Inception: Keeps you at the edge of your seat

Must admit, my better half and I only watch films in the cinema if we feel that it's worth the money. So after Toy Story 3 (didn't get to write a review, but it was a super duper amazing movie), we decided to watch Inception because it was a Christopher Nolan film and we liked him. As well as the other cast like Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer), Ellen Page (Juno), Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai), and Cillian Murphy (The Dark Knight).

Okay, I'm not a big fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, but he's a good actor.

Anyways, the trailer has left me curious as to what this film is about. By its very definition, the word "inception" means the beginning or origin of something. So the movie is a beginning of what, you might ask.

In the story, Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, a thief who steals secrets in a most unique way: extraction, or stealing by going into a person's subconscious (dream state) and gets what he wants. His last assignment, supposedly to steal information from Saito (Watanabe), goes a bit awry. Cobb, a wanted fugitive (the reason revealed later on in the movie) and Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) decide to lie low for a while, but then Saito appears and offers them a proposal that would become Cobb's ticket to redemption: to do inception, or to plant an idea in the mind, on Robert Fischer, Jr. (Murphy), heir to a big oil company. Cobb, wanting to be with his children again and be cleared of his past charges, accepts the proposal and builds his team. Along with him, Saito and Arthur, he gets Ariadne (Page) the architect, Eames (Tom Hardy) the forger, and Yusuf (Dileep Rao) who creates the sedative to let them go to the dream state.

I found it amazing how Christopher Nolan and his team was able to take the film viewers to multiple layers of dream states and still have them engaged right to the very end. Every scene elicited a gasp or so, and a lot of twists and turns were quite unexpected. It was not much of the action scenes that glued people on their seats, rather it was the whole process of inception, on making the dream so real, that made us watch from start to end.

And the end... man! If that wasn't mindf--k, I don't know what is.

Christopher Nolan has been good in that aspect, especially if you've watched his previous movies like Memento and The Prestige. They all keep you guessing in the end (actually the 2 Batman movies were less mindf--ks but had you at the edge of your seat). Inception is no exception. It's like dreaming within a dream and waking up just to say, "Am I still dreaming?" That's how crazy it got for me.

Acting-wise, I think everyone delivered. Albeit short, Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine had their moments. DiCaprio was quite good as the skilled yet troubled Cobb.

Note, though, that this is a movie that would require you to be awake to not miss any details. It won't fall under the category, "Relax, see a movie." So if you're not up to it, you might as well catch it on DVD to listen to the dialogues and press Replay if needed. And I would recommend people to watch it when you're completely awake, just so you won't miss out on anything.

One of the best movies this year so far. A film about dreams that leaves you awake. Really cool, try to catch it in local cinemas while you still can.