From Star Tribune
By COLIN COVERT
（写得不错。先放在这，有时间翻中文。）
Christopher Nolan dreams big. He has been responsible for many of the best moviegoing experiences of the past decade: "Memento," "Insomnia," "The Prestige" and his two terrific Batman movies. And with his surreal fever dream "Inception," he triumphantly outdoes himself.
This is a film to bend your mind like origami, an audacious, enigmatic heist thriller that journeys to the deepest corners of the subconscious. It questions the essence of love, the nature of reality, and toys with our expectations regarding story line, continuity, conflict and resolution. Nolan's film is surely the most ambitious psychological thriller ever, and yet also the most personal. His baroque imagination makes most directors' efforts look like beach-pail sand castles alongside Mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle. "Inception" is transcendent, a film lover's dream-come-true.
Superficially, the plot is simple, but nothing about this film is really on the surface. A skilled thief assembles a team to pull off a daring crime. They must penetrate an impregnable stronghold in waves of attack, flight, destruction and pursuit. Some members of the group are heroic, while others are questionable security risks.
So far, it's standard adventure melodrama. But the devil, and the genius, lurks in the details. The stronghold here is the well-coiffed head of a dying industrialist's adult son. The thief and his squad must enter his mind to implant an idea that will benefit a rival. This is done through a process called "shared dreaming," which is posited as a high-tech military breakthrough being bent to illegal private ends.
It allows several people connected by a suitcase-sized device to interact in a common fantasy. It's a virtual world familiar to anyone who has played such online multiplayer games as "World of Warcraft." But in this dreamland, it's possible to descend into another, deeper dream state, and so on, operating in multiple flights of the imagination. Events in one iteration create outcomes in another. The concept may perplex the action-film audience, yet it's one designed to entrance and stimulate true movie aficionados. What are films, after all, but shared hallucinations?
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a self-described professional specializing in stealing secrets from the subconscious when his victims are sleeping. He is blackmailed into the near-impossible assignment of smuggling an idea into the tycoon's mind. If he succeeds, Cobb's record will be cleared concerning a tragedy that wracks him with guilt.
To divulge more would be criminal. The film's twists and surprises are fresh and original and will surely grow richer on second and third viewing.
What certainties?
A close study may even topple whatever certainties we think we've gained. Characters challenge one another's version of events, and the deeper we look into the evidence, the more discrepancies emerge. The film's trademark image is a maze. The story line is unapologetically elliptical. Through editing that mimics dream logic, incidents repeat and settings reappear, but their details shift disconcertingly each time.
These inconsistencies imbue the film with a tone of uncertainty, instability and threat. "Inception" is a mystery to which every viewer must find his own solution.
The acting ensemble performs beyond praise. DiCaprio's Cobb, determined yet hounded by anxiety, is the finest of Nolan's traumatized heroes. Struggling with his own repressed memories as he works to implant a false one, he acts courageously while suffering vividly.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is cast brilliantly against type as a Bondish associate who handles firearms and hand-to-hand combat with aplomb. His key scene is a zero-gravity throwdown in a hotel corridor, where he and his adversary tumble up walls and skitter across ceilings. It's a jaw-dropping sequence that had every soul at my screening holding his breath. Tom Hardy is all imperturbable poise as a droll master of disguise, and Cillian Murphy brings a bruised soulfulness to the role of the business heir whose mind is about to be invaded.
Marion Cotillard is radiant playing a mystery woman Cobb can't keep out of his thoughts. Ellen Page graduates to a new adult maturity as an architecture prodigy whose gift for designing labyrinths is a key to the caper. A weak link is Ken Watanabe as a Japanese financier; his near-incomprehensible accent mars an otherwise worthy performance.
The film is said to have a nearly $200 million budget, and every shiny penny is on the screen, in monumental sets, stunning locations in France, Africa and Japan and unparalleled visual effects. The film's trailers already have disclosed some of the head-spinning images. Nolan rolls up Paris streets over the characters' heads like so much carpeting, towering apartment blocks collapse into raging surf, snowbound fortresses collapse in flame.
What these teasers can't show is how deftly the cutting moves us between multiple planes of illusion, nor how Hans Zimmer's foreboding score heightens the drama onscreen. From its epic opening frames to its audaciously ambiguous finale, "Inception" will be an unrivaled conversation starter. It'll go something like this: "Hey, I just saw an awesome movie. ... "
Colin Covert • 612-673-7186
（竟然还有作者电话╮(╯▽╰)╭）
