Inception

A petty thief with an estranged family gets the chance to do one big last job to put things right. Been there, seen that? That, in a nutshell, is the story of Inception.

Luckily, Christopher Nolan is at the helm of affairs, creating a thriller that is engrossing, even if not as clever as it likes to think it is.

Tom Cobb (Leonardo Di Caprio) is an 'extractor' - someone who enters the dreams of others to steal information hidden in the subconscious mind. Working alongside Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and estranged from his family thanks to a previous job gone wrong, Cobb gets the offer from Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea in a business rival, Robert Fischer's (Cillian Murphy) head. In return for helping him with his business needs, Saito will arrange for Cobb to be reunited with his family. So Cobb starts to get together a motley crew (Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao) to carry out the inception.

As a Nolan fan, Inception is a bit of a disappointment. Although the core idea in the film - of entering the subconscious through your dreams to plant ideas - is strikingly original, the storyline that has been built around this idea is as old as the hills. Coming from someone with a filmography as impressive as Nolan's, this shouldn't have really been the case. The film also thinks it's cleverer than it is - using a dream within a dream within a dream scenario to try and confuse people as to what is a dream, and what's real - but this doesn't really work - the dreams are fairly easy to follow, so the blur between dreams and reality just doesn't exist.

Criticisms aside, the screenplay is fast paced, and despite a 2 and a half hour run time, the film doesn't feel particularly long. Nolan's direction is tighter than his story, and the performances are very good all around.

All in all, despite the negative remarks, Inception is definitely worth a watch - I just wish Nolan had made the film he wanted to make, rather than making the next summer blockbuster.