**** Spoiler alert! This review reveals the major plot elements of the film Inception.

Inception (release date: 2010, rated PG-13)

Leonardo Dicaprio has acted in another excellent movie. Inception deals with a dream 'implanter' named Cobb (played by Dicaprio) whose job involves planting vivid memories into people's brains while they dream. They do this by entering the mind of the dreamer, and participate in the dream as if it were real. Forgetting for the moment that this dream traveling is done by some unexplained technical process, Cobb is hired by a Japanese conglomerate to mess with the minds of a competing American corporation. The American corporation is headed by an aging father who intends to pass control of his corporation to his 20-something son. So, Cobb assembles a team of dream warriors who arrange to put the son onto a private jet airplane, surreptitiously drug him so that he dreams, and put a wired electronic device on his body. Next, the dream-team hooks themselves up to the son's neural electronic device, self-administers the same dream-inducing drug, and descends into the son's dream subconscious. Once in the dream, everything starts going according to plan. But wait, dream-manipulator Cobb has submerged memories of his manipulative dead wife that re-surface, enter the collective dream, and attack the 'dream-team.' In the make-believe world of Inception, the injuries caused to members of the dream also cause genuine physical harm to their 'real' bodies outside the dream.

So, to solve problems arising in the reverie, the dream-team puts the people within the dream itself into a dream state (a dream-within-a-dream). When that 2nd dream layer also faces trouble, they descend into yet a 3rd dream-within-a-dream layer and solve their problems in that level. Only once each dream-level's problem is solved, can they all escape from the three dream-layers and make it back to 'reality' alive. They can participate in all dream levels simultaneously because time goes at a slower pace at each level down (in Inception's world only). The dream team awakens everyone from their reveries and returns alive and whole into the conscious state (i.e. reality). They succeeded in implanting an idea into their male target and made it seem like it was his idea all along (hence, the 'inception' of the implanted idea). The son will now act upon his newly implanted thought, harming his own corporation without his knowledge, and unwittingly helping out the Japanese conglomerate that hired Cobb.

The film has excellent special effects and sound. My favorite effect was early in the film, in a different dream, where within a decaying seaside city, huge 20-story buildings calve off into the water like the way Antarctic glaciers lose giant sheets of heavy ice, splashing mightily into the ocean - a surreal visual.

Amazingly, despite Inception's plot twists and complex three-level dreams, most of its viewers should be able to follow the complicated film plot all the way through. Inception succeeds in warping the viewer's reality. It has the same effect as Johnny Mnemonic, 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, and Brainstorm where the movie viewer is momentarily transported away from our earthly reality into another way of thinking, and fleetingly looks differently at his own version of 'reality' once he stops viewing the film. Watching movies is a temporary entertaining escape from our world, and Inception succeeds in that escapism.

I enjoyed Inception, and rate it 8/10.

Rating: 8/10

(Rating system: '10' is best, '1' is worst)

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This video was shot on a nice sunny summer day of 2007 in southern California, USA
It shows mostly longboarders.