<< INCEPTION >> I can only say that I have never seen such a nice movie. It has

extraordinary imagination. Before the end of the movie I felt like I had been in a dream, until the last few minutes back to reality from the dream, and it made me feel very shocked. It also makes me understand a truth: the human brain has a super function that all computers in the world do not have, creating the whole city and details in a person's brain. Personally, I think in addition to commercial genre film on the surface of the layer outside the packaging, the core of the movie story is very artistic. If you remove those fancy but is really a very good shooting, car chases and fights, and that doesn't make any principle explain dream machine, the story itself was not influenced by the loss. It tells or deepest desires and the conflict between the reality, and how to complete the process of self soul redemption.

The film in terms of artistic expression is also very good:

Feel the movie represents the film after more than a century of

exploration and discovery, as an art form, the content of the shape of the technical indicators are a perfect match and fusion. The movie big tells the story of consciousness in the brain structure, thus constitute a strain of sci-fi thriller. Wandering between real life and lucid dreaming, film with strong music issued by exquisite image query, bring the audience a big show intelligence and skill of brawn. But "inception," is not a perfect film,Although there have been two and a half hours film, from the perspective of the world set of the film, it constructed the illusion world run rules or some vague, at the same time, a lot of ins and outs of the characters and story details stated too hasty. For some fans, however, this is a test and fun.

 

第二篇：盗梦空间 Inception 英文影评 review by James Berardinelli

盗梦空间 Inception 英文影评 review by James Berardinelli

Undoubtedly, some reviews are going to describe Inception as confusing. Such a description confounds me, and may be more indicative of how accepting people have become of screenplays that allow for no ambiguity and traverse plotlines by blazing trails that even a blind man could follow. For those who pay attention, Inception is not confusing. It is smart, taut, and does not reward indolence. If you zone out or make a trip to the snack bar, it will lose you. All it asks of viewers is that they do something rare: engage the intellect. Details may elude even the most attentive viewer, but the big picture will remain in focus. Despite layering dream upon dream and blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, writer/director Christopher Nolan has meticulously established Inception in such a way that getting lost is not an option. Is it a mind fuck? Maybe, but not one that leads to endless frustration. Nolan has a story to tell and he tells it. His main goal - at least until the end - is not screwing with the viewer's perception. He provides enough clarity that we know where we are and what we're watching and that we don't founder.

In fact, one could make an argument that the straightforward nature of Nolan's approach to such potentially mind-bending material is one of Inception's weaknesses. By pulling his punches, so to speak, and keeping things mostly linear, Nolan disallows the possibility of the screenplay turning into a Mobius Strip. Influences include, most obviously, Dark City and The Matrix. There's also a sense of kinship with Martin Scorsese's recent Shutter Island, not only because that film also stars Leonardo DiCaprio, but because both productions toy with

narrator perspective and the intersection of illusion with reality.

However, the strongest synergy I can think of is with the TV series Caprica (the prequel to Ronald Moore's Battlestar Galactica remake),

which uses a similar approach to the one employed in Inception to explore virtual realities.

Inception unfolds is a near-future setting in which devices have been invented that allow individuals to invade the dreams of others and, if they're clever and experienced enough, extract secrets revealed by way of the subject's subconscious. One of the best such thieves is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is being recruited for a job by corporate magnate Saito (Ken Watanabe) after failing in an espionage attempt to steal one of Saito's secrets. At first, Cobb isn't interested, but then Saito offers a carrot that Cobb can't refuse: the opportunity for past crimes to be forgiven - something that would allow him to return to the United States and see his two young children. The nature of Cobb's infractions is not immediately revealed, but they involve his wife (Marion Cotillard). What Saito wants is not an ordinary request. Instead of asking for an extraction, he demands an inception - the implantation of an idea deep in the subconscious that will bear future results. Most dream thieves consider this impossible, but Cobb disagrees, because he has done it. It's risky and dangerous, but possible. The target is Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), who has just inherited the corporate empire built by his father (Pete Posthelthwaite). Cobb assembles his team, beginning with his frequent compatriot, Arthur (Joseph-Gordon Levitt). Together, they recruit an "architect" - the individual who builds the dream worlds. She is Ariadne (Ellen Page), a student studying under the tutelage of Cobb's father-in-law (Michael Caine). After Ariadne undergoes her training (which serves as a tutorial for the audience, as well), the final two members are brought on board: Eames (Tom Hardy), who can impersonate anyone in a dream, and Yusef (Dileep Rao), a chemist whose drugs can keep sleepers sedated or bring them back to wakefulness. Together with Fischer and Saito, these five travel into a

