Inception Review!

 Alright! Today I am hopping back in the review game by reviewing Christopher Nolan's $836 million dollar grossing, critically acclaimed, defining best-case scenario original action movie, and absolute behemoth of a movie and cultural touchstone. 

The first thing you should know about Inception is that literally everyone loves it. It might not everyone's favorite Christopher Nolan movie (Mine's Interstellar or The Dark Knight), but there's no denying how good it is. 

Meet one of the best movie posters ever.

Basically, the story goes that Christopher Nolan did Warner Bros. a solid by making The Dark Knight, so they just kind of let him do whatever he felt like, so he revised one of his ideas from 2005 (Before he started working on Batman Begins), sold it to Warner Bros., and then directed it. Absolute legend. 

I vaguely remember when Inception came out (I would've been pretty young at the time), and there was... a lot of confusion around how Inception worked. Which I never got. Inception wasn't confusing at all. Inception is about people who invade dreams to extract information hidden deep within the subconscious. 

The actual storyline of Inception is not the extraction thing I just talked about. In this one, they implant an idea, which is most commonly seen as impossible in this world. So, the main character, Dom Cobb, puts together a team to implant an idea in the mind of a young heir dissolve his dying father's business. Dom is payed by a rival of that business, Mr. Saito, who says he can reunite Dom with his children who are in America, whom Dom Cobb cannot visit because his deceased wife framed him for her suicide. So they go inside the head of the young heir, Robert Fischer to implant the idea. But, they have to go really far into his dreams to implant it, which makes them go three levels into a dream (Two is considered risky). 

It's a dense plot, but look at what's going on visually while that plot's happening. 

Okay, actually, on the surface level it is complicated. But, I promise, in its execution, it's not at all confusing. Like all Christopher Nolan movies, this one does play with time - In each of the three (Technically four) layers of the dream world, time runs at a different speed. But, again, it's all explained and executed really well. It's not like Tenet, where the time and logic are running backward, this is pretty straightforward. 

And, the movie has an amazing ensemble cast (Part of the reason it got to $836 million). Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine, and the always underappreciated Cillian Murphy. That is definitely one of the strongest ensembles to ever be assembled on the big screen. 

Kudos to the casting director.

If you've been paying attention, you'll probably have noticed I've gotten really far without actually saying anything about the quality of the film. Well, observant reader, you are right. There's not much that can be said about Inception that hasn't been said before. It's good. Really good. 

But, if we have to cite specifics, let's go with the score to start off. Inception's score (By the legendary Hans Zimmer) is nothing short of amazing. I mean, the video on YouTube has 112 million views! That's unheard of for a movie's instrumental score! 

The movie has amazing and mind-blowing action scenes. There will never be a day in which I am not inspired by the genius of the beloved hallway fight scene. Everyone loves that scene. And that's because it's amazing. Then you have a snowy landscape action piece. Why is it on a snowy mountain? Because why not! It's one of those decisions that just adds so much to a movie that Christopher Nolan excels at. 

Did the third act need to take place in a snow fortress? No. Is it cool? Undoubtedly. 

Another thing I commend the film for is making me cry. I'm making an entire post about movies that have made me cry next Tuesday, but I might as well discuss it here as well. Maybe you think it's really lame that I cried during Inception. Maybe you're confused as to where I cried during Inception. Well, let me start off by saying that this scene is what made me really appreciate Cillian Murphy. The scene in question is one of the very last scenes of the movie in which Cillian Murphy's character, Robert Fischer, finally is taken far enough into the dream that he sees his dad again. 

His dad has him open a safe, and the camera briefly shows the legal documents that the entire movie has been trying to get the characters to break up. But then the camera moves down to a pinwheel that was used as an example earlier in the film when Robert talked about how his dad never loved him. They show that the dad kept the pinwheel, and then the dream dad dies. 

This scene physically hurt me. Maybe it was Hans Zimmer's absolutely incredible score here. Maybe it was Cillian Murphy's acting. Maybe it was the knowledge that it was all a lie and that his dad didn't actually care about him. Maybe, it's a combination of all three. But the film does it so perfectly. Nothing but respect for Inception. 

This is one of my favorite cinematic scenes. 

Inception is an absolute unit of a film. Hats off to Christopher Nolan for making one of the defining movies of the 2010s. 

Overall, I give Inception a 10/10. "Inception has a lot of exposition going around, but that exposition has a purpose - To create one of the best action movies of all time. Emotional, action-packed, beautifully scored and acted, and ambiguously ended, Inception is literally everything you could want from a movie."

Still one of the best fights scenes you'll see.