“Inception”, playing in the Woodland theatre of Davies Center Jan. 25 at 7 p.m. and Jan. 26-27 at  2 and 7 p.m., is reviewed by staff photo editor,

Elizabeth Jackson.

4/5

If Sigmund Freud were to write a movie, “Inception” would be it.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I have to warn you, it gets confusing. This review may get confusing, so bear with me.

“Inception” is basically an elaborate heist movie. Saito (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese businessman, hires Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and their team of “extractors” (Ellen Page and Tom Hardy, in part) to plant the thought of breaking up Maurice Fisher’s capitalist empire into the mind of his son, Robert. The planting of a thought is called, what else, inception.

“Inception” starts out confusing, but because of the action in these first scenes, keeps you drawn in. It isn’t until 15 minutes in that you learn this is in fact a dream within a dream — the whole premise of the movie.

Apparently “inception” is a nearly impossible thing to do, and requires Cobb and his team to not just have a dream within a dream, but a dream within a dream within a dream! No one has ever gone that deep into the dream world, and it turns out more dangerous than the team suspected.

The characters are decent. Cobb’s backstory was the only backstory in the movie. Cobb’s wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) was a dream thief. Cobb and Mal had been trapped in “Limbo” after dying in a 3 level dream, and when they were finally awoken, Mal did not accept that reality was not a dream. To make a long story short, and not give away anything, Mal becomes a antagonist in Cobb’s subconscious.

There really isn’t much of a backstory to the other characters. The backstory for the team really isn’t necessary to move the movie along, but Page’s, Gordon-Levitt’s and Hardy’s characters seem almost one-dimensional. Page plays the brilliant architecture student who serves as the platform for Cobb to tell his story; Gordon-Levitt is the “researcher” of the group, and Cobb’s right hand man; Hardy is the trope of “actor”, meaning he takes shape of different people in the dreams. There’s not much else to these characters, and they’re interesting on the surface, but not any deeper.

Considering that Inception runs for about an hour and a half, the basic backstories of one or two more characters would be nice.

Inception is a pretty heavy, action/suspense movie, but, unlike almost all action movies, is very smart. Prepare yourself for a movie that you have to be mentally awake for, because the shift between each dream is fast, and sometimes confusing. Despite the suspense, there is some humor sprinkled throughout, mostly coming from the mouth of Eames, played by Hardy.

All in all, Inception is a good movie. It requires a couple viewings to fully understand what is happening, but that isn’t bad. I’m not guaranteeing that this will be the only movie you’ll want take with you on a deserted island, but you’ll like it a lot.