Christopher Nolan is a man who many seem to forget doesn’t have the biggest line-up of films in his whole history. Starting out as an indie director and slowly making his way up from there, the director has roughly only 8-9 movies under his directorial belt and only a small amount more in the writing department. While his work has been criticised for its needlessly convoluted storylines, the messy structure of his films, pretty bland characters and a whole more emphasis on dialogue than maybe needed, it’s hard to ignore many of the movies that he’s created and how each one at least left an impact in some way. With movies like The Prestige and Memento doing pretty well for themselves and even being able to revitalise the Batman franchise by making arguably what mainly consider the best Batman, or even comic book movie, The Dark Knight, the next movie he made strikingly left people just as speechless, the 2010 hit Inception. A man named Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is part of a team that specialises in entering into people’s dreams and tampering with them to get their own results. Left isolated and on the run after he was convicted of murdering his wife (played by Marion Cotillard), Cobb is given the chance to return to his children when he is tasked with entering into the mind of a rich young man named Robert Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy) to convince him to not take on his father’s company. With a gang of specialists behind, Cobb enters into multiple levels of the dream-world to pull of this heist, as tragedies from the past continue to haunt him as it goes even further down. Being the movie that started so many memorable images, ideas and ending every trailer with a loud horn-like sound effect, Inception strangely appealed to a lot of people despite it being arguably one of his most confusing and complicated plots ever. But with a lot of clever planning out, some amazing concepts, and with a surprisingly less amount of dialogue, it’s a mind blower that started a lot more in the future.

The movie walks an interesting middle ground of being bombarded with scientific talks, tons of rules regarding the dream-world and filled with a lot of dialogue scenes without much action balancing them out, and yet it doesn’t feel nearly as drawn-out and dull as some of his other long wordy speech scenes can be. Despite the long running time and less dramatic narrative, the film surprisingly holds your interest for the full length and doesn’t dull throughout most parts of it. The reasoning for that is that the dialogue is always focused on the main story and goal; most of his failed speeches are prattles about philosophy and preachy monologues that don’t connect with what’s going on in the movie, here everything said has a purpose and a pay-off, it doesn’t waste time and does a fairly decent job filling the audience in on all the technicals and making them remember each step. The ideas for this movie are incredibly interesting and the movie follows up with a lot of these great concepts with great execution, making them both physically and psychologically engaging with being too vague or obvious. Instead of just being a simple mind-warping area with crazy rules, it tackles themes of escapism, losing oneself to madness, denial, closing people off, and the very idea of creativity ruining someone’s reality, it balances these concepts with a straightforward heist and they surprisingly gel together. While the actual mind-heist itself can get a bit lost during the long running time and isn’t nearly as interesting as the film’s side story, but it’s a decent stabilising story to off-shot the creative ideas.

Characters in Nolan movies are usually the ones that suffer the most from his style of directing. Most are not necessarily done badly, but it would be hard pressed to remember a single name of any of his characters if they aren’t from pre-existing comic material. That is a similar issue here and to an even stronger extent because the real star of this movie is the concept, not the characters involved in it. Most of them aren’t much more than caricatures and even by that level not always the best handled. The main character actually has a really interesting, gripping, tragic, and thought-provoking backstory, yet his presence in the current time is so bland, it’s hard to imagine it comes from the same person. Most of the side characters are more familiar actors playing roles rather than actual characters and by that logic, the acting is pretty split. On the one hand, Ellen Page is a good support, Tom Hardy is pretty bland and too much of a side-note, but seems to enjoy just doing his own thing, and Cillian Murphy actually does a pretty good job in his part, one of the few roles that actually has an identity. But on the other end, Ken Watanabe doesn’t much throughout the movie, Michael Cain is rarely seen, Joseph Gordon Levitt is really dull and uninteresting to watch, Marion Cotillard is strangely flat and awkward, and with Leo, the issue is one that follows him in almost every performance; he does clearly try and puts in effort, but he rarely feels like a leading man and never stands out as a separate character. He doesn’t share any chemistry with his wife despite the strong backstory the two share, but his usual screaming child-like antics are played down a lot more in this movie at least, producing a less memorable but at least serviceable performance.

Even though the trailers milked the scene where the buildings envelop in on themselves, the film isn’t filled with that much striking visuals as one would imagine. That shot is really cool and led way to a bunch of similar effects in the future, and the film is even home to a really fun action scene in a hotel hallway where the line of gravity keeps altering to different sides of the building, those moments are really fun to look at. However, the dream-world isn’t that visually pleasing to look at, mostly consisting of a bunch of dull greys and blues, which works in replicating reality but not so much in pleasing imagery. The locations are mostly just large city and, to no one’s surprise, a snowy mountain, and they do get a bit tiring to look at after a long period of time spend in them. The music by Hans Zimmer is again another effect memorable piece that works great in and out of the movie. The film practically created a new trailer cliché with the booming conclusive note, and the rest of the score has a great feeling of rushing peril.

Inception has been viewed as an overhyped overly long dull Nolan movie that’s much more idea that movie, yet the results are surprisingly up to the expectations built up around it. It somehow features a lot of Nolan’s clichés, but handles them in a more reasonable well-structured way that keeps the film from feeling dull. It takes an old concept, entering people’s dreams, and not only makes it original to itself, but also makes it feel strangely realistic, like it could function in the real world but on a less dramatic and more psychological level. It tricks the unexpected with a disjointed story that actually has meaning, plot twists that actually get good shocks, ideas that are taken in vastly more intriguing ways than expected and makes an over two-hour long heist like movie work really well. Its true that the characters are still more actors than anything, the running time is handled well but will still leave people feeling a bit squirmy, and it’s hard to say if it will sway non-Nolan fans, but for the fans and maybe even casual audiences looking to check it out, its will be a worthwhile viewing. Like a top that never stops spinning, the presence of Nolan will not soon be forgotten.