'Leonardo DiCaprio finds the tortured center of his character,' one reviewer writes.
By Eric Ditzian
Almost one year ago, the teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan's "Inception" hit the web. It featured acrobatic fight sequences, hallucinatory imagery, and left us with far more questions than answers. Just what the heck was this movie really about, anyway?
In the months that followed, Nolan slowly peeled back the curtain to reveal peeks at his top-secret follow-up to 2008's "The Dark Knight." Now, with the movie's July 16 release date approaching, "Inception" has been fully unveiled to industry insiders, and the first reviews are beginning to pop up online. Here's what folks are saying about the flick.
The Story
"Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, an expert in what the film calls extraction, the theft of secrets or information from the subconscious mind," Todd Gilchrist wrote in Cinematical.com. After botching a job thanks to the intrusion of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb finds an unlikely opportunity for redemption from one of his former victims: Saito (Ken Watanabe), CEO of a flourishing multinational, offers him amnesty in exchange for planting an idea - known as inception - within the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), one of Saito's competitors. Enlisting the help of teammates Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Ellen Page), Eames (Tom Hardy), and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Cobb reluctantly agrees to the mission, only to discover that the mind's defenses are more formidable than any physical threat he could face. Heist-movie plot details notwithstanding, the above description scarcely scratches at the surface of what's in the film, and certainly reveals nothing of the deeper conceptual and thematic dimensions of its story."
The Look
"Shot across four continents by Nolan's regular d.p., Wally Pfister, and outfitted by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, 'Inception' is easily the director's most visually unbridled work," Justin Chang wrote in Variety. "Its canvas stretches from the skyscrapers of Tokyo to the bazaars of Tangiers, from an amber-lit hotel corridor to a snowy mountain compound (a setpiece that plays like an homage to 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'). Pic has arresting effects and images to spare, such as the sight of Paris folding in on itself like a book or Gordon-Levitt's Arthur performing a fight scene in zero gravity (the explanation for which is even more dazzling)."
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