In Inception, we have a movie that uses the Cartesian dilemma as a chance to examine ideas, rather than as a plot point. True, the half of me that’s saying this is the half of me that is majoring in philosophy, but Inception is good enough (and pretty enough) that it should satisfy anyone who is willing to examine their cogito for 2 and half hours, which, in truth, may not be that many people. However Inception is received by audiences at large, there’s no denying that it’s indubitably the strangest $200 million film ever made. Hell, it’s probably the strangest $100 million film ever made. Most of the film’s action takes place in dreams, and some of it takes place within dreams within dreams within dreams. Thankfully, Christopher Nolan, the auteur behind The Dark Knight, knows how to create a trailer-friendly money shot, or he never would have had this chance, regardless of his last film’s success.

Nolan again borrows an emotional coldness and penchant for urban gunfights from Michael Mann, but he attaches it to a story that’s  more complex and more intellectually stimulating. He’ll probably never match the technical efficiency of the armored truck robbery from Heat, but he can keep trying, because Mann will probably never have the imagination to fold Paris over on itself for the sake of an idea. The protagonist’s dramatic arc is also something that one would find in a Mann film, he is a professional spy that must finish one last job so he can return home to his children. The “one last job” is fairly unimportant, but what Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has to spy on is people’s dreams. Cobb enters the subconscious of other people’s dreams and steals confidential information, often while under fire from projections of the subject’s subconscious, which often take the form of men with guns. Cobb’s team is made up of Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a researcher, Eames (Tom Hardy), a thief who can easily take the shape of other people within a dream, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), an “architect” who creates the universe of the dream, Penrose stairs and all.

But what’s great about Inception isn’t the tireless exposition required to make the world make sense, rather it’s the way Nolan attacks these ideas with the precision of a surgeon rather than an open-minded acceptance of the power of our imagination. Even the objective truth of waking life is questioned, no easy answers are given, and the safety of the real world is never assured. Like DiCaprio’s last film, Shutter Island, reality is uncertain, but this film deals with logical consequences of such a scenario, rather than using it as a contrived plot point or a supposedly shocking third act twist. In the end, Nolan grasps what Descartes could not (granted, he was aided with hundreds of years of philosophical development), that even if we can determine whether our material existence is a dream or not, it doesn’t make our psychological experiences any less meaningful.

- Alan Jones