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Inception

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Marion Cotillard, “Inception” is an action thriller about thieves planting an idea in the mind of the son of a huge energy corporation in order to change his mind about the future of the company through a method called inception.
The movie starts out when Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) washes up on a beach in a dream and is taken in to do business with Saito (Ken Watanabe), the head of another major corporation. Cobb wants to train Saito how to avoid people who steal secrets from people’s dreams, known as extractors. However they are only in a dream at this point. It takes multiple people to perform inception, a few architects to construct the dream and thieves to perform the task. Everyone is involved in creating the dream and planting ideas in the mind of one who is sharing the dream. So when one of the architects is taken and killed in reality, it’s time for Cobb to find a new architect. He finds Ariadne (Ellen Page), a student of architecture, capable of performing the tasks he needs her to perform. Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) father has just passed away, leaving the company in Robert’s hands. On a flight to Los Angeles from Tokyo, the thieves must change Fischer’s mind about the company and go through with changing his mind through inception. Everything goes mostly according to plan, however his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) has become a projection of Cobb’s subconscious. He cannot return to his family because he is believed to have killed his wife after she really committed suicide because she thought she was in a dream. Saito makes a phone call from the airplane and Cobb is allowed to reenter the US.
I found the acting in this film to be quite good. I found this cast to work well together in their respective roles. Leonardo DiCaprio never fails to impress me with the roles he’s in. This seemed like an ideal role for him. His character goes through very tough parts of the movie. While he has to perform this extremely enormous and difficult challenge of implanting an idea in Fischer’s mind, he must also decide between wanting to see his children at home or stay with Mal in the dream world. Ellen Page has a good role as well, and I think she executed it beautifully. She plays a student of architecture who is recruited to the team by Cobb as the new architect for the dreams they will use in performing inception. She must make extremely difficult mazes that even Cobb cannot know the solutions to in case of projections coming after them in the dream. Overall, this is a great cast and one that works well together.
The direction of this film is fantastic. Christopher Nolan is not the most well known director/writer in Hollywood, but critics are calling “Inception” his best work yet. I would agree with this statement. I was first exposed to his work when watching “The Dark Knight” starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. What I like about Nolan’s films most is the sets he uses. They all look much more real than many other movies because he doesn’t use green screens and sound stages as much. He uses real places. “Inception” was shot in six different countries, each showing a different aspect of the film. The dialogue Nolan writes also works very well with the film. It helps bring out the emotion in the actors. He is best compared to M. Night Shyamalan. Both do similar work, but I find that Nolan is much more successful with his than that of Shyamalan. Nolan takes what seemed to me at first a rather boring idea, the idea of intercepting people’s dreams and planting an idea in their minds, into a fantastic depiction that makes it look extremely cool. He also makes it very twisted and some things are hard to catch because of this, making viewers want to see it again so they can understand things in this movie better. I enjoy Nolan’s work for this reason.
Overall, this was an exceptional film. I wasn’t so sure that I understood it as well as I would have hoped, but this is Christopher Nolan’s goal, so that it draws people like me back to the theater and sees it again. With an exceptional cast and an awesome director, I would rate this film four stars out of four stars. I loved this movie and recommend that anyone reading this go see it. It’s mind-blowing.

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