Inception overview

Inception features one of the best fight scenes of all-time.  Take a moment to consider that: in the entire history of cinema, of every fight scene that has ever taken place, the one in this movie is among the best.  Watching a fight without gravity is incredible.  It’s not like in The Matrix where a character can defy gravity if they choose.  The fight scene in Inception has no gravity to defy and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the team’s point man, has to figure out how to achieve his objective while fending off projections.  I can only hope that someday in the distant future, when people with free time are on a space station in zero-gravity, they will re-enact this scene.  In the meantime, Nolan’s spectacular visual effects will have to suffice.

With the exception of one set piece (which I’ll get to in a moment), the action scenes in Inception are spectacular.  Visually lush and imaginative, Nolan transforms car chases into countdowns, fistfights into puzzles, and shootouts into…well, shootouts.  There’s a mission on a snowy mountainside that doesn’t work as well as the other set pieces because there’s a poor sense of location, a lack of visual diversity, and sloppy editing.  But that doesn’t really halt or hurt the film because Nolan brilliantly placed the car chase, the fistfight, and the shootout on top of each other.  You would think this would cause action fatigue, but by cutting between three set pieces and having what happens in one set piece affect the others, the action climax of Inception isn’t exhausting—it’s exhilarating.

“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”