Guest blogger: Alex 1

Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, starts off on a beach outside of a facility with a man lying face down in the sand. Little do we know at this point, we are currently viewing a dream that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his adversaries have entered into in order to steal ideas from a super mind (Saito Ken Watanabe) via a machine they built for dream extraction. The opening scene is just a test drive of the machine developed by Cobb. He is hired by the same man (Saito) to give people ideas in their own dreams so that they think it is pure reality, rather than a dream. In order to do this Cobb sets up a team. This team consists of Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who has been an associate of Cobb’s for many years, Earnes (Tom Hardy) who is a master at deception and he can change his facial/body figure and structure when they are in these dreams, and Ariadne (Ellen Page) a young and intelligent architect who is a prodigy at creating mazes and intricate layouts for settings that the characters visit. Cobb coaches the whole team on his plan and eventually along the way Ariadne finds out that Cobb has lost his wife due to what Cobb has been doing. When one enters a dream through Cobb’s machine ‘x’ amount of times, one can only wonder what is dream or ‘made up’ apart from pure reality. This is what drives Cobb’s wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) to insanity and she jumps off a building because she perceives reality as a dream due to all the dreams she has entered with Cobb. A lot of the characters in this movie are mysterious, but we figure out their personalities and background as we venture further into the story. The whole plot has the team going 3 layers down in the dream world (aka a dream within a dream within a dream) in order to plant a new idea into Robert Fischer Jr. (young billionaire who is heir to his father’s corporation) so that Saito can defeat his business rival. The universal theme of this movie that the audience can take from viewing it is: “What we believe to be real is not because of its existence, but because of our acceptance of it as ‘reality’. I think that Roger Ebert did a thorough and well thought out analysis of this movie and I enjoyed reading what he had to say. Overall, I believe this movie is worth everyone’s time and money that enjoys a good suspense and thriller adventure. And finally, no matter how many times you watch Inception, you can still pick up something new from the film that you didn’t spot previously.