dream-within-a-dream-within-a dream where, three levels deep, they attempt the inception.

Inception is a less challenging project than Memento, which brought Nolan to the world's attention. It isn't as convoluted and the payoff, despite toying with our expectations, lacks the boldness of the earlier production. Still, this is a very good film that involves the intellect while at the same time not ignoring the visceral. There are numerous straightforward action scenes, including Matrix-like gravity-free hand-to-hand combat and a car chase, that inject some adrenaline into the proceedings. In fact, the entire second half of the film amounts to one massive, carefully choreographed sequence of escalating suspense as dangerous circumstances unfold across three levels of dreamscapes. Hans Zimmer's pounding score and Nolan's careful cross-cutting tie everything together perfectly.

As intellectually involving as this material is, Nolan wisely does not ignore the need for the viewer to have a strong emotional attachment to the main character. Cobb's backstory unfolds gradually, with the screenplay dropping pieces, like crumbs, in front of the viewer at regular intervals. We learn the truth about his relationship with his wife and children during the course of the narrative and, as one might suspect given Nolan's apparent anti-happiness bias (his movies aren't exactly carefree and joyous), there are tragic elements. Cobb is the only character who experiences significant development - the other members of his team are secondary. They get plenty of screen time but we know little about them beyond their functions within the scheme.

Seemingly half of the Batman Begins/The Dark Knight cast is on board for this production: Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine. Of course, when working with actors of that caliber, it's hard to go wrong. Apparently, DiCaprio, in addition to being Martin Scorsese's current day

Robert DeNiro, was always Nolan's first choice for Cobb, and the versatile actor brings the full weight of his talent to bear on a difficult role. DiCaprio has to hint at unpleasant secrets in Cobb's past while forging a bond with the audience. It's up to the performer to make Inception more about human beings than about special effects. He succeeds and that's one reason why this movie isn't only about challenging ideas and eye candy.

The special effects in Inception serve the story, rather than the other way around - which is a rare occurrence these days, when the emphasis seems to be on providing viewers with visual amusement park rides. In this case, we are presented with cities where streets defy gravity by arching overhead and massive cliffs that collapse into the sea. There is a point to everything, most often to illustrate how dreams distort the commonplace into something that defies the natural laws. Is Inception cerebral? Yes. Is it too cerebral for mass audiences? I would argue that's not the case. In a sense, one gets out of Inception what one is willing to put in. Those looking for an action/adventure film can identify that, although 148 minutes is a little long for something so simplistic. Those willing to think and puzzle a little more will find that the twists and turns of the narrative aren't as labyrinthine as they initially appear. Inception is more accessible than obtuse. It proves, among other things, that Nolan has been unwilling to bask in the success of The Dark Knight. Looking for new and exciting challenges, he has found one here.

盗梦空间 Inception 英文影评 review by Anton Bitel

"Once an idea has taken hold in the brain it is almost impossible to eradicate," says Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio).

He should know. After all, he is an 'eradicator' – an industrial spy whose work involves infiltrating people's brains when they are in a vulnerable dream state and stealing their innermost secrets. His latest assignment is even more challenging – an 'inception', which involves not taking an old idea away, but implanting an entirely new one, without the subject, in this case corporate heir Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), ever suspecting that the idea was anyone's but his own in the first place.

