… The Year? ….. The Decade?

by Warren Day

The buzz is deafening.

In a season of reboots, remakes and rip-offs, it’s the movie that stands apart as a true original. It’s the movie you get to make if your last film grossed over a billion dollars. It’s the first movie in a long time that has critics reaching for their Thesauruses to find some new superlatives.

It’s called, “Inception.”

And like all movies that come riding in on a high wave of praise, you should enjoy the film for what the director designed it to be, rather than what you think the hype dictates it should be.

And like those rare films that achieve a high degree of originality, it defies the usual labels. It’s part thriller, part mystery, part science-fiction, part allegory, part brain-teaser, and a full-blown, celluloid inkblot test. A movie that is literally, metaphorically, and   methodologically about dreams.

Research shows that when you’re really into a film your brain produces the same waves it does when you are in a dream state.  “Inception” takes that to a further level than any motion picture has before.

It takes place in the not-too-distant future when certain people, called extractors, have developed the ability to enter into your dreams and steal the most valued secrets from your sub-conscious.  An all-powerful industrialist comes to the best extractor of them all and asks him to do something no one else has ever been able to do, something called inception, where you enter the dreams of another person to plant an idea he’s never had before.

Such a storyline and setting frees the director from the laws of physics and the rules of narrative, and allows him to construct a multi-layered parable, for this is also a film about the nature of reality, the morality of privacy, and the ever-present possibility of redemption. And like all really good films, it might mean something totally different from one person to the next. It will certainly be the most talked-about and argued-about movie of the summer.

Directed, produced and written by the man responsible for “The Dark Knight,” as well as the mind-twisting “Momento,” Christopher Nolan combines in this production the audience-pleasing skills of a Steven Spielberg with the intellectual complexities of a Stanley Kubrick.

No pun intended, but it does feature a dream cast, most of whom have played a gay character in a former film, and also won or been nominated for an Oscar: Leonardo DiCaprio (“Total Eclipse”), Joseph Gordan-Levitt (“Mysterious Skin”), Ellen Page (“Juno”), Marion Cotillard (“La Vie en Rose”), Michael Caine (“Deathtrap), and Ken Watanabe (“The Last Samurai”).

See it the first time for the sheer brilliance of its visual style. See it the second time for the uncommon depth of its ideas. It’s that rarest of big summer movies, one that gets your brain going as much as it gets your pulse racing.

“Inception” is rated PG-13. Opens widely on July 16, including the IMAX theater in Fort Lauderdale.

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