Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan

(PG-13)

***

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Inception is a “conceptual tour de force,” said Justin Chang in Variety. Proving he is “one of Hollywood’s most inventive dreamers,” writer-director Christopher Nolan conjures up a metaphysical puzzle that takes audiences on a mind-bending trip through his characters’ psyches. “Set in the labyrinth of the subconscious,” the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, a man who makes his living sneaking into other people’s minds, shaping their dreams and stealing their ideas—until a wealthy industrialist (Ken Watanabe) asks Cobb and his team to implant an idea rather than extract one from the head of a rival businessman (Cillian Murphy).

Inception combines the fastidiously engineered puzzles of his breakthrough brain-twister Memento with the mad chaos of his blockbuster hit The Dark Knight, said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. A “rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels,” the heady thriller weaves multiple complicated subplots that make us question the difference between reality and illusion. In doing so, Nolan’s film “exemplifies the best kind of filmmaking, unchained from the laws of time, space, and even gravity, but never from the most basic rules of narrative.”

Actually Nolan did forget one basic rule: Create characters the audience actually cares about, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Nolan doesn’t give Cobb a “rich enough inner life” to keep us invested, even when he’s unexpectedly forced to confront demons erupting from his own subconscious. Nolan’s conception of how our brains work turns out to be “too literal, too logical, too rule-bound” to fully re-create the “supremely unruly place” that is the human mind, and ultimately he’s “too timid” a filmmaker to grapple with the serious philosophical questions he raises.

Still, let’s applaud him for the attempt, said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Inception proves to be a thrilling head trip, thanks mostly to a director whose intelligence and visual sophistication place him “among our most persuasive contemporary fantasists.” In this summer of disappointing blockbusters, what could feel more satisfying than a movie with “large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom”?