Everything you wanted to know about "Inception"

by Sam Adams

Salon
July 19, 2010

Even before it hit theaters on Friday, Christopher Nolan’s Inception was one of the year’s most talked-about movies, and one of its most argued-over. But before you can form an opinion, you need to know what’s going on, something even a few seasoned critics seem to be having trouble with.

Like Nolan’s breakthrough movie, Memento, Inception is an elaborate, deliberately disorienting maze of interlocking time frames, only here the stakes are raised. Rather than challenging us to figure out what happened, Inception presents events that may not have happened at all. Set in the world of dreams, and dreams within dreams, the movie is the narrative equivalent of a set of Russian nesting dolls. Every time you think you’ve reached the center, Nolan pulls the film apart and shows us another world hiding within.

By structuring Inception as a subconscious heist movie, following a team of dream thieves led by Leonardo DiCaprio as they infiltrate the mind of business heir Cillian Murphy, Nolan provides a strong thread for us to cling to as we bounce between the concentric layers of dreams. But if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Inception’s world rather than simply go along for the ride, you need to see the film more than once and spend some serious time untangling its mysteries.

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Read the film review by Roger Ebert