Inception is a film by the same director as The Dark Knight. It is about a man named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is a professional thief. However, Cobb doesn’t steal jewelry or money. He steals ideas from your subconscious as you sleep. In doing this job, he’s lost his life, and with this new job, he has a chance to get it back. This job is much more difficult, though. Instead of stealing an idea, he must plant one. Assembling a team of the best men (and women) he’s ever worked with, he must pull off this one final job, called Inception.

Since The Dark Knight was my favorite movie of all time, I naturally had to see this movie. I found this movie to be absolutely phenomenal. It really forces you to focus and think to keep up with everything that they’re saying. It had a plot that moved like a snake, twisting and turning every second. What I like about this movie is that there isn’t really one main villain. It’s the cumulative of various villains and allies that really drives this movie forward. Ellen Page plays Ariadne, a young architect who was hired by Cobb to design the layout of the dream. She plays the Oracle in this movie, the character who is smart enough to realize what really is going on inside Cobb’s mind. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, Cobb’s right hand man. He really did a phenomenal job in this role and should be considered for best supporting actor in the Oscars. Tom Hardy rounded off the team as the forger, or the person who could convince the subject of the dream he was someone else. Hardy was mainly there to provide comic relief for this very dark and serious movie.

With The Dark Knight, you really had to see it more than once to truly understand Christopher Nolan’s genius in his film. The same rings true for Inception. In order to truly appreciate this work of cinematic art, you really should see it more than once. There is so much going on in this film that I was lost after the opening sequence (I eventually caught up). Chris Nolan worked on this script for ten years, and it shows in this movie.

Finally, the effects. What can I say? If you can make a freight train come out of nowhere, blow up an entire coffee house scene, make a road become a right angle, and create a maelstrom in the middle of a city, I think you’ve got an Oscar in the bag. There is a difference between the effects in this movie and the effects in a movie like Avatar. Not only was Avatar in 3-D and Inception in 2-D (Kudos for that), but also the effects in Inception were so realistic. I mean, it looked as if the setting with a collapsing city was a real place that I could visit on summer vacation. However, in Avatar, you could easily tell the natural planet was fake and done on a computer.

In conclusion, Inception was the best movie of the summer (Toy Story 3 came out three days before summer began) and I would recommend it to everyone who is bored of movies where stuff blows up for no reason. Here, stuff blows up for a reason.