I am normally very critical of Leo as I don't think he is as great an actor as many people seem to believe. I think this stems a lot from his earlier work and in particular "the Beach." Anyway, Inception is an absolutely brilliant film and once again, I had no idea it existed because of where I have chosen to live in the world.
Based on the box-office figures of nearly $1 billion, i would imagine that most of the world is already familiar with this epic film and have likely seen it at least once. If you have somehow managed to not see this movie you need to find a way to make that happen right away.
Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) and Arthur, who I don't believe was given a surname in the movie (played by Joe Gordon-Levitt) perform corporate espionage and theft by entering the subconscious of their unknowing victims via induced and shared dreams. They then get to work on extracting information from their victims while they are sleeping in close proximity in real life. Since everyone in the dream must be sleeping in order for this to work, the movements their bodies go through in real life affects what is happening in the dream - which is extremely cool
This can include rooms moving and flipping, and also water flooding whatever scene they happen to be in at the time. How they were able to pull off a lot of these scenes is truly a testament to the directing capabilities of Nolan. While obviously a tremendous amount of CGI was used in this film, Nolan stayed committed to the idea that he needs to utilize as little CGI as possible. The snow palace at the end was actually an extremely realistic miniature because, well, they needed to blow it up.
"It's always very important to me to do as much as possible in-camera
Therefore a lot of rotatable sets were build and when you see the actors flying from one side of the room to the other, they actually were doing this on set. It's pretty wild to see.
As critical as i tend to be of DiCaprio, he was absolutely the correct choice to star in this film. Actually, every casting choice was spot on.
I extend this opinion even to Ellen Page, who i thought was a strange choice for this type of film considering that she was most widely remembered for her performance in Juno, which was largely a comedy film.
Overall, this is one of my personal favorite films of all time. Likely in my top 10 (which is a list i haven't actually compiled.) It would seem as though the world agrees with my opine for the most part though. As this film received nearly unanimous praise and is listed as one of the best movies of all time on IMDB.
