MOVIEGOERS have gotten so used to the fat, flat and fatuous fluff they usually get to watch on the big screen that viewing Christopher Nolan?s latest film, ?Inception,? hits them like a slap in the face ? a bracing, mind-blowing and inner eye-opening experience akin to being cinematically ?born again.?
That?s exactly how the movie hit us when we watched it on its opening day, and we haven?t stopped thinking ? and dreaming ? of it since.

What we value most about ?Inception? is the fact that it presumes that its viewers are intelligent ? not at all like the dimwit, kneejerk cinematic popcorn-ingesters cynically exploited and taken for granted by some other filmmakers.

Even better, Nolan makes us stretch our intelligence and imagination to their outer limits by involving us in a multi-tiered tale about the high-tech theft of a top business tycoon?s most secret dreams by an ?extruder? played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The tale is told in so complex a manner that we must confess Nolan lost us somewhere along the way to his film?s dazzlingly brilliant and deeply instructive conclusion.

The fact that the movie is about dreams enables the filmmaker to do practically anything he wants, since dreaming defies ?logic.? To Nolan?s credit, however, he doesn?t use this as an escape hatch or handy alibi to go weird and crazy on us.

In fact, he takes a lot of time constructing the ?new? or ?hyper logical? framework that makes sense of the high-tech dream state that his screen characters are made to psychologically inhibit.

A lot of work
That must have taken a lot of work, but Nolan makes sure that intense and involved cogitation doesn?t distract us from the points he?s trying to make. To his credit, he succeeds most of the time, and the surreal images his new ?dream logic? conjures up fill the screen ? with striking visions that make ?Inception? the new ?Avatar? for thinking, feeling and dreaming film buffs.
To be sure, the filmmaker hedges his bets by trying to fob his thought-provoking movie off as an action-thriller, to enveigle even the popcorn crowd to watch it. But the story he tells is so psychologically seductive that, by the time ?pop? viewers see through his artful cinematic deception, he?s got them hooked.

Some viewers may get lost in all those escalating and deepening levels of plot, theme, significance and consequence, but Nolan?s mind-expanding images keep them interested ? and that?s no mean achievement.

For our part, we feel that the entire subplot set in what looks like an icy Siberian fortress was one far-out filmic and ideational conceit too many ? but that could be just us.

Besides, filmmakers are entitled to make some ?mistakes,? right? The most important thing is, by taking us on this wild and woolly ride into man?s subconscious, and beyond, Nolan has made us reconsider our views on the ?other? life we all live when we?re asleep for six, eight or more hours a day.