If there's anything you should know going into Inception, it's that it comes from the mind of Christopher Nolan. For reference, if MC Escher were a director he'd seem like a cheap imitator of Nolan's collective body of work. Seriously, try watching any one of his movies once, and only once. Now try reciting the entire plot. I promise you, you forgot something. Did you remember what Michael Caine was doing? Don't forget about the double! You see, I've figured out Nolan's gambit: set up an original and compelling premise and populate it with an interesting cast with good chemistry. Now that the trap is set, VIOLATE THE AUDIENCE'S TENDER, PINK, VIRGIN MINDS. They will come crawling back, tattered and broken, attempting to comprehend what it was that shattered their fragile reality.

The latest take on Nolan's maniacal plot to break unsuspecting moviegoers, Inception, is all about dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio extracts information from people's dreams by going into them, and then into dreams within that dream and then another dream within that other second dream. Then there's also Limbo, which is like dream purgatory. They do a better job explaining it in the movie. Anyways, DiCaprio is the best Extractor in the Extracting industry, and so Ken Watanabe decides to hire him for a completely different job, which is Inception (see what they did there?). Anyways, Watanabe hires DiCaprio and his motley crew to plant an idea in his business competitor's head to dissolve his father's business empire. DiCaprio does this not for money, but so that Watanabe can make the Magic Plot Device Phone Call™ that lets DiCaprio go back to the United States and see his kids. So DiCaprio gets together his plucky posse of dream invaders, consisting of Joseph Gordon Levitt's serious face, Dileep Rao as their drug dealer, Tom Hardy and the One-Liner Challenge, and Ellen Page moonlighting as Leo's common sense. They all get on an airplane with Cillian Murphy in order to get inside his head (literally) and perform the inception. Marion Cotillard also shows up every so often to ruin everyone's shit as part of the subplot that is DiCaprio's guilt issues.

All in all, it's a big, mind-bending thrill ride that is everything that it was trying to be: a compelling and original action movie. There's just the right amount of exposition on the central concept of dreams to keep you from getting confused without doing too much to bore you, a problem that bogged down some of his previous films. The cast is definitely interesting enough to keep you engaged in what they're doing, and everything they do makes sense and looks cool. The plot moves at a breakneck speed, and Nolan shows no hesitation in overlapping the subplots and personal drama with the main events, and to his credit, it works overall. The whole idea of dreams within dreams ends up being really cool and makes for very fun and well done action sequences, and the whole thing comes together in what is ultimately a very intriguing package. It's a bit of The Matrix, a bit of Memento, with a dash of The Science of Sleep, and of all the movies coming out this summer, this is certainly among the most enjoyable of them.

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