It’s not often a mainstream film comes out of Hollywood with such wellformed and thought out science fictions ideas, in fact they are increasingly rare in the modern day dumb-it-down-for-simplified-american-audiences era. This only serves to make Inception, the latest film from director Christopher Nolan (Dark Knight), an even greater delight and easily one of the best sci-fi films to date.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, an “extractor” of people’s memories from their very psyches. A fugitive from the law, he takes on one last job to perform the most dangerous of missions, to plant the very essence of an idea in a mind. What follows is a journey through multiple layers of dreams within dreams, until reality itself begins to fold in around the central characters.

Inception assumes a level of intelligence on its audience’s part, technology is left unspoken, actions are not explained in small words and the overall result is a very smart thriller. It demonstrates the best form of science fiction, one in which the very technology itself becomes a transparent medium through which the actual story is told. What’s left is a heart-pounding story with equal parts action and thinking.

The ensemble cast fit together very, very well with a very sharp script to move things along. It’s also worth pointing out that the special effects themselves are worth going to see the film for. From hotel corridors that actually rotate (no CGI here), to entire streets exploding in slow motion, the special effects are simply superb and never once push the film towards the realm of “it looks good, but there’s no way that could happen”.

In closing, Inception takes the very best parts of other films in its genre such as The Matrix and Primer (two amazing films in their own right) and merges them to create something wholly original and unique. To watch Inception is to invite doubt about the very nature of reality and the things that inhabit it. This is one movie that should definitely be watched multiple times.

My rating: 10/10