Inception

Inception is an absurdly expensive flight of fancy. Christopher Nolan's film jumps off from a big-lie idea of there being a whizz-tech powerful enough that it allows people to break into each other's dreams. We are lead slowly through sequences that establish and demonstrate the various mechanical laws that allow interlopers to dabble around in foreign subconscious. Naturally, this wonder science is used, primarily, as a tool for industrial espionage. Machine established, the film then becomes a launch-pad for weaving together a series of clashing action sequences, each one set at a distinct simulation level of the quarry's dreamscape. These action plains intersect and distend, spinning in and out of each other at a frequency close to parody. Inception invents a behavioural rule-set, premised on complete fantasy, then gleefully vandalises it. It's not in love with characters; instead it finds joy in establishing a new idea, then gleefully kicking the chair out from underneath it. Inception is, in this sense, joyous; a piece that may move with the familiar beats of the blockbuster - staffed by mission-focused experts who deal in broad, cool strokes - but isn't constrained by them. It's a heist film where everything goes wrong and these professionals have to think on their feet. Their central task quickly becoming wildly irrelevant when judged against the action of performing these feats. Along the way enough details are left nagging to undermine all of the reality we have witnessed; micro-details and spectral figments take on alarming meaning the deeper we tumble into our players.