Dominating the North American box office last weekend and releasing next week in Australia, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi/thriller/Freudian heist flick
Inception is unleashed on Sydney film types tonight. I’m sure I won’t be the only one rocking the special brown pants in anticipation.
Sure, Nolan is the guy who gave the Batman franchise the swift and overdue kick up the ass it needed, but you don’t have to be what critic Armond White calls a ‘Nolanoid’ to know that he’s done his best work outside Gotham. Nolan proved himself a master long ago in
Memento (2000) – a serious contender for the greatest film of the last decade and a serious contender for the worst film to see with your girlfriend. If the buzz is to believed,
Inception sees Nolan returning to the ‘mindfuck’ genre (that he’s such a deft hand at) in spectacular fashion. And we think the buzz is to believed.
But far be it from us to want you to take our word for it. You can expect our review of
Inception tomorrow, but until then, here’s our pick of spoiler-free coverage, positive and negative, elsewhere.
Some of the loudest buzz is emanating from the great
Roger Ebert, who suggests that, compared to
Inception,
Memento was just a warm-up. “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.”
Ebert is not alone in thanking the movie gods (who seem to be smiting us this year) for a genuinely ‘new’ movie that is genuinely good. Over at
Slashfilm they’re speculating that Inception may do nothing less than save cinema. “When you give a skilled director complete creative freedom, final cut, and the ability to buy and use whatever toys he wants, he just might be able to deliver a satisfying action film that also makes you think, and maybe even feel something.”
Cinematical’s regular funster Eric D. Snider couldn’t resist incidentally mentioning the only other great movie of North America's summer season,
Toy Story 3, in his
Inception review. Snider mentions “narrative agility and thrilling set pieces and ingenious plotting”, but also notes a “certain detached coldness”. There’s much more coverage at
Cinematical. An
interview with Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Wally Pfister is a must-read – Pfister talks about how close
Inception came to being dragged into 3-D; and Todd Gilchrist has pulled and assembled some
illuminating quotes from the film’s LA press day, including Ellen Page’s advice not to “sniff around” the Internet for, well, pieces like this. “Just have an absolute blast and an exciting, cerebral time when you see it.”
Xan Brooks of
The Guardian calls
Inception a Thomas Crown Affair of the senses – “that rarest of beasts: a slippery, cerebral summer blockbuster that slaloms from illusion to reality and back again and leaves its viewer bewitched, bothered and bewildered”; but
A.O. Scott of the
New York Times, citing Freud at every opportunity, is less than impressed, bemoaning that “though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision.”
What else? Well, in a stroke of genius,
USA Today dream psychologist Marcia Emery has capitalised on the film to market her most recent
dream column (“I was at my old high school with the kids from my senior year musical production of
The Sound of Music," begins one of the dreams), and personally I always find that
lame Leonardo Dicaprio fan art is like chicken soup for the film geek's soul.
Finally, here are some more words that rhyme with ‘inception’.
deception
exception
perception
misperception
interception
contraception
Inception is released in Australia on Thursday 22 July.
View the trailer here on TheVine.