Inception Reviews

I heard a number of great things about Inception, including from my sister who came out saying it was one of the cleverest and best movies she'd seen. After seeing it for myself, I thought it was a good film, but not as good as I was led to believe. Out of the Christopher Nolan movies I have seen, Inception didn't wow me as much as Memento and The Prestige, and it is one of my least favourites of his so far. Does that mean the film is bad? No, I am just saying I do not think it is Nolan's best as I have heard people say.

My main problem with Inception was the lack of emotional attachment, I do understand completely anybody who says it is emotionally cold. Particularly in the characters, they are written and acted well, but not much is done to make us empathise with them and their predicaments. I loved the idea of the story, it was clever and somewhat original and it did start very compelling and intriguing, but as the film progresses it does become rather convoluted and I found myself losing a little interest. Also, the pace is uneven, as the characters became more cold and the story more convoluted, the film really does start to drag until the conclusion where the film does thankfully pick up.

Inception despite these faults does have a number of strengths, especially the beautifully crafted production values, dream sequences and effects and Nolan's superb direction. Hans Zimmer's score is incredibly good too, while powerful and haunting it rarely becomes overbearing, while the dialogue is on the whole clever and thought-provoking. The acting is generally very good, both Leonardo DiCaprio, with a more hardened persona which has grown even more, and Ellen Page give strong performances and while Marion Cotillard is underused she is pretty good as well and Cillian Murphy I think gives the best supporting performance as he is superb.

Overall, Inception is a generally good film but not as good as it is lauded to be. 7/10 Bethany Cox

This film has great effects. That is about all I can say because I found its plot instantly forgettable. Slickly directed, it is a visual treat.

Leonardo D. is solid as usual, Ellen Page is good but she suffers from looking too young to have qualified as an architect.

I would struggle to think of any reason to recommend this film to anyone to watch because beyond the sight of Paris folding over there is nothing else to recommend. Not enough tension within the plot so I didn't actually care about the characters.

Looks good but not a great film.

When I saw this movie, I found the story didn't see her ever seen before, and even today have never seen an instance where savvy, experience and depth of the idea that the story of this film from Director is (Christopher Nolan) who has perfected a superior output and roles and I don't think there was a better than (Leonardo DiCaprio) for the lead role in the same way you do it is have some type of skill and gives everything needed in the role as an influence in particular scenes You need passion and frankly, this movie, in my opinion, the best movie I have seen in my life, and I don't think it has made movies in the future make me give up my mind easily and the appropriate soundtrack for the movie and especially the track (Time) is the best one to listen to it in my life.

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عند مشاهدتي لهذا الفيلم ، أدركت أنني لم أجد لقصته مثيلاً من قبل ولابعد مشاهدتي بل وحتى الآن ، الفيلم يتميز بجودة إخراجية عظيمة وآداء تمثيلي فائق للغاية ومحكم وقصة عميقة جداً وتحتاج للكثير من التأمل ، عملٌ شبه متكامل وممتازٌ للغاية بل ورائع بكل ما للكلمةِ من معنىً ولا أعتقد بصراحةٍ وجود من أهو أفضل وأنسب من (ليوناردو دي كابريو) للعب الدور الرئيسي وأعني دور (كوب) وما جعلني أتحدث بهذه الطريقة هو مهارته العالية والتي إستغلها بشكلٍ جيد جداً حيث اظهر على سبيل المثال التأثر الواضح والتعبيرات المناسبة في المشاهد التي تتطلب ذلك وتصرف بشكلٍ تلقائيٍ وسلس مما أدى بالإحساس بأن ما يحدث حقيقي وهذه من الخصائص التي أصبحت صعبةً بل ونادرةً بالأخص هذه الأيام ، ولا أعتقد أنني سأتنازل عن رأيي بسهولة أو أغيره في المستقبل ، وأيضاً شيءٌ إضافي ألا وهو الموسيقى التصويرية الرائعة للغاية والتي عبرت عن الفيلم بشكلٍ دقيق    للغاية وبالأخص مقطوعة (الوقت) التي تُعد من أفضل ما سمعته أذناي

 

'Inception' is just really fun to watch, the story is confusing but also really amazing when you can figure it all out! 'Inception' has a decent performance from Leonardo DiCaprio and its action scenes are epic

There was a great cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine), non-stop excitement and some of the most awesome action scenes ever.