Cobb's right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) suggests that inception is impossible, but Cobb himself insists he has done it once before. "You just," he says, "have to go deep enough" – and Cobb proves willing to go to any depth, once powerful client Saito (Ken Watanabe) has promised in return to enable the international fugitive at last to return home to his beloved children.

So a specialist crew is assembled for the high-concept heist – Cobb, Arthur, fledgling 'architect' Ariadne (Ellen Page), experienced 'forger' Eames (Tom Hardy) and experimental chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao), with Saito along for the ride – but as they play off their elaborately layered dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream sting operation, they must face not only the armed-and-dangerous projections of Robert Fischer's own mental defenses, but also the far more treacherously unpredictable psychic detritus of Cobb's unresolved feelings towards a past, half-real, half-dreamt, with his former wife Mal (Marion Cotillard).

If philosophers from Descartes on have discussed the difficulty, if not impossibility, for an experiencing subject to distinguish dreams from reality, then cinema, with its all-encompassing dramas of sight and sound, is perfectly suited to giving vivid, vital form to this thorny problem. For it is in cinema that suspension of disbelief sits happily with patent fictions, so that seeing both is, and is not, believing. It is this sort of paradox on which Inception depends – indeed 'paradox' is a recurrent word in the film.

The events on screen are repeatedly exposed as little more than swindle, masquerade and trickery, even as we find ourselves so involved in the characters' emotional journeys that we positively will ourselves to follow them deeper and deeper into the web of illusion, in search of some sort of transcendent, albeit well-guarded, truth that we want to believe is there, as the object of and justification for our own 'leap of faith' (another key phrase in Inception).

Writer/director Christopher Nolan is at pains to remind his viewers that they are in a cinema, watching a film woven from the stuff of other films. By making all his film's dream scenarios – and some of its 'real' scenarios – resemble distorted set-pieces from Bond and Bourne movies (chases through narrow North African alleyways, rendez-vous in swanky hotels, gunplay on ski-slopes, etc), he prompts us to recognise worlds constructed of a decidedly cinematic texture. By having Cobb's team use the song 'Non, je ne regrette rien' as an important trigger within their dreamscapes, he is going out of his way to remind us that the self-same Cotillard who plays Cobb's ex-wife has also – in her Oscar-winning performance for La Vie En Rose (2007) – played the very woman who made that song famous. And by casting DiCaprio as a noirish agent haunted by a traumatic past and forced to choose between fantasy and reality, he is virtually insisting that we compare and contrast the actor's similar role in Martin Scorsese's similarly metacinematic Shutter Island (2010), and then lose ourselves even further in the intertextual crosstalk between two films that are labyrinthine enough individually.

In his own version of inception, Nolan uses what Eames calls 'very subtle art' to insinuate in the viewer's mind an idea, itself almost impossible to eradicate, that what we are seeing may not be real at any level, on either side of the screen. He then leaves us to find our own way back home from his Escher-like 'infinite stairwells', his corridors of the subconscious and his windmills of the mind, as Cobb's totemic spinning top, used to distinguish reality from illusion, continues tracing its revolution in the head long after the film itself is over. Nolan elaborates seductive layer upon layer of narrative to trap us, much like Fischer, into placing our own image in a hall of mirrors, supplementing this floating world with our own very real hopes and fears.

There is not much more that one can ask from a movie – but Inception also delivers

thoroughly believable performances in its many (purposefully) less than believable scenarios, and matches the gymnastics through which it puts the mind with a kaleidoscope of awe-inspiringly idiosyncratic imagery, as though all the tropes of a conventional thriller were being both defamiliarised and trumped before our eyes. You will no doubt need to see Inception more than once to appreciate every nuance of Nolan's carefully balanced ambiguities – but, more importantly, you will also want to. This is a film that people will be watching, rewatching and cherishing for years to come, in pursuit of answers that only they can in fact provide, as they choose to connect their own brains to Cobb's dreams. Worming its way into our consciousness with more ideas than a year's worth of blockbusters, Inception is a triumph of cerebral cinema.

