Director/Writer: Christopher Nolan
Release Date: December 6 2010
DVD and Blu-ray release date: November 6 2010
Studio: Warner Home Video
Number of discs: Available as a solo DVD or Triple Play Blu-ray, DVD and Digital
Price: From £9.99-£14.99
Running Time: 148 mins
Certificate: 12
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas

Christopher Nolan is the Director and Writer of some of the best films of the last decade (The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Insomnia, Momento) so it’s no surprise his latest epic project, Inception, has been long awaited. The secrecy shrouding Inception, only heightened media interest and spawned a whole array of theories. Watching Inception, it all becomes clear why Nolan took years to realise this long-running idea and obsession.

In many ways, Inception’s long-running-time is necessary to give audiences enough time to adjust to the confusing concept the film is based around. Dreams expert, Cobb, acts as our teacher, explaining to other characters in order to help us understand. In dream-states, thoughts are apparently vulnerable to theft but it is possible to teach someone to have their defences up, even in sleep. It is also possible to construct dreams within dreams and killing someone in a dream will merely wake them up, although pain is just as much in the mind as a result of a physical act.

Cobb and his highly-skilled gang require a dreamer to “build” a world and a subject to fill it with their subconscious. Once these conditions are met, they can infiltrate the dream and extract and steal contracted information. Five minutes in the real world is an hour in dream-time, allowing the team long enough to complete each mission. As dreamscapes feel so real, team members take personal “totems” with them to root themselves in some sort of reality and ensure they realise they have filtrated someone else’s dream. Head spinning yet?

Blamed for his wife’s death, Cobb is a wanted man and exiled from his own children. When business tycoon, Saito (Ken Watanabe), offers him a deal in order for him to safely return home, he agrees to attempt Inception – the planting of an idea in someone’s head. Unfortunately his own complex past history almost compromises the mission. Ever warning and mysterious, speaking from personal experience Cobb talks of “The idea [being] the most resilient parasite – the smallest seed of an idea can grow and destroy us.”

Amid an exceptionally strong talented cast of big and growing names, DiCaprio plays the lead, Cobb, a guilt-ridden grief-stricken character of complexities. His background explores the blurring of reality and the terrifying concept of dreams becoming more desirable than the daily grind. Constantly haunted by his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb occasionally finds it difficult to differentiate between fiction and reality, having to force himself to remember how the idea of death as a means of escape “grew in her like a cancer”; Mal, like others, entered the dream state “to be woken up” – the dream became a reality.

Visually beautiful and mesmerising, Inception is ambitious in its scope, concept and cinematography. Although on the surface Inception is the story of one man’s fight to be reunited with his children, it also plays with the occasional irrational and paranoid fear of: “What if it’s all a dream and how can I tell when I’m asleep or waking”; Like the Inception process, to believe in its central premise, requires a “leap of faith”. Through Saito, Cobb and Mal, the possibility of living alternative lives, starting over and extending life, albeit it in a dream world, is also explored. Like this review, confusing it is, but well worth the mental grapple. Depending on the degree of your apres-viewing headache, Inception is possibly the film of the decade.

****

DVD Special Features

  • The Inception of Inception
  • The Japanese Castle: The Dream is Collapsing
  • Constructing Paradoxical Architecture
  • The Freight Train

Blu-ray Triple Play Special Features

  • Extraction Mode – Infiltrate the dreamscape of “Inception” – with this in-movie experience – to learn how Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of the cast and crew designed and achieved the movies signature moments.
  • Dreams: Cinema of the subconscious – Taking some of the most fascinating and cutting-edge dream research to-date on lucid dreaming, top scientists make the case that the dream world is not an altered state of consciousness, but a fully functional parallel reality.
  • Inception: The Cobol Job – Now in full animation and motion, check out this comic prologue to see how Cobb, Arthur, and Nash came to be enlisted by Cobol Engineering and perform an extraction on Saito.
  • 5.1 Inception soundtrack – Composer Hans Zimmer teams up once again with Director Christopher Nolan to create the soundtrack for “Inception”. Enjoy this feature in full 5.1 surround.
  • Conceptual Art Gallery
  • Promotional Art Archive
  • Inception Trailers
  • Inception TV Spots
  • Via BD-Live – Project Somnacin: Confidential Files – Get access to the highly secure files that reveal the inception of the dream-share technology.