'Inception' is a must-see for any action movie lover. No one can resist!

This is simply the best movie ever made!!
First of all, I love Christopher Nolan. As a director, is one of the best and as a writer, I don't really have to say anything!! The film speaks for itself.
The thing that I liked more of the movie, was not only the plot itself, but also the main effects and the actors... everything was perfect!!
I love specially how Cillian Murphy portrayed Robert Fischer. As strange as it might sound, Robert is my favourite character :D
Leo DiCaprio, great as always, and it'a because of being very good on what he does that he is still one of my favourite actors.
It was very good to see Ellen and Joseph together in the same movie. They're both great actors and I admire them both for their personality too. Arthur and Ariadne are one of my favourite pairings because of them

I first watch this movie with no idea of how it's gonna be. After watching it: Uaaaaa! Mind blow! I had to watch scene's more then once because i didn't know what was going on. And i was pretty distracted by Leo and all the other cute guys. When that building went up i was like "Sheet!".Christopher Nolan is a frekin' genius. A brilliant director and writer. And the music made by Hans Zimmer was completely amazing.
One of the best movies I'd ever seen!

Christopher Nolan's mind-bending, intelligent, exciting and disturbing sci-fi extravaganza, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, blends the best of traditional and modern filmmaking.
Dreaming is life's great solitary adventure. Whatever pleasures or terrors the dream state provides, we experience them alone or not at all.

But what if other people could literally invade our dreams, what if a technology existed that enabled interlopers to create and manipulate sleeping life with the goal of stealing our secret thoughts, or more unsettling still, implanting ideas in the deepest of subconscious states and making us believe they're our own?
Welcome to the world of "Inception," written and directed by the masterful Christopher Nolan, a tremendously exciting science-fiction thriller that's as disturbing as it sounds. This is a popular entertainment with a knockout punch so intense and unnerving it'll have you worrying if it's safe to close your eyes at night.

Having come up with the idea when he was 16, Nolan wrote the first draft of "Inception" eight years ago and in the interim his great success with "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight," not to mention the earlier "Memento," put him in a position to cast Leonardo DiCaprio and six other Oscar-nominated actors and spend a reported $160 million in a most daring way.

For "Inception" is not only about the dream state, it often plays on screen in a dreamlike way, which means that it has the gift of being easier to follow than to explain. Specifics of the plot can be difficult to pin down, especially at first, and guessing moment to moment what will be happening next, or even if the characters are in a dream or in reality, is not always possible. But even while literal understanding can remain tantilizingly out of reach, you always intuitively understand what is going on and why.

Helping in that understanding, and one of the film's most satisfying aspects, are its roots in old-fashioned genre entertainment, albeit genre amped up to warp speed. Besides its science-fiction theme, "Inception" also has strong film noir ties, easily recognizable elements like the femme fatale, doomed love and the protagonist's fateful decision to take on "one last job."

That would be DiCaprio's Dom Cobb, a thief who specializes in what's called extraction, in taking secrets from the subconscious. Aided by Arthur (a fine Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the trusted associate who is a whiz at the mechanics involved, Cobb is introduced in the middle of a dream involving Saito ( Ken Watanabe), a wealthy Japanese businessman.

That one last job is soon proposed by Saito, who asks Cobb if he is also able to do inception, the planting of ideas, a maneuver many people believe can't be done. Saito promises Cobb, who has a past which prevents him from returning to his children in America, the one thing he can't resist. If he takes on this one last job, if he agrees to practice inception on Robert Fischer ( Cillian Murphy), the heir to a multibillion-dollar energy empire, he will be able to return home.

In true movie fashion, Cobb has to round up a team to do the job. Aside from Arthur, he needs Eames, the forger (Tom Hardy), gifted at impersonating people inside dreams, and Yusuf, the chemist ( Dileep Rao), who makes the compounds that put people under. And with the aid of his father-in-law Miles ( Michael Caine), he meets Ariadne.
Named after the mythological character who helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth, Ariadne is a young architect who is needed to create the subconscious landscapes in which the dreams will take place. As played by Ellen Page, adroitly cast for her youth, intelligence and earnestness, Ariadne is the team's last essential element.

