This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Do you remember how you first felt upon leaving the original The Matrix, that shell-shocked sense of having been given a heady glimpse into another fully formed world, that feeling of suddenly possessing dangerous and unearthly knowledge, that giddy realization that you’d just witnessed something intellectually breathtaking and truly original? Prepare for those sensations all over again. Inception is the most astonishing thing you will see all year. It may be one of the most astonishing things you will ever see.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best at what he does—corporate espionage. But not just any corporate espionage. Cobb enters the dreams of his targets and extracts their secrets from their own heads while they sleep. Cobb and his team (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao)—members with such titles as architect, chemist and forger—are hired by a Japanese business tycoon (Ken Watanabe) for a special assignment involving the son of a business rival (Cillian Murphy). Rather than steal something, he wants them to plant a parasitical idea in the man’s head that he will assume is his own. To do so, Cobb will have to go deep into the subconscious, masking his actions in dreams within dreams. But the further down one goes, the more erratic and volatile the mind becomes and the easier it is to lose oneself forever—especially if the subject knows you’re coming and is prepared to fight back.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Inception fuses two of his previous films—Memento and The Dark Knight. It is the very best sort of science fiction, deliriously creative, bracingly inventive and audaciously ambitious. For once, it cannot be said that a film suffers from a failure of imagination. Part James Bond actioneer, part heist/con-artist film, Inception knows its world takes some getting used to. It allows us time to get our bearings. It introduces characters to ask the dumb questions for us. The exposition is long but luxurious, describing a world at once alien and yet as intimately familiar as our own subconscious.

Inception doesn’t show the random, unpredictable, indiscriminately shifting nature of dreams nor does it reveal their creative extravagance. These characters are the most boring dreamers imaginable, conjuring worlds of nearly implacable reality, rather than, say, the surreality of What Dreams May Come, The Cell and indeed, our own experiences. But I nitpick. The phosphorescent imagination necessary to pull off a film of this magnitude is rarely given wings, much less in a Hollywood studio blockbuster.

Inception is slow but scintillating one moment and like grabbing hold of a frayed electrical wire the next. Freight trains plow through city streets, elevators transport us through memories and, in easily the most dazzling and extraordinary section of the film, fights are conducted in tumbling weightlessness. Yet for all its pyrotechnics (which, incidentally, eschew CGI as often as possible in favor of refreshingly practical effects), the film never loses sight of the personal story that drives it—Cobb’s desperation to get back to his young children and his lost wife who continues showing up in his own dreams as an alluring femme fatale (Marion Cotillard).

The cerebral thriller is made up of mesmerizing, compounded layers of plot, each with an intricate and established paradigm of indissoluble rules. If Inception requires more than one viewing (and it will), it is not because the film is a maze—it is not convoluted, given to misdirection or beholden to twists. It is straightforward. It follows its rules fanatically. The confusion comes simply in its intoxicating elaborateness. At some point, if you lose sight of Nolan, who is always a dozen or so steps ahead of you, don’t panic—you understand enough. Trust the ride. You will want to take it again.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout.
Running Time: 148 minutes