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15th Jul 2010

Review: Inception

The first five star review since JOE.ie started clogging up the internet back in April has arrived. It's called Inception, and it'll make your brain hurt.

JOE

perfect

It’s taken six long months, but finally the first genuine blockbuster of the year has arrived. What with all the remakes and re-imaginings filling our screens of late, writer director Christopher Nolan’s ORIGINAL film Inception has arrived just in time to save summer.

So get your brain in gear, hand the popcorn to your girlfriend and prepare to be blown away with a film that reminds us all just what going to the cinema is all about.

Leonardo Di Caprio plays Cobb, the leader of a team of infiltrators who specialise in breaking into the minds of important people and stealing ideas without the victim ever knowing they were there.

After convincing Japanese billionaire Saito (Ken Watanabe) that it is indeed possible to steal an idea, Cobb and his team are tasked them with the near-impossible mission of placing an idea in the mind of an adversary.  What follows is a race against time to break in to the most secure place in the universe, the human mind.

Christopher Nolan (Dark Knight) in one of the most important directors working today… fact. No other director (Senor Spielbergo is no more) consistently delivers films that push the boundaries of what can be achieved in front of the camera and raises the bar, only to be topped by his own work.

It’s probably no coincidence that Nolan only directs his own ideas or scripts and with Inception he has written/directed one of the best films of the last decade.

Now this is normally the paragraph where the reviewer tells you what he loved about the film but since I don’t want to give away any spoilers I will say that Inception has to be seen to be believed. And for those who try and explain it away by telling you it’s like The Matrix, it is most definitely not.

Much like the Stanley Kubrick of old, you know from the first frame you are in a Christopher Nolan film. Rather than take the easy way out like most sci-fi movies (The Matrix, Star Wars) by saying that the laws of physics don’t apply to them, he instead embraces the laws and makes them work in his favour.

Intellect

As with Dark Knight, his heroes and villains have no special powers but instead rely on intellect, and considering the whole film revolves around the inner workings of the human mind you can be damn sure that Inception is one of the most cerebrally taxing yet satisfying films in years.

The cast is a Who’s Who of up ’n’ coming and already big talent with DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon Levitt (3rd Rock from the Sun), Tom Hardy (Rock’n’Rolla and the new Mad Max), Ellen Page (Juno, Whip It), Ken Watanabe (Dark Knight and Last Samurai), Cillian Murphy (Sunshine and Dark Knight), Marion Cottilard (Piaf) and few nice cameos here and there most notably Michael Caine.

It’s hard to single any one actor out as each brings their ‘A game’, but Joseph Gordon Levitt as Cobb’s right-hand man Arthur just owns each and every scene he’s in.

They say we humans only use about 10% of our brains (also a line from the film) but after the last year or so of mind-numbingly boring movies week in week out, I’d say we are down to about 5%. Now that would explain why my head hurt after watching Inception.

Inception starts as it means to go on, with Hans Zimmer’s booming score shaking the very foundations of the cinema and jolting the audience out of the cinematic coma it’s been in for some time.

What are you still reading this for? Go to the cinema now.

Andrew Kennedy

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