Inception

Christopher Nolan is a strange breed of director. For his relatively brief career, he has managed to make a string of films that with each release get bigger and better than the one before, without ever losing sight of compelling storytelling or indulging in mindless excess. Every frame has a purpose, no line of dialogue is a throwaway, and nearly every character has enough weight that they aren't simply cardboard cutouts floating in the breeze. This is not to say he's a perfect filmmaker, but to paraphrase The Dark Knight, he's the kind of director we deserve, and the kind Hollywood needs.

From the score accompanying the opening studio logos to the end credits, Inception assaults your brain and dares you to think differently. It also demands you pay strict attention to what's being done and said, as looking away for even a moment could leave you lost in Limbo. This is refreshing as explains everything it needs to - which, granted, is a lot - and gives you the benefit of the doubt in assuming you can keep up, while there also lurks the danger of overestimating the audience and trying to be too clever. The good news is that Inception is incredibly clever, but never so clever it starts taunting you, save for one instance which I will not discuss here - but it works so well that nothing will feel better to you as a moveigoer than the feeling of frustration and disappointment mixed with elation with which you'll leave the theater.

If I have any complaints about the film, it's that it sometimes relies a little heavily on exposition, but these nitpicks are null for two reasons: one, the events being explained probably could not have been told solely with images, and two, the exposition works because of the earnestness of the actors. As strange and ridiculous as everything that happens in this film is, it is made believable - first because of Ellen Page's Ariadne, the closest thing to a character taking the journey right along with the audience, as she's walked through the process of "dream architecture" in one of the film's many amazing visual sequences - and second because of Dom and his team, notably Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy, whose confidence and ingenuity tell us they've done this stuff before, it is happening now, and if they mess this up, bad things will happen.

The bulk of the film is like one extended heist sequence, and is so heavily layered that your own imagination will feel jealous. The rules of the game are constantly changing, and outside influences are a constant factor. Take for instance the insane hotel sequence, in which the environment's gravity is treated like the inside of a shaken snowglobe. As a van tumbles down a hill with our dreaming heroes inside, Gordon-Levitt's Arthur tumbles with security guards in a hallway melee that takes them from the floor to the ceiling and back again. That someone conceived of a scene like this and then proceeded to make it look this damn good is simply astounding.

Inception is indeed a treat for the mind, but this makes it somewhat lacking as far as emotional payoffs. A payoff it does supply, however, through the story surrounding Marion Cotillard's hallucinatory Mol, an unexpected antagonist whose presence was increasingly difficult to decipher, even when Dom calls her out for what she really is; is she simply a reminder of a terrible mistake that Dom left for himself, or a real, measurable remnant of the real Mol trapped inside Dom's mind? This lends itself more to the intellectual than emotional, I'll admit, but it is again the credibility of the performances that sell this.

This is easily the best film I've seen in 2010. Inception is smart, good-looking, memorable, original, and is sure to mess with a few dreams. Seeing it is the best idea possible; you just won't be sure whose idea it really was.