Inception (prelude to review)

I’ve just got back from a screening of Christopher Nolan’s mind-warping, genre-bending balls-to-the-wall sci-fi action thriller ‘Inception’ – which, on a first viewing, I have to say fully justifies every bit of hype – and I’m tempted to hammer out a quick review and post it in enough time to qualify for my fourth contribution to Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blog-a-thon which concludes today at Things That Don’t Suck.

Then I read a couple of reviews – by Jake at Not Just Movies and Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy – which really raised the bar. It seems like everyone in the blogosphere is throwing in their tuppence-ha’penny worth on ‘Inception’ – it’s generating as much fervid and fervent response as Nolan’s previous film, ‘The Dark Knight’, did – but Jake and Tim have gone above and beyond, producing the kind of intelligent and sophisticated yet unpretentious film writing that reminds me why I started my own blog.

Accordingly, and with just as must respect accorded to Christopher Nolan himself, I feel need to take a few days to think my way through ‘Inception’ as fully and deeply as possible. It’s a hell of a film and it deserves the most comprehensive review I can give it. So I’m going to post a couple of Shots on the Blog reviews over the next week, then turn my attention to ‘Inception’.

Right now, the most authoritative thing I can say about it – and even this is a clutching-at-straws approach to a summary – is that it comes across like a conflation of ‘The Matrix’ (with real cerebral concerns instead of pseudo-intellectualism), ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (with someone’s mind instead of a vault) and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ (snow, fortress, shoot-outs, explosions) filtered through William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ and rewritten by Iain M. Banks.

And even that’s simplifying it!