盗梦空间 Inception 英文影评 review by JOHN ANDERSON

Call it the Emperor's New Bedclothes: "Inception," the first feature from director Christopher Nolan since his enormously successful "The Dark Knight," is a movie about dreams and, alas, one that may well merit the appellation "critic proof." Ordinarily, this term applies to films that advance a popular series ("Harry Potter," "Twilight") or which boast stars so enormous they can't be deterred by conventional weapons. "Inception" isn't either of these things. And yet it may still be impervious to criticism, simply because no one short of a NASA systems analyst will be able to articulate the plot.

But let's try. The deeply troubled Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) provides a unique service for his corporate clients: stealing secrets from the subconscious of their competition. As will become clear, Cobb cannot return to the U.S. because something happened to his wife, the aptly named Mal (Marion Cotillard), who may be dead, or may be alive, but either way travels through Cobb's dreamlife wreaking havoc. When the Japanese industrial magnate Saito (Ken Watanabe) asks Cobb to plant an idea in the mind of his rival, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), it's an offer Cobb can't really refuse: If he can manipulate Fischer into breaking up the company of his soon-to-be-late father (Pete Postlethwaite), it will derail the creation of the world's only energy superpower. And a grateful Saito will get Cobb back home to the U.S., and his longed-for children.

How? Never mind that. The real question is, Where? In an effort to give his imagist impulses the broadest possible canvas, Mr. Nolan has scripted a story that travels across six countries and just as many layers of human consciousness. The problem is, we don't know where we are most of the time. And we profoundly do not care.

Dreams and movies have a kinship as old as cinema itself. As soon as filmmakers learned about double-exposure, souls started leaving bodies; subconscious fears became flesh; the biggest bad guys were bonked on the head, if only in a poor tramp's fantasies. Both dreams and movies provide an alternate reality, a visual adventure, full of unpredictable and sometimes Freudian implications. But "Inception" reneges on the implicit deal: By convoluting the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams, Mr. Nolan deprives us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it.

He is not, it seems, a conventional narrative storyteller. That's OK—neither is David Lynch, or a lot of other artists of cinema who are more concerned with the subliminal, suggestive powers of film. But "Inception" isn't an experimental movie and it requires too much explanation, more than Mr. Nolan can gracefully dole out. His breakthrough feature, "Memento," certainly was a novel, intriguing construct, with plotlines moving backwards and forwards like rows of ducks at a mental shooting gallery. But the sometimes hallucinatory images erupting out of the narrative murk of "Inception" suggest that the entire enterprise was contrived as an alibi for special-effects wizardry—and that what Mr. Nolan had in "The Dark Knight" was the perfect match for his talents: Namely, a built-in mythology. Mr. Nolan could embellish the Batman legend in the most fantastical and visceral ways and never lose his audience because they already knew very well who was who and what was what.

It may be that Mr. Nolan is purposely making his story obscure so as not to distract from his phenomenal image-making. If so, it's a waste of costly man hours. Mr. DiCaprio, it should be said, is a wonderful actor as well as an engaging screen presence, but his choices of late seem as suspect as "Inception." (The mysterious wife, the ephemeral kids, the fractured realities here all recall the recent "Shutter Island.") He's also as hampered as everyone else in the cast, needless to say, by the script. Each question asked by Cobb's

dream team—Ariadne (Ellen Page), Eames (Tom Hardy), Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)—is answered a la the official "Inception" owner's manual: quickly, predictably, and as if it were all being made up on the fly. There is indeed an answer for everything: The sedative that doesn't allow a dreamer to return from the dream? I've adjusted it, says the team pharmacologist (Dileep Rao). What happens if someone is killed in dream but is sedated at the same time? Uh, he goes to Limbo, or "unconstructed dream space." They don't wink at each, quite, although when Ariadne asks, late in the game, "Whose subconscious are we going into, exactly?" it may be the biggest laugh line of the summer movie season.

