“You Mustn’t Be Afraid to Dream Bigger, Darling.”

People seem to have a hard time describing Inception. They get bogged down in the twisting dream imagery and lose track of its core. Basically, Inception is a super-serious version of Leverage. Yes, it takes place in dreams, but at its core, this is a caper movie.

I’m going to try very hard not to spoil things here. This will not be a play-by-play review, but I am going to give you the set-up, so you understand what we’re talking about. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team are thieves. They steal information. But they do so using a process designed by the military for combat training. They steal into a target’s bedroom, or train car, or first-class on a ten-hour flight, and they hook him up to a machine that lets them enter his dreams.

In place of a hacker, you have the chemist who makes tailored designer drugs to facilitate the process, and the architect who builds the dream world. Then you have the extraction team go in and con the information out of the dreamer, hopefully leaving the target none the wiser when they wake up. Now, the dreamer’s subconscious is aware of the external forces meddling in the dream, so the team acting in the dream have to avoid the people that populate the dreamworld. They are projections of the dreamer’s subconscious, and they act something like white blood cells, rejecting the foreign influence. To that end, the architect builds the dream as a maze, a labyrinth that the team can hide in, to give them more time.

The cast is amazing. DiCaprio is, I think, a little outshined by the rest of the crew. Ellen Page is adorable and curious as the new architect, Ariadne (whom you might remember as the Mistress of the Labyrinth in Greek myth). Tom Hardy steals nearly every scene he’s in as Eames, the forger. Ken Watanabe is fun, Marion Cotillard is beautiful and mysterious and subtle. Cillian Murphy is great and sympathetic as the target, though I wish (as always) that he had more to do.

And Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Well… The biggest thing that I took away from his performance was this: if you give Joseph Gordon-Levitt a suit? He. Will. Rock. It. Seriously. His performance was stellar, and he got a lot of really great scenes. But the only thing I could think of was how well he wore those suits.

Great setup. Really fun idea. The story is a tight, intricately woven puzzle, a Russian doll of dreams and reality. I almost loved it. Christopher Nolan is a great director in many ways. But his movies all have this… gravity. There’s a stateliness to his films that causes a slight emotional disconnect. Like a waltz, the whole movie felt like it stayed on an even tempo from start to finish. Even when Ariadne is learning how to control dreams, there’s no whimsy, no light-heartedness to contrast the DANGER and HEAVY EMOTION of the rest of the film. I mean, good job keeping a consistent tone and mood, Mr. Nolan! But at some point, I lost that vital emotional connection with what was going on. I think he burned out the circuit, or something.

I’m a crybaby. I go into movies wanting an emotional experience, primed and ready for it to make me feel. Kat and I bawled like infants at the end of Angel. The ending of the movie should have left us a puddle on the floor, but because of that mood fatigue, we were left feeling a little cold.

Inception is a great movie that, with a little more variation in the tone, could have been an amazing one.

First thing’s first: The PG-13 rating isn’t a joke. This is a bleak, bleak movie. The settings are beautifully desolate, and more than once, the ragdoll characters have to navigate through a landscape strewn with the corpses of humans murdered by the machines. Seriously. 9 – and this may be considered a very slight spoiler – has to pull something from beneath the withered, dead hand of his creator. The character designs are gorgeous, and the world is wonderfully realized. The mechanical monsters built by the synthetic B.R.A.I.N. are creepy tattered things, made up of an amalgam of bone, metal and other detritus left behind by humanity.

If there’s one complaint I have about the film, it’s that it is way too short. At 79 minutes long, it could have happily been expanded at least another half hour. I would have liked more time with the characters, to establish more of a rapport. I think they leaned a little too heavily on the iconic stereotypes of the dolls: the dictator, the brute, the crazy guy, and so on. It would have made the ending a bit more poignant, I think, if you could have identified more with the characters.

That said, I friggin’ love 3 and 4.

Oh, one more thing… It needs to be reiterated: this is not a Tim Burton movie. Shane Acker directed it, and I hope he doesn’t have the same issues Henry Selick has with A Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton only produced the film; he had no creative stake.