"Inception"

It's easiest to judge a movie by the effect it's having on you hours -- or days -- later. "Brokeback Mountain" put me in a contemplative funk for a couple of days. "The Dark Knight" made me jumpy and uneasy for almost a week. "Casino Royale" gave me an adrenaline rush that woke me up several times that first night.

"Inception" has me in a daze and I don't see an end to it anytime soon.

If you haven't seen it yet (it's only been out a week, after all), then you need to know two things: 1) it's an incredible movie best seen in a theater (particularly if you're well-rested already so you have the necessary energy) and 2) you must pay attention for the first half hour if you want to understand the rest of it.

[If you're living in a foreign country at the moment, I recommend waiting for an opportunity to see it in English. I can't imagine a more frustrating experience than having to read subtitles ... Or not having any way of knowing the dialogue at all.]

Really, that's all you need to know. You can stop reading now. I'm going to talk a lot more about it and there will be spoilers. Wait until you've already seen it.

Okay?

Doesn't matter. Someone's going to keep reading anyway. Oh well.

Off we go.

***

It wasn't until the screen went to black that I realized I'd been holding my breath.

It took ten minutes for me to speak, and after a brief but ramble-y phone call with my mother I started to feel a little more normal. The truth was that I had just had an incredibly intense experience -- and my body wasn't sure how to react. It was just a movie.

Just a movie.

The reality is that "Inception" isn't just a movie. It toys with your head, burrows into your thoughts, and then unleashes one truly helter-skelter ride. At that point, the only thing left to do is hold on for dear life.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan is one heck of an architect. The director of "Memento," "The Prestige," and both "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight" spent ten years with "Inception," from his first realization that he wanted to make a movie based on the manipulation of dreams until its release. Building from his action movie experience in the Batman movies, "Inception" took on a life of its own.

The basic premise was kept quiet long enough to make moviegoers wonder, but the little bit of information they got was equally intriguing -- "It's about a guy who steals ideas from people while they're sleeping." It's billed as a heist film and I went into it still thinking this would be a corporate espionage movie, but ... it's not. Not really.

No, this takes a different path -- it's about inception, about putting an idea into someone's head instead of taking it from his head. But not just putting it there ... Convincing him on a deep, subconscious level that the idea was his all along.

With that, things get moving. Cobb, the main protagonist (played by the continually cool Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team are assembled. There's Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, "10 Things I Hate About You," "(500) Days of Summer," and TV's "3rd Rock From the Sun," an actor I have a growing crush on), the somewhat surly researcher and planner. He's quick on his feet and innovative but lacks the imagination Cobb seems to have. Eames (Tom Hardy, "Layer Cake" and "RocknRolla") is their change artist, who can adapt new "characters" mid-dream and isn't a fan of dealing with other people's crap. Yusuf (Dileep Rao, "Avatar") is a genius chemist and likely the only one who can make their layered approach work. And then there's the architect, the one building the landscape of the dreams they inhabit and the only newbie on the team, Ariadne (Ellen Page of "Juno" fame).

They've been hired by the somewhat sinister Saito (Ken Watanabe, "The Last Samurai") who insists on accompanying them into the mind of their target -- his business rival and heir to a fortune, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy, "Batman Begins," "Red Eye").

Somewhere in there, we start to see Mal (played by the gorgeous Marion Cotillard of "Big Fish" and "Nine"), Cobb's wife. It's known almost immediately that she died (presumably not that long ago) but beyond that details aren't immediately clear.

As Ariadne is trained, we learn the first rule: if it's too out there, the person's subconscious will know it's a dream. I couldn't decide if this was pure intelligence on Nolan's side or an opportunity missed, but now I have to go with the former. The dream sequences had the potential to be way out there (and at times they truly are) but there's one fault there: when we dream, we don't know the dream from reality. And nothing would make a person feel more like they're outside reality than a dream taking a completely unrealistic path -- particularly if their subconscious was not in control. Instead, Nolan focuses in on the story when he could be wowing us with special effects -- and for that, I have to commend him.

The remaining rules are laid down ... You cannot let the person dreaming know they're in a dream. You need a way to prove to yourself whether or not you're in reality. Time expands with each dreaming layer, much as you would experience in an actual dream -- five minutes of reality is an hour in a dream. If you die in a dream, you wake up. If your "reality" self is jolted, you will wake up. And you should never go so deep as to end up in limbo.

The movie's structure is best shown with the Cobb-Mal storyline. With each appearance of Mal, a new detail is learned. From the skeletal structure of "Cobb lost his wife and can't go home" the bits and pieces are added until the truth is fully fleshed out. Likewise, the movie is built from the inside out. We know within the first half hour what needs to happen: they need to build an incredibly complicated alternate reality in order to plant an idea.

What follows is, simply put, the fleshing out of the solution to this single problem.

While the dreams seem so realistic, it is the effects of the outside world that provide the dream-like twists. A van goes into free fall and suddenly the dreamer doesn't experience gravity in his dream. Someone gets jolted by a defibrillator and there's an electric storm in the dream. All the while they're moving through labyrinths to get to a final "safe place," the spot where an idea can be planted.

What I found to be one of the film's strongest points is also the most confounding: there are no real bad guys. The characters are attacked by phantom armies sent to protect their target's mind from invasion, but they're just that -- phantoms. The sinister character hiring them has a surprisingly good reason to do so -- he's trying to prevent a bad situation (not one that's just bad for him). Their mark, the only "innocent" in the movie, is trying to find his way out from his father's shadow ... and in the end, the idea planted isn't such a bad one.

Each character has to wrestle with his or her own demons, which is largely where the antagonism takes place. Cobb's are the most in-your-face, but the others have their pitfalls -- Ariadne is still learning what she can and can't do, the seasoned vets are going into deeper and darker places than any of them want to visit, and all of them have to cope with the risks involved ... and the fact that if any one of them screws up just a small part of the plan the whole thing could fail spectacularly.

It isn't easy to keep track of everything, first of the characters themselves as some of them stay behind in each layer of the dream, and then of where you are at any given moment or how long they have left in that level. The details are presented but if you miss them (or forget them) you can be lost ten minutes later. It is a dizzying, occasionally infuriating ride -- but all you can do is hold on and wait for a chance to catch your breath.

There aren't many. There are occasional pauses each time they enter a new layer and regroup. There's a single line where you can't help but laugh (delivered in a perfect deadpan by Gordon-Levitt) but ... That's about it. If you don't take them when they're presented, you're out of luck.

There are a lot of movies out there that can whirl you around with action, but this film does something different -- it whirls you around with the plot, then kicks it up with the action. And it is this fact that put me in a daze.

Normally I'd follow a description with a sort of disclaimer -- "this movie isn't for everybody." And while that's probably true here as well, there are no dead giveaways as to who that will be. It's surprisingly clean-cut. There's no swearing, no drugs, no ultra-violence. Heck, there are no cigarettes and the only booze is when a couple of characters are actually in a bar for five minutes.

If you don't like action movies, it's probably not for you. If you're not going to be able to concentrate, you'll only end up annoyed and confused. Some people will simply not like it, although it seems that's a minority. And I'll admit that I'm particularly enthused and not likely to judge fairly for those who won't like it.

All in all, this movie blew my expectations away -- and considering I practically had butterflies in my stomach during the previews, that's saying something.

Now, if only I could do something about the lack of sleep I got following it ...