Inception (12A)

14 July 2010

IT'S the summer blockbuster everyone's been talking about - The Dark Knight and Memento director Christopher Nolan's mind-bending special effects thriller INCEPTION (12A), in which Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team into Cillian Murphy's dreams.

Nolan says: "About 10 years ago, I became fascinated with the subject of dreams, about the relationship of our waking life to our dreaming life.

"I've always found it to be an interesting paradox that everything within a dream - whether frightening, or happy, or fantastic- is being produced by your own mind as it happens, and what that says about the potential of the imagination is quite extraordinary. I started thinking how that could be applied to a grand-scale action movie with a very human dimension."

Granted, DiCaprio's effortless performance makes for an intriguing hero, and the special effects are pretty spectacular - a freight train barrelling unexpectedly down a main road is a memorable scene.

And it is certainly star-studded. Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard and Tom Berenger are all here.

But it all feels a bit like an inferior Matrix - particularly Joseph Gordon-Levitt's gravity-defying, slow motion fight in a hotel corridor, and the "is this reality or is it a dream" confusion.

And it's hard to believe that a bunch of people could insert themselves into another person's dreams and then run around fighting off the subconscious' answer to antibodies.

But most of all, it's just too convoluted, as the team goes into a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within another dream? I lost count.

And while the action would be good enough for the viewer not to worry too much about the mind-bending stuff, we're not allowed to ignore it because of the rambling psychoanalytical "explanations" about your "vulnerability" when dreaming, the subconscious etc, without actually explaining how it is that DiCaprio can drop into your dreams and shape them whenever he wishes.

Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is the best extraction thief, stealing valuable secrets from dreaming corporate bigwigs. He tours the world, hiring out his skills, but he is on the edge, an international fugitive who is unable to go home to his children, who cannot dream without being sedated and who is haunted by his dead wife.

Now he is offered the chance of redemption. Instead of stealing a secret, if he can plant an idea in Cillian Murphy's brain, he will be allowed to go home.

But is "inception" even possible? Cobb is so desperate he'll put everyone's life at risk in his attempt.

- LINDSAY JONES