DVD Pick: 'Inception'

Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) wrote and directed Inception (2010), a big-budget film featuring dazzling visual effects and action sequences. The star is Leonardo DiCaprio, and the fine supporting cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine. At first viewing, the plot is difficult to follow, but an attentive second viewing reveals it to be fairly straightforward.

Basically, Inception is a caper film with a team of five people led by Cobb (DiCaprio) on a mission of corporate espionage for a tycoon (Watanabe). But the story takes place in a world where it is possible, via drugs and electronics, for several people to simultaneously experience the same dream. The complex rules governing these shared dreams are explained, and that is part of what makes the movie intellectually interesting.

The overarching storyline is that Cobb's motivation for doing the mission is so he can be reunited with his children, but he's a tortured soul whose dead wife (Cotillard) keeps popping up in dreams. However, this has little emotional punch because Nolan didn't flesh out Cobb very well, though DiCaprio still manages to make his character sympathetic.

The mission is carried out within the nested dreams of three of Cobb's team members: thus, the viewer is expected to follow a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. This may prove tedious for those who demand emotional intimacy, but the film is aimed at viewers who relish visual effects, visceral action and cerebral sci-fi.

The Inception DVD contains four short featurettes with a total runtime of about 12 minutes. In "The Inception of Inception," writer-director Christopher Nolan talks about developing the movie over a 10-year period. The other three featurettes are about technical aspects of the film, and we hear from the production designer, the special effects supervisor, the visual effects supervisor, the director of photography and the editor. "The Japanese Castle: The Dream Is Collapsing" is about making it look like an earthquake and flood occur in the Japanese castle that appears in the early part of the movie. "Constructing Paradoxical Architecture" is about the stairway loop shown to Ariadne (Ellen Page) when she first joins the team. (The idea is based loosely on the Penrose stairs famously depicted by graphic artist M.C. Escher.) "The Freight Train" shows how a modified truck was used in the scene that looks like a freight train plows into a bunch of automobiles on a city street.

DVD Release Date: December 7, 2010
Total Runtime: 2 hours 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for Sequences of Violence and Action Throughout