INCEPTION is the summer film you'll be talking about all year.

If Christopher Nolan's MEMENTO delved into the cinematic head trip of short-term memory loss, then INCEPTION explores the mysterious mazes of the heart and our fondest, darkest dreams, and it's a much more emotionally involving puzzle to solve. Told with the visual wonder of origami cityscapes folding over themselves but anchored to reality by a father's love for his estranged children, this is a brain-bending, challenging tale of redemption and absolution. Your mind may be the scene of the crime in the film's plot function, but the true punishment is the pain we inflict upon ourselves by regretting the past. Yet this means we also hold the key to our own redemption and release.

Boiled down to its brilliant essence, writer/director Nolan's film is a story of dreams not so much in the nightly sleep sense, but that of the heart's desire and what we're willing to do to fulfill that deepest, most personal dream. This mission belongs to Dom Cobb, played with finesse and conflicted power by Leonardo Di Caprio in one of his best performances. On the surface of the plot, Cobb is an idea thief: a freelance operative hired by corporate elite, trained to infiltrate a target's subconscious mind and steal information they hold secret (known as extraction).  Think of extraction as industrial espionage in a MATRIX-like virtual world of mental suggestion — an illegal Jedi mind trick.  Such robbery may be Cobb's for-hire mission, but with each inception his true goal is to escape the prison of his own guilty, mourning heart which he can't elude even when he's awake.

Trying to summarize the story of INCEPTION is like rationally explaining a dream just after you've woken from it.  Cobb is an extractor, hired to steal ideas from people's minds until he gets an offer (he can't refuse) from his most recent target, a business magnate named Saito (Ken Watanabe).  Saito hires Cobb to implant an idea in the mind of his competitor's son, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) in the rare, almost unattempted process called inception.  Inception is a difficult skill to master and nearly impossible to pull off, since the film portrays the human subconscious as attacking foreign ideas like antibodies attacking a virus in the body. Saito wants Cobb in implant into Fischer's mind the idea to dissolve his dying father's corporate empire, but for the inception to work, Cobb must make Fischer think the dismantling is his own idea once he awakens from the shared dream.  Not only is inception terribly difficult, we learn it also poses dangers to those implanting the idea in the target's mind.  The story and dramatic meaning of INCEPTION hinges upon this danger in ways audiences must discover for themselves.

This all sounds quite cerebral but Nolan blends the mental mind tricks with stunning visuals to spark viewers' imagination and peppers the plot with action as visceral as the best first-person shooter video games.  INCEPTION plays like an intricate chess match with a master storyteller, but at any moment the game pieces may float off the board and spring to life in virtual battle. Thieves and security thugs battle in hotel corridors unbound by the logical laws of gravity as a real-world van tumbles off a bridge with Cobb's dreaming team asleep in it. This isn't merely wire-fu fantasy fighting to look cool on-screen (though it sure the hell does), but this flying fist battle ensues with the clock ticking away valuable minutes of dream-time, creating palpable dramatic tension.  By this point, audiences are so attuned to living in Nolan's dream-time state, that when the film checks back on real-world actions, their van tumbling off the bridge hangs in air an almost comically long time, creating even more agonizing tension in the dreamside scene.  Sans the sci-fi trappings of THE MATRIX, audiences can easily identify with the oddity and seeming reality of simple human dreaming, which infuses INCEPTION with a gut-check significance not even the coolest comic-based universe could achieve.

Yes, this film is challenging and you really must pay attention to it at all times.  These are good things in a summer swamped with several mediocre, uninspired time-filling films demanding little more than a pair of eyes and a pulse to watch. Your reward for concentrating on INCEPTION is the wonder of watching Paris fold up at its horizon and bend over on top of itself: cars, pedestrians, buildings hanging effortlessly in the air as Cobb and his new inception team architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), walk up a vertically tilted street and then upsidedown as the city hovers over itself in an origami-folded cube. In mythology, Ariadne helped Theseus find his way through the labyrinth of the Minotaur.  For this inception to work, Cobb needs Ariadne to be his team architect to design mental replications of an entire cityscape as a maze so their dreaming target can walk through it for hours without escaping it or even knowing it's a dream world — lest he realize he's dreaming and wake up before Cobb can implant the idea. Yet Ariadne soon learns that she must design the dream maze so Cobb doesn't know how to navigate it so the dark secret of his own mind can't infiltrate and decode the puzzle first.

