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Inception (2010)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Time Out rating

Average user rating

151 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Funny things, dreams. Fascinating for the dreamer, but as dull as a late morning in Slough for anybody else, unless, of course, your guide is Freud. Or, as it turns out, Christopher Nolan, the 39-year-old British director of ‘Memento’ and ‘The Dark Knight’, whose solution to the boredom of other people’s dreams is to collide their woozy, ever-changing, upside-down and roundabout nature with the thrust of a fast-paced, men-on-a-mission movie and a startling visual language that mirrors their strangeness. Better still, the dreams preferred by Nolan include images of Paris folding in on itself and a trackless train thundering through a city. The limited, sleepworld excitements of retaking your A levels ad infinitum or forever missing a flight at the airport don’t figure here.

Nolan throws a perfect storm of stunts, effects, locations and actors at one big idea: that it’s possible to pilfer ideas from dreams by a process called ‘extraction’, which involves hooking yourself up to a drip, falling asleep and entering the world of the subconscious. The holy grail of this process is to reverse it, which is ‘inception’, the planting of a new idea in another’s mind. That’s the trick that experts Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), aided by new recruits Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Eames (Tom Hardy), try to pull off while hopping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa. They’re working for Saito (Ken Watanabe) in pursuit of business magnate Robert (Cillian Murphy), and their motives vary, from financial to intellectual. But DiCaprio has another driver: the memory of his wife Mal (Marion Cottilard) is haunting him and it’s going to take a lot of psychological spring-cleaning for him to reconnect with that lost world.

All hail Nolan for mastering a higher class of mass entertainment. Like all good science fiction, ‘Inception’ demands we pay serious attention to pure fantasy on the back of strong ideas and exquisite craft – but it also combines fantasy with real observations about our sleeping lives. Like a dream, Nolan’s film fades swiftly in the light – but while it lasts, it feels like there’s nothing more important to decipher.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2082: 15-21 July, 2010

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User reviews of this film

USA said...

Posted on Oct 13 2011 23:00 tnxxxx great post

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USA said...

Posted on Oct 13 2011 16:00 mmm pizza

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USA said...

Posted on Sep 30 2011 07:05 tnxxxx great post

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Vercantos said...

Posted on Sep 14 2011 14:20 An amazing movie I loved the actors on here where they acted like it was really happening IT WAS AWESOME keep it up!

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USA said...

Posted on Aug 05 2011 16:45 aTqPrQ thanx joe

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cholas said...

Posted on Jul 12 2011 09:20 After watching this film it disturbs me to think that people managed to escape from the lunatic asylum to make a film assisted by perfectly sane people.
Special effects were good .

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Cactus Flower said...

Posted on Jun 24 2011 19:58 Astonishingly good and really enjoyable, too. I'm amazed at the negative comments on this film. It's the best film I've seen by far in a long, long time. I had to watch it twice within a few days just because (a) it was so good I wanted to watch it again and (b) I knew there was going to be some pieces of plot I hadn't picked up first time around. A bit of a cross between the Matrix and James Bond, but not really like either, it's a really fantastic ride and gives your brain a workout too. What a clever film and what a brilliant director. The cast are superb as well.

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Caracal said...

Posted on Jun 06 2011 16:43 Absolutely brilliant! An ingenious plot never letting you relax. I was always on the edge of my seat. This is not the film to see if you like uncomplicated plots. This is a film you cannot not see, a must see. The ending was the best ending I've seen in a film. It left you thinking about it a long time after the film was finished! Amazing! One of the best films I've seen!

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davidthenomad said...

Posted on Apr 20 2011 16:38 I haven't watched it yet, but am very aprehensive of the extreme conflicting views. Loved it or Hated it - nothing in the middle. Let's see.....................?

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Robert Thornton said...

Posted on Mar 11 2011 12:01 Just watched on DVD, very poor quality at the start. I am just not impressed by special effects as I think they detract from the story and in most cases they are an addition for those that can’t appreciate a film without them. Nowadays a blockbuster must have them. To me the effects were padding which added to the confusion of the story and added at least an hour to this over long film. To understand it fully would require another viewing but I am not that interested in wading through most of it to get to the relevant bits. I really got bored with the endless snow scenes and couldn’t understand what was going on. DiCaprio seems always to be DiCaprio, exactly as he was in Shutter Island, at times Watanabe was not understandable. Not really impressed.

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Jason E said...

Posted on Mar 01 2011 03:00 “One star idiots?” An interesting terminology for the clear thinking people that thought Inception was a miserable unengaging mess. I am starting to see a pattern here amongst the I-got-Inception crowd who feel superior to anyone else in the knowledge that they were able to successfully negotiate Nolan’s pretentious, absurd and seemingly empty, hollow nonsense.

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funkoxen said...

Posted on Feb 27 2011 23:57 please dont listen to the one star idiots. This is simply oneof the best films of the last ten years. Its a little heavy and convoluted in places but visually amazing and incredibly stylish, smart and atmospheric, the soundtrack alone is worth the admition. The most talented british director currently working comes of age.
criminally underated by all the awards but thats what you get for being unique. i happens to all the best films actualy.

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Deec said...

Posted on Feb 21 2011 20:56 This film was ok but the whole idea was a little far fetched for my liking however having said that, when my laptop ran out of battery 20 mins before the end, i couldnt get the plug in fast enough to see what happened.

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akhila said...

Posted on Jan 24 2011 18:59 I think the film was harder to follow than it really needed to be.Don,t think the basic premise was that complicated,but it still seemed to confuse most people i know who saw it,including me.Potentially a good film but didn,t sustain my interest.

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Arthur said...

Posted on Jan 23 2011 10:04 Absolute tosh - terrible script that is suitably hammed up (hollywood style) - truly irresponsible and monstrous to spend so lavishly on such psuedo pretentious bollocks.

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