Inception (2010)

It's hard to really give a thorough description of what Inception is about, but here's the most basic ingredient to understanding how complex it is: Imagine the Matrix. Now imagine that there was a Matrix inside that Matrix. And possibly another one inside that one. You kind of get the head trip that Inception is about to take you on.

The movie concerns that which is most precious to movies: dreams. Movies realize our greatest dreams and greatest fantasies, and Inception is a movie to challenge all those notions. Here is the reason we go to the cinema: to see things we've never seen before, to experience thrills that we've never dreamed of. A Trip to the Moon was a modern marvel in 1902, and I'm happy to report that in a summer full of sequels, reboots, and whatever else, Christopher Nolan has delivered what could very well turn out to be his best movie.

I say could because I'm not sure of the movie's greatness yet. But it is a movie that, once over, immediately warrants a repeat viewing because you want to go back, knowing what you now know, and reconstruct the movie from there. Repeat viewings, as is true for all movies, test whether something is truly a masterpiece. For now, I will say Inception is one of the best of the year and maybe that opinion will change later on.

The movie is about a specialized group of people who steal ideas from other people's dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, one of the best in this field, along with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I won't even begin trying to explain how this process, known as "extraction," exactly works, and I won't even delve too far into the concept of Inception except to say, it is the opposite of an extraction.

Marion Cotillard is also in this movie, as Leo's wife, and she has a stare that terrifies the shit out of you. There's also Ellen Page, who doesn't know how this stuff works and so serves as our entry point into the whole idea of the dream world. Her job is to construct the reality of the dream so that the subject doesn't realize there are other "dreamers" there.

Nolan, who is the sole writing credit on this one (usually his brother Jonathan collaborates, but this one was maybe to intricate for Nolan to lay out for him on paper), proves how adept he is at juggling multiple story lines. This movie is the perfect study of parallel editing over the course of an hour to build tension so high that you are about to burst at the seams with craziness just wanting it to all end.

Undoubtedly there will be several knockoffs of this film down the line, but we will weather them. People will try to be as brilliant as Nolan, but few if any will succeed. He is working on a whole new level, way ahead of the rest of his competition, and inventing the curve. Did I understand Inception? Yes. Can I explain it? Yes, but it would take far too much time to lay out, and honestly, you should just go see it. It's a movie that has to be experienced, it cannot simply be explained.