To pull off this greatest inception ever, Cobb and his team must create a dream within a dream . . . within a dream, layering levels of dream-reality in Fischer's mind to probe deeper into his subconscious and implant the corporate dissolution idea so subtly that he will accept it as his own inspiration.  Assisting Cobb is Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as the dream team mechanic in charge of coordinating their actions, Eames (Tom Hardy) as the high-ordnance muscle protecting the group and a forger assuming the guise of the target's confidants, and Yusuf (Dileep Rao) as the chemical wizard who sedates the team so they can dream deeply for hours instead of minutes.

Most trusted by Cobb is Miles (Michael Caine), the man who taught him to be an extractor and also the grandfather to Cobb's two young children.  Despite the guild Cobb feels over the death of his wife (as if the subject were that simple), he and Miles retain a tenuous connection while Cobb is estranged from his kids, insisting that Miles help him complete this final inception in order to reunite with his children again.

That is Cobb's one and only meaningful dream in life — in fact, such extraction/inception missions are the only way Cobb can even dream anymore, and yet his dreams are constantly haunted by the troubling memory of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard).  Since he cannot escape the dark secrets he buries deep in his mind, they arise in the form of Mal  who constantly threatens the success of his missions by demanding he confront the dark fears and guilt she represents. Because Cobb literally cannot separate his job from his personal life within his own mind, his suppressed guilt and regret endanger his entire team with grave consequences.

Science fiction concepts aside, the fine acting across the board make INCEPTION a worthwhile exercise in mental gymnastics. While characters like Arthur and Eames have fun with their dream duties at the right moments, the fact that the entire cast approaches their roles and this story with stern sincerity makes the brain-flexing concept and easy and enjoyable sell.  Michael Caine is money in the back, especially when partnered with Nolan.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers the best performance of his adult-age career, and Tom Hardy simmers with inviting charm as the team trickster.  Ellen Page sheds her JUNO-era image in a mature performance which still employs all her relatively youthful appeal.  Dileep Rao adds some dramatic depth to his resume while serving up skillfully played moments of levity, and one hopes this expands his opportunities going forward.  Cillian Murphy, far from his manic mannerisms seen as the Scarecrow in Nolan's excellent BATMAN reboot films, electrifies his role as the inception target with low-wattage subtly and high-voltage vulnerability.  Tom Berenger serves well as Fischer's confidant Browning, and Marion Cotillard dances between displays of heartbroken turmoil and viscerally cold menace.  There's not a false note in the bunch over two-plus hours.

The production is superb on all fronts, but the accomplishments of score composer Hans Zimmer, cinematographer Wally Pfister, and production designer Guy Dyas deserve special mention for making this brain-warping alternate reality feel and look so visually and emotionally compelling.

INCEPTION, reportedly an effort ten years in the making by auteur Christopher Nolan, possesses the uncanny knack to offer summer movie-style thrills and visual punch while towering above the pack in its intellectual power.  The film already has early viewers buying tickets to see it again and its opening weekend has barely begun.  Sure, INCEPTION has a gigawatt of buzz surrounding it, but more importantly it merits such heat as both eye candy and mental investment into its heartfelt drama.  We won't spoil the ending, if only because a direst shot-for-shot description of the final scene would be meaningless without having experiences all that precedes it. INCEPTION is Christopher Nolan's triumph and should be considered a front-running contender for award recognition six months ahead of Hollywood's silly season.  Films which have audiences bursting out of the theater after the credits to discuss what they just watched are rare gems.  INCEPTION is a rare dream, both dark and delightful, and you'll be talking about it until you see it again and long afterward.

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READ FILMEDGE'S SECOND REVIEW OF INCEPTION BY JOAN RADELL