Chances are, you went and saw one of the biggest releases of 2010. Everyone sat in a theater at some point and saw that huge, loud trailer with exploding buildings and floating streets, all the while having no clue what the movie was actually going to be about. I know for me, it was a classic example of leaning over to my friends and whispering, “I wanna see that!” I won’t bother worrying about ‘spoilers’ here; if you haven’t seen "Inception" yet, you probably just don’t want to (which is a mistake).

Writer-director Christopher Nolan made "Inception" out of a love for filmmaking and a curiosity for psyche. It’s clear that the movie was huge, and epic, and entertaining, but the depth of the film goes further than the dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a dream. Nolan is quite literally discussing the filmmaking process, where “inception” is the act of instilling thoughts and ideas into a subject’s head, much like a movie instills thoughts and ideas into an audience. So here, I want to go through an explanation, an analysis, and a conclusion.

Christopher Nolan’s "Inception." That mind-bendy two-and-a-half hour brain melt that no one understood going in, and many didn’t understand on their way out. If you figured out the plot of the film, you understand that Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, leads a band of highly skilled and or intelligent people who specialize in a form of thievery called “extraction,” in which they enter the dreams of others and steal ideas, which they sell to their clients. But in the film, they’re tasked with doing the reverse: inception, the act of subconsciously placing an idea in someone’s head. Hired by energy tycoon Saito, Cobb and his team must enter the dreams of Robert Fischer, son and heir to a dying energy conglomerate, to convince him to dissolve his father’s company in order to grant more power to Saito’s.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Dominick Cobb, is the leader of his team, well-versed in every facet of inception with a high level of control, patience, and understanding of the goal. His role is the director of the set (Fun fact: he looked to Christopher Nolan for inspiration for his character). His partner, Arthur, serves as the intelligent, level-headed organizer, so while Cobb is free to create the dreams, Arthur keeps everything in-check. He is the producer on a set. Saito, who represents the studio, is the man who hired Cobb and his team, and enlists them to create a story/lie to elicit an emotion/action from the audience, Robert Fischer. In order to most effectively accomplish their task, they also recruit Eames, whose role is to project himself as any other person while in a dream (Making him the actor), and Ariadne, an architecture student whose job in Cobb’s mission is to elaborately create an entire world around them for the team to enter, making her the screenwriter/set designer.

With all of this in mind, Christopher Nolan aimed to tell a story about a bunch of really smart liars going on an elaborate mission to create a high intensity, action-packed fest of imagination, all for the purpose of getting something into their audience’s head…Which is exactly what a movie is. In the traditional sense, at least, a movie’s purpose is to start the viewer with nothing, and end the story with the hopes of the viewer leaving with additional or new perspective. In other words, Christopher Nolan made a two and a half hour tribute to film purism. And made Martin Scorcese proud.