Inception is essentially a heist movie that takes place inside someone’s head. Leonardo Di Caprio is an expert in ‘extraction’ – the technique of entering subjects’ minds via dreams and stealing their thoughts. As the movie begins, he’s hired to perform the apparently much trickier task of ‘inception’ – placing an idea into a subject’s mind.

Di Caprio’s character, Cobb, assembles a team of experts and sets about the labyrinthine process of infiltrating a dream within a dream inside the mind of the mark, played by Cillian Murphy. The stakes are high. If Cobb succeeds he will be reunited with his family. If he fails, he and his team face being trapped in some perpetual dreamlike state from which they won’t be able to wake.

What follows is a complex and confusing journey into the puzzle that is the human mind, with Cobb and his team switching back and forward between reality and multiple layers of dreams, allowing director Christopher Nolan to deliver a brainbusting series of plot twists and big ticket visuals.

One of Cobb’s recruits is an architect, played by Ellen Page. She’s charged with designing the dream world in which the inception will take place, and the sequence in which Cobb introduces her to the possibilities of dreams is spectacular, with city streets and architecture bending and morphing around them on an epic scale. Later scenes in which a team member played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt tries to jolt his colleagues awake without the assistance of gravity are also amazing to watch.

I’m a big fan of Nolan, loved Memento, really enjoyed Insomnia, The Prestige and Batman Begins. I really liked The Dark Knight, too, although I thought it was a little bloated. Now, having made a billion dollars from that enterprise, he’s been given free reign to make a blockbuster apparently free from the usual studio constraints. What a rarity.

It’s incredibly refreshing to see a blockbuster that isn’t a sequel, or based on a comic book, or a theme park ride, or a toy range. It’s an original idea (extracted) from the mind of its creator, which in an ideal world would be the case for all movies, but it isn’t, so for this we should be grateful. It’s original and ambitious, and as adeptly executed as you’d expect from Nolan.

And, crucially, it makes you think. Granted, not all cinemagoers want to engage their brain when sat in front of the big screen, but this cinemagoer definitely does. Surely all movies should at least demand that the audience pays attention? Inception certainly does that, and remains in the thoughts long after the credits have rolled.

I do have a few quibbles, however. Although the dream worlds were purposely designed to facilitate the inception, they weren’t as strange as I’d have liked them to be. In dreams, people and places are never quite as you remember them. They’re odd, sometimes literally nightmarish, and I’d have liked to have seen that explored a little more. Certainly, the snow-bound world in which the climatic shoot-out takes place seemed very dull when compared to the possibilities suggested by the movie’s initial ventures into dreams. As for the shoot-outs, well it’s disappointing that a movie that promises so much ends with a fairly typical noisy blockbuster bullet fest.

So I’m not sure Inception is quite as good as some critics are claiming. Only repeat viewings will reveal whether it matches Memento. (And, for the record, I don’t think Inception is as satisfying a moviegoing experience as Toy Story 3, also out this week.) But it’s an exciting, thought-provoking, worthwhile picture that goes a long way to renewing your faith in the summer blockbuster. More films like this, please.

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Paul Film