Martyn Pedler

Sorry, Batman. Inception is probably Christopher Nolan’s best film.

So I’m especially pleased that it’s a success, both critically and at the early box office – because any time a non-franchise, non-remake, non-adapted blockbuster does well, it’s good for cinema in general. Weirdly, though, I’ve seen half a dozen reviews who take exception to one thing in particular: that Inception’s dream worlds don’t feel like dreams.

There’s a collection of these dream descriptions here: “curiously pedestrian”, “too literal-minded”, or reducing the human subconscious to “a routine action movie”.

Because dreams are, like, crazy! Why didn’t Nolan include a scene of my high school that also wasn’t my high school, you know? Or a clown, who’s just kind of there? Dude!

Inception features “dream architects”, deliberately constructing their own mental mazes, so it should be obvious these aren’t your usual, organic dreams. Inception’s characters project themselves inside them, or see their unconscious minds rushing in to fill their hypothetical spaces. It’s all more Wachowski than Freud, and Nolan has very little interest in the “Hey! Look! A backwards dancing dwarf!” non sequiturian style used by filmmakers like David Lynch to emulate dreaming on screen.

We barely even see the machine that allows them to network their dreams together – and why should we? What do we need to know other than when they press the button? And travelling between dream-states doesn’t come with swirling CGI tunnels like Avatar’s shifting consciousnesses. Nolan lets regular editing do all the work.

Over at IO9, Annalee Newitz says Inception will “change the way you watch movies”. Well, maybe. Maybe not. But she is dead right to suggest that Inception’s special effects sequences are “as much about how you stage an action scene as they are about the scenes themselves”.

For example: when dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) asks his dream-victim Fischer (Cillian Murphy) why he can’t remember how they got here – how their scene actually began – it works as a quick flash of dream-illogic. But it also works much more powerfully as a reminder of how movies are edited. After all, we didn’t see the beginning of this scene, either. Like Buston Keaton in his masterpiece Sherlock Jr., we are all trapped between the edits, stitching the moments together as best we can.

Christopher Nolan has always been more of an architect than a storyteller, and sometimes that’s hurt his films. The Prestige, for instance, suffered from his determination to keep the three-act structure of a magic trick – because it meant leaving the big ta daaa! reveal until long after the audience had already guessed it. It benefited, however, from David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla, which is empirically awesome. See?

This time, Nolan’s obsession with structural puzzles don’t interfere with Inception’s story. They are its story. No matter what ambiguous concepts are whizzing around a scene, they’re in the service of one thing: action. Big, old-fashioned action. In fact, it contains numerous jaw-dropping action scenes – hardly “routine” – all constructed with real weight and gravity – and they cut through the film’s more pretentious moments like a hot bullet through butter.

That’s what makes this a more than worthy sequel to The Matrix – just ten years later than expected.