Inception

We went to see the movie Inception last night. It’s an interesting movie. Most of the reviews compare it to The Matrix. That makes sense because it relies on the same sort of trick of using alternate realities to allow for scenes with lots of cool special effects. In this case they’re using dreams within dreams to define the different realities, and the different stories are happening at the same time and tied together. For example, when a car goes over a bump, the characters inside the dream of the person inside the car all feel an earthquake.

I think that Inception’s use of multiple realities ends up being a lot more interesting than The Matrix. By the peak of the movie, they’ve stacked these stories up several levels deep and are still balancing connections between them all. One of the interesting things they did was to use different film styles in the different levels. So one of the story lines is a heist caper film, while another one is a James Bond like thing, and another is a love story. The result is a fun summer movie that keeps your interest all the way through.

Here’s David Denby’s review (which has a some spoilers). It seems like he was expecting more from it than what I expect from a summer action movie.