"It's like a pretentious version of the Matrix"

I heard a guy say that to his date as we left the theater after seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception last night and it made me chuckle a bit.  With its clean, visual dazzle and dreams inside of dreams where reality can be bent and and morphed with various real-world implications-I'd say he had a good point.  But in this film there is no evil terminator machine army to defeat, in fact the only real enemy is the character's own memories. 

Okay, I'm going to stop myself here and redirect - by now you've seen the previews, probably read some reviews and decided if you want to go see the movie or not.  I say go see it.  It's a very smartly done film, even where it falls into familiar territory it still does so with skill and style.  The climatic sequence with several overlapping plot lines is worth watching just for the impressive ability of the filmmaker to keep it all going w/out confusing the hell out of the audience. 

Unfortunately there ate times when the film is just too focused on it's own beauty and the characters suffer for it.  When the occasional humorous moments appear, brought on by Ellen Page's Ariadne and Tom Hardy's Eames, we are reminded that these people are in fact, real, and not the "projections" that habit these dreamscapes.  More of that, and less slo-mo and we'd have a great film....

That being said, it's still one of the most imaginative and impressive things I have seen this year, and it beats the hell out of every other summer blockbuster to this point.  But no one has set the bar very high this year. 

There's always The Expendables.

Inception gets 3.5 Molos



PS  SPOILER ALERT:  Don't read this if you don't want to learn a little something about the ending.....but one of the most amusing experiences of seeing this film was when at the very end of the film, the movie ends on a highly ambiguous note, very highly, and a guy in the audience yelled out "ahhhhhh come on!"  which got the entire crowd laughing.  Good stuff.