deep within different levels of dreams, risking dying there which would mean ending up in a kind of mental no-man's land, unable to wake up. In addition to surviving in someone else's imagination, Cobb must also face his own demons which have a nasty habit of following him into other people's heads.
I remember the days of student film-making where the 'dream-within a dream' scenario was really frowned upon. 'It was all just a dream' is usually the ultimate cop-out in stories (remember Bobbie Ewing and the aliens in Dallas?) but somehow here it pretty much works.
Admittedly it's all very confusing to begin with and any explanations given by the characters about various plot points don't stand up to much scrutiny. You also risk giving yourself a migraine if you try and over-analyse what's going on. If you can suspend disbelief for almost two and a half hours (yup it is that long) then it's a frantic and enjoyable roller-coaster ride.
The special effects and action sequences are breath-taking and it's all trying very hard to be clever and more-or-less succeeds, visually anyway. It's directed by Christopher Nolan who also brought us The Dark Knight which should give you an idea of the feel and look of the film. There's a great cast including 'blink and you'll miss him' roles from Michael Caine and Pete Postlewaite who does the best on-screen 'dead face' ever. Tom Berenger, Marion Coulthard, Ken Watanabee and Cillian Murphy are also there and the leads do a good job although Ellen Page seems a bit out of place at times. It's one of those stories that has the potential to be either very good or very bad and could go either way until the last few minutes of the movie. It's only at the very end that I decided I really liked it. At the risk of spoilers, it is the last few seconds of the film that clinched it for me. Some people are calling this the movie of the year. I wouldn't go that far but it is definitely the movie of the month and, if it wasn't for the fabulous Toy Story 3, might even have been my favourite movie of the summer.
