Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Leonardo DiCaprio
I’m ashamed to say, i managed to miss Inception on it’s theatrical release. Having heard so much about it, I was eager to get my hands on the Blue-Ray. I’m really happy to report Inception lives up to the hype, and deserves all the praise it’s been getting.
Following on from his massive success of The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan takes on the tale of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a master thief. But instead of stealing money, Cobb and his team steal ideas using a process know as ‘Extraction’. This involves entering the victim’s sub-conscience whilst they are asleep, and manipulating their dreams until they give up their secrets. This is all well and good until Cobb meets the highly influential billionaire, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who wants to hire him, not to steal an idea – Extraction, but to plant one – Inception.
Saito wants Cobb to place the idea into the head of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son and heir of his main business rival, that he should break up his father’s company when his sick old man kicks the bucket. Cobb’s team think it’s impossible, however, Cobb himself is convinced it’s hard, but not impossible. So when Saito offers to clear his name with the US authorities, who Cobb has been running from due to the small matter that they think he murdered his wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb agrees to take the job.
Ariadne (Ellen Page) & Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio)
Cobb’s team consists of a planner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an newly acquired architect (Ellen Page) who designs the dream-scape, a forger (Tom Hardy), who can manipulate the subject by taking on other peoples appearance, and a chemist (Dileep Rao), who controls the process of putting the target under.
Inception has been described as an art-house movie posing as a Hollywood blockbuster, and i’d say that’s a fair description. This has been tried before with films such as Tom Cruise’s Vanilla Sky, but it’s never quite been pulled off until now. DiCaprio is superb and eminently watchable as the team leader, tormented by the loss of his wife, as is Page, as the team’s newcomer.
As with previous Nolan movies, Inception is visually stunning. As Cobb and Arthur take Ariadne (Page) through her first steps in sub-conscience design, the fx work is beautifully achieved, making things you know can’t exist seem real.
Inception - Stunning FX
The plot is brilliantly constructed, and just as with Memento, Nolan grants a large amount of intelligence to his audience, something that is missing from an awful lot of Hollywood studio movies these days. As Cobb delves through the layers of his subject’s mind, Nolan manages to walk the tightrope of delivering a complex plot without alienating the viewers.
The Inception Blu-Ray Triple Play includes the movie on Blu-Ray, DVD, and digital formats. The Blu-Ray disc comes with a whole host of extras, such as Extraction Mode, which shows how Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of the cast and crew designed and achieved the movies signature moments. A feature on dreams, where some of the most fascinating and cutting-edge dream research to-date on lucid dreaming, top scientists make the case that the dream world is not an altered state of consciousness, but a fully functional parallel reality. An animated comic which serves as a prequel to the film, a feature on the soundtrack, stills, and trailers. The Inception DVD includes 4 features on how various sequences were constructed and achieved.
Inception – Triple Play (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy) is out 6th December 2010.
9/10 – A brilliant, intelligent, sub-conscience heist movie.
