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Inception Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (sequences of violence and action throughout) Genre: Action, Science Fiction, Thriller Theater release: July 16, 2010 by 20th Century Fox Directed by: Christopher Nolan Runtime: 2 hours 28 minutes Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Michael Caine (Miles), Cilian Murphy (Robert Fischer, Jr.), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Ken Wantanabe (Saito) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

A day or two after seeing Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated Inception, my head's still reeling. I don't think it will stop until I see it again. Once is not enough.

One thing I'm confident of: Inception is the most audacious and multifaceted Hollywood entertainment for grown-ups I've seen in years: a brainy, bravura achievement inviting comparison to the most inspired work of Hollywood visionaries from Michael Mann and Charlie Kaufman to Ridley Scott and the Wachowskis.

Some spoiler-free first impressions. One of the film's most iconic images starts with two characters sitting at a cafe in a Paris street market. One of them has an epiphany, and the next thing you know the whole street starts to explode—not like a bomb site, but like fireworks and confetti, with flying chunks of vendor wares and debris hanging in mid-air and bursting anew until every square foot of space around the characters is strewn with suspended fragments of stuff, like a snow globe. The shot, which took weeks of preparation and testing, is a mirror image of the film itself, meticulously controlled despite a superficial impression of chaos, exploding in all directions at once, bursting with creative ambition.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb

Like an even more spectacular set piece in which an entire Paris neighborhood folds over on itself, the film's narrative doubles down on itself three, four, even five times, with reality and unreality in layer under layer, like catacombs. On the surface, Inception is a glossy sci-fi caper film, an ambitious, mind-bending action thriller about an elite team of identity thieves hacking into a target's subconscious mind through shared dreams—the ultimate in identity theft.

It's also a dazzlingly virtuoso cinematic spectacle, stunningly converging in a single narrative structure a far-ranging gallery of effects and techniques at times evoking past landmarks: time-bending, gravity-defying action scenes recalling The Matrix; surreal architectural fluidity suggesting Dark City; crumbling dreamscapes reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are also more conventional set pieces, from a Bond-style commando assault on a heavily guarded mountaintop compound to a Bourne-style street chase.

Marion Cotillard as Mal

The plot is about a caper, a journey into the mind of a target carried out by a team of professional "extractors" led by Dom Cobb (Leonard DiCaprio). But it's just as much about Cobb's inner world, a multilayered reality visually represented in dream architecture by floors accessed via elevator. Inception contemplates guilt, grief and regret, and how they come to define us and our reality. Thematically, it's about the power of ideas, the power—and vulnerability—of the mind.

Philosophically, Inception invites existential and epistemological comparisons to Solaris and Eternal Sunshine with respect to how we live in relation to reality and unreality, doubt and leaps of faith, truth and memory, and other minds, as we imagine them and as they really are. Poetically, recurring images are invested with gathering weight: a pair of small children glimpsed from behind as they dart away; a tiny spinning top; blowing curtains; the surf crashing on a beach; a vault door; a hospital bed.

On one meta-level, Inception is a movie about moviemaking, about the process of creating illusory worlds and narratives that seem real to others. But it's also very much about the relationship between the screen world and the viewer, to a greater extent than any recent Hollywood film I can think of. "Everyone wants catharsis," one character observes in relation to plotting the caper. Nolan, plotting the film, is aware that the audience desires catharsis. Will we get it? On what terms will we accept it? Is illusory catharsis as good as the real thing?

Ellen Page as Ariadne

The joy of invention runs through the film as Nolan takes his premise from one startling extrapolation to another, seamlessly running together the reality and popular mythology of dreams. The association of falling or dying in a dream with waking up is juxtaposed with the common experience of physical sensations (such as being cold or hearing sounds) manifesting in the dream world. The saw of time in dreams being compressed or telescoped is startlingly combined with the notion of "dreams within dreams." Then there's the experience of lucid dreaming and the unsettling awareness of other people in dreams as projections of one's own mind—and with it the sickening sense of a nightmare foe who seems to know what you're thinking and can match you move for move, because you're actually up against your own subconscious.

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