Pun Salad

As I type, IMDB rates Inception as #3 in its top 250 movies of all time, outranked only by The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather. That will probably come down a bit: Christopher Nolan's previous movie, The Dark Knight, was in the number one spot when it was in theaters, but since has dropped to #11. Still, it's pretty good.

It's quite a yarn: the main protagonist, Cobb, is an expert in infiltrating the dreams of others. He's made this into a profession, hired by corporations to ferret out the secrets of the competition.

[I'm not sure how this would work in reality. I plumbed Steve Jobs' dreams to find out Apple's secret: Make glitzy, dead-easy-to-use tech stuff that you can build a mystique around, and fills a need that people didn't know they had. I shopped this around, but nobody wanted to pay me for it.]

But one employer wants Cobb to do a little more than the standard secret-extraction: instead, he wants to plant an idea into the dream-mind of a competitor in order to alter his business strategy. Apparently, in the world of Inception, that's a lot easier than market competition.

Also, Cobb is a wanted man in his home country, and separated from his kids. And he has a complex relationship with his wife, who keeps popping up in his dreams as a hostile force. It's pretty dysfunctional.

Nolan does a fantastic job of setting up the detailed rules for these dream escapades, and how they play out (typically spectacularly) in the dreams themselves. As at least one reviewer pointed out, the dream-construction business is quite similar to the moviemaking process, and that's probably not an accidental coincidence. But it's a tremendous amount of fun, and will almost certainly engage parts of your brain that aren't touched by watching (say) Hot Tub Time Machine. I'll probably get the DVD just to catch the details I missed, and I think that will take a few viewings..