Cobb is a thief who can enter people’s dreams and steal ideas aka Extraction.  He is hired by a powerful man named Saito who says he can clear Cobb’s name so he can go home to be with his kids.  Saito wants Cobb to implant an idea (it’s called Inception) in the head of the son of a businessman.  The idea is to get the son to break up his father’s powerful energy company.   Cobb assembles his team and many on his team think Inception is impossible (but Cobb says he has done it once).   When in the dream worlds, Cobb is plagued by the projection of his dead wife, Mal, who can sabotage his missions.

INCEPTION is an absolute amazing head trip.  It creates a dreamscape with rules that shouldn’t be broken and dream levels that affects other levels if you’re in someone else’s dream.  The visuals are stunning in dreamscapes as other levels can effect deeper levels (one part has a hotel in zero-G).   Nolan even looks at the little details like each dreamer has a token that others can’t touch because the token is the one object that tells them they are in a dream.  He inserts rules for the dream world like the subconscious attacking the people who change reality too much in the dreams and people being trained to fight those who try to extract ideas from their minds.  INCEPTION is a cerebral sci-fi caper film that makes you question what is reality and what would you do to get back to the ones you love (or to experience dreams that seem more real than the real world).

The assault on a fortress (high up in snowy mountains) near the end make me think director Christopher Nolan would make a great choice to direct a James Bond movie (Nolan even said recently he would love to direct a Bond movie).   Nolan sustains the last hour with momentum that never lets up as it flips between different levels of the dream world.    Nolan has been on a streak of great movies beginning with BATMAN BEGINS continuing up to INCEPTION.   The movie is definitely one of the best movies of 2010- an easy one for the top ten list.    Definitely, it is a film worth seeing more than once (even if it is just for the visuals).

SPECIAL FEATURES:

I bought the 3 disc Blu-ray/ DVD combo with the shooting script book from Best Buy.  The DVD has no extras in the combo pack except for the digital copy.   The shooting script book has the complete shooting script in addition to the director being interviewed by his brother (sometime screenwriting collaborator) Jonathan, storyboards for certain scenes, production art, original script outline, and specs on the dream machine).   It is definitely a book to own if you want to go deeper into the film

The Blu-ray has an assortment of extras split up into Extraction Mode, Dreams: Cinema Of The Subconscious, soundtrack selections from Hans Zimmer’s score in 5.1, art galleries, trailers/ TV spots, and an animated comic prequel (INCEPTION: THE COBOL JOB).

The regular one disc DVD not in the combo pack has four making-of featurettes (The Inception of Inception (3:23), The Japanese Castle: The Dream is Collapsing (3:32), Disintegration of the Paris Cafe (3:09), The Freight Train (3:04)

FINAL ANALYSIS:   INCEPTION is one of the best films of 2010 and one of my favorites.  It is an imaginative dream heist flick that has action, sci-fi, and themes straight out of a Phillip K. Dick novel.   Watch it now if you haven’t seen it.  Watch it again if you have to see what you may have missed or enjoyed about INCEPTION.

This DVD review is ©12-10-2010 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to lord_pragmagtic@hotmail.com