Quick Review: Inception

If you're looking for a complex film that will make you think, "Inception" may be your film. Honestly, though, while there's much to like about it, the extreme complexity at times worked against it for me. Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, a thief who, because of something that happened involving his late wife (Marion Cotillard), is unable to return to the USA to be with his children. What he steals, it seems, is ideas. With the help of some sort of device and some sort of sedatives, he and his team are able to enter a target's dream and manipulate things in order to learn some piece of information that the target is trying to keep secret. Cobb's team (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy) is hired by a businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) to do something different -- instead of taking an idea from someone's mind, implant an idea instead. This is what the title refers to. The target is a rival businessman (Cillian Murphy), and if Cobb and the team are successful, Saito will arrange things so that Cobb can reenter the country and be reunited with his kids. There are various levels of dreams, and time advances more quickly in deeper levels, and...well, I can't do it justice. It is, as I think I've made clear, really complex. It kind of takes a leap of faith to accept everything without wondering about the rules of the dream states that are presented. Also, normally in a film you're rooting for the protagonists to succeed. In this case the protagonists are essentially criminals. As it went on I wasn't sure if I wanted them to succeed or not. Still, it is visually brilliant and well-acted, and the ending is certainly worthy of debate...although just before the very last scene played out, I knew exactly what would happen. My grade: B-plus.