It's said that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing his screenplay for "Inception." That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire. The film's hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.

The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all. Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act, and Nolan may have considered his "Memento" (2000) a warm-up; he apparently started this screenplay while filming that one. It was the story of a man with short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.

Like the hero of that film, the viewer of "Inception" is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don't know that when

you’re dreaming. And what if you're inside another man's dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate raider of the highest order. He infiltrates the minds of other men to steal their ideas. Now he is hired by a powerful billionaire to do the opposite: To introduce an idea into a rival's mind, and do it so well he believes it is his own. This has never been done before; our minds are as alert to foreign ideas as our immune system is to pathogens. The rich man, named Saito (Ken Watanabe), makes him an offer he can't refuse, an offer that would end Cobb's forced exile from home and family.

Cobb assembles a team, and here the movie relies on the well-established procedures of all heist movies. We meet the people he will need to work with: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his longtime associate; Eames (Tom Hardy), a master at deception; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a master chemist. And there is a new recruit, Ariadne (Ellen Page), a brilliant young architect who is a prodigy at creating spaces. Cobb also goes to touch base with his father-in-law Miles (Michael Caine), who knows what he does and how he does it. These days Michael Caine need only appear on a screen and we assume he's wiser than any of the other characters. It's a gift.

But wait. Why does Cobb need an architect to create spaces in dreams? He explains to her. Dreams have a shifting architecture, as we all know; where we seem to be has a way of shifting. Cobb's assignment is the "inception" (or birth, or wellspring) of a new idea in the mind of another young billionaire, Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), heir to his father's empire. Saito wants him to initiate ideas that will lead to the surrender of his rival's corporation. Cobb needs Ariadne

to create a deceptive maze-space in Fischer's dreams so that (I think) new thoughts can slip in unperceived. Is it a coincidence that Ariadne is named for the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth?

Cobb tutors Ariadne on the world of dream infiltration, the art of controlling dreams and navigating them. Nolan uses this as a device for tutoring us as well. And also as the occasion for some of the movie's astonishing special effects, which seemed senseless in the trailer but now fit right in. The most impressive to me takes place (or seems to) in Paris, where the city literally rolls back on itself like a roll of linoleum tile.

Protecting Fischer are any number of gun-wielding bodyguards, who may be working like the mental equivalent of antibodies; they seem alternatively real and figurative, but whichever they are, they lead to a great many gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, which is the way movies depict conflict these days. So skilled is Nolan that he actually got me involved in one of his chases, when I thought I was relatively immune to scenes that have become so standard. That was because I cared about who was chasing and being chased.

If you've seen any advertising at all for the film, you know that its architecture has a way of disregarding gravity. Buildings tilt. Streets coil. Characters float. This is all explained in the narrative. The movie is a perplexing labyrinth without a simple through-line, and is sure to inspire truly endless analysis on the web.

Nolan helps us with an emotional thread. The reason Cobb is motivated to risk the dangers of inception is because of grief and guilt involving his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), and their two children. More I will not (in a way, cannot) say. Cotillard beautifully embodies the wife in an idealized way. Whether we are seeing Cobb's memories or his dreams is difficult to say--even, literally, in the last shot. But she makes Mal function as an emotional magnet, and the love between the two provides an emotional constant in Cobb's world, which is otherwise ceaselessly shifting.

"Inception" works for the viewer, in a way, like the world itself worked for Leonard, the hero of "Memento." We are always in the Now. We have made some notes while getting Here, but we are not quite sure where Here is. Yet matters of life, death and the heart are involved--oh, and those multi-national corporations, of course. And Nolan doesn't pause before using well-crafted scenes from spycraft or espionage, including a clever scheme on board a 747 (even explaining why it must be a 747).

The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. "Inception" does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in "Memento:" How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there's a hole in "Inception" too, but I can't find it. Christopher Nolan reinvented "Batman." This time he

isn't reinventing anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle "Inception." I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.