In order to keep your sanity and wits intact while watching Inception keep repeating, “it’s just a Chris Nolan movie, it’s just a Chris Nolan movie.” A fascinating look at dreams, and an exhilarating bit of cinema Inception may not be a game changer like The Matrix but it packs all the ingredients of a hit with its inimitable story and various special effect set pieces.

Inception layers various levels of dreams as reality. Other films have touched on this premise. Dreamscape (from 1984) was a perennial 80s effects driven film that’s forever etched in my mind since running non-stop on cable during that new wave decade. Until the End of the World, the 90s Wim Wenders film featured a devise that recorded dreams. Then everyone became addicted to watching their iDream toy. And Paprika, a Japanese anime from with an excellent soundtrack from 2024, had a plot where people use a machine that can access other people’s dreams. But Inception doesn’t really fit so easily into specific categories. Sure it’s supposed to be complicated, and yes the plot packs info so densely you’d look to The Big Sleep with its notoriously twisted narrative as a movie that’s easily explainable by comparison.

Words like smart describe Inception but not the kind of smart where you, say, understand higher math. It’s more like everyone can remember one phone number. Nolan gives you five, all at once. Even as you’re processing the events unfolding on screen you get caught up in action sequences that makes you want to roll with it.

Nolan casts with an eye for a top international cast, so here alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt we have people like Tom Hardy (excellent actor who appeared in last year’s little seen Bronson), Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao and a couple of others. Cilliam Murphy plays the mark or person on which DiCaprio’s team has set their sights.

In the world of Inception team Dicaprio weaves through dreamscapes wherein they enter another person’s dream and plant suggestions or steal ideas. Instead of flashbacks and even flashbacks within flashbacks Inception goes into dreams inside of dreams, each with different rules of space and time. The trick is getting the mark to sleep at the same time everyone goes REM.

The entire film has a cold hard look and the CGI effects are flawless. Hans Zimmer’s music is pounding and relentless in a good way. Inception is as much fun as I’ve had watching a film recently, and that’s because Inception was constantly giving me cool thoughts to go along with the non-stop barrage of action and character interaction. I want to lucid dream and in fact do at times. Inception plays on the fact that people never remember the beginning of their dreams but rather the end.

By the time you witness the second or third or even fourth state of dreaming in Inception it feels like you’ve progressed into a separate state of alpha waves.

- Michael Bergeron