In addition to not knowing what they'll find inside Fischer's dream (believe me, there's plenty going on), Cobb and his team have to contend with a wild card: Mal, the untrustworthy femme fatale, a woman with deep and complicated ties to Cobb's past and someone who specializes in finding her way into dreams where she is not wanted.

The selection of Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard as Mal typifies the care Nolan has taken to cast these thriller roles for emotional connection, a move which pays off in the scenes she shares with DiCaprio. In addition to the impeccably professional Batman veterans Caine and Murphy, the film is also on the money with the smaller roles, including Pete Postlethwaite as Fischer's ailing tycoon father and Tom Berenger as one of his key associates.

The reason all these diverse elements successfully come together is Nolan's meticulous grasp of the details necessary to achieve his bravura ambitions. A filmmaker so committed he does his own second unit direction, Nolan is one of the few people, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald on film mogul Monroe Stahr in "The Last Tycoon," "able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."
Because he's been so successful, Nolan, like Clint Eastwood, has been able to return again and again to the same creative team, which includes exceptional director of photography Wally Pfister, sharp-eyed editor Lee Smith and composer Hans Zimmer, whose propulsive score helps compel the action forward.

Incapable of making even standard exposition look ordinary, Nolan is especially strong in creating the stunts, effects and out-of-the-ordinary elements whose believability characterizes this film as they did his previous Batman efforts.
Shooting "Inception" in six countries, preferring to do elaborate stunts in camera whenever possible but expert at utilizing computer-generated effects when necessary, Nolan and his team (including production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and stunt coordinator Tom Struthers) have come up with some unforgettable set pieces. As detailed in a thorough cover story in American Cinematographer magazine, the standout imagery includes: a 60-foot-long freight train that barrels down the middle of a city street, shot in the vicinity of 7th and Spring in downtown L.A. with a replica of the train engine placed on the chassis of an 18-wheel tractor-trailer; a 100-foot hotel corridor built so it could rotate through 360 degrees to mimic a zero-gravity experience; and a mind-altering CGI scene that has a Paris street roll up and over itself like it was some kind of a tapestry instead of a steel and concrete boulevard.

His goal in doing all of this, Nolan told American Cinematographer, is a desire to always "be putting the audience into the experience," to create "what I like to call a 'tumbling forward' quality, where you're being pulled along into the action."

Speaking of Paris, it's one measure of how wide-ranging Nolan's influences are that he used the classic Edith Piaf song "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" as a key plot element. The pleasure of "Inception" is not that Nolan, as the song says, regrets nothing, it's that he has forgotten nothing, expertly blending the best of traditional and modern filmmaking. If you're searching for smart and nervy popular entertainment, this is what it looks like.

A pretty good idea. The movie seems to present a parallel universe which tends the reality. The special effects and the characters' features are great. In a great journey through the world of dreams, this movie holds its audience in a clever plot, well planned and a great thriller. Not much to say. I just sat dumbfounded watching this movie and watching the genius of its creators. A well-chosen cast (Ellen Paige is knowing full well what movies do, surely this was a UP in her career). And that was certainly the movie that made me FINALLY going into Di Caprio. Nolan, along with Artificial Intelligence, probably my two favorite sci-fi films.

A fascinating, engaging, overly explanatory- and yet somehow not enough explanitory- epic film. I watched this a second time recently around the time i re-watched 2001: a space odessey. Both are different kinds of science fiction, but both play with ambiguity and metaphysical reality in a powerful way. While Kubrick's masterpiece is almost plodding, Nolan whizzess us into a world where dreams can be inhabited by other minds. The complexity of this idea requires a lot of exposition, which starts almost from the first line of the film and never really ends - as I am still discussing the ending and what really happened. While Nolan's premise is somewhat complicated (why would people do this, what types of things could we do with it, etc.) Kubricks is more primal: there are alien beings. Inception may go down as one of the great science fiction films along with Kubrick's. That is assuming the past is real.