Inception is an overly ambitious, wordy, and claustrophobic work of art meant to impress as equally as entertain. And I like it for those reasons. It seems like Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight (2008), Insomnia (2002), and Memento (2000) is at least trying to be inventive with this novella-like presentation of what could be considered a heist film. That and it reminded me of how good The Matrix films might have been had Nolan resolved that trilogy. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page, with great turns by Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy, Inception is The Story about a crack team of dream technicians hired by a global magnate to infiltrate a business man’s dreams and plant the seed of an idea that will alter the direction of that individual’s corporate decisions. Packed with an almost tangible feeling of suspense right from the get-go, the path we take to get through Inception is seemingly intricate and full of explanation. Just like it is when explaining a dream, the simplicity of the sleep events suddenly become more elaborate as we try to describe them. You would be smart to prepare for a film like this by getting into your favorite Stanley Kubrick frame of mind. Even if it doesn’t make complete sense, you’ll at least experience the feeling of being there. Having already planted the seed of The Story, here now are The Goods, The Flaws, The Call.

The Goods: At my screening, about an hour into Inception the projectionist gave us a more climactic reel prematurely, and did so backwards. But we all thought for a few seconds that the actions moving in reverse on screen and the garbled audio of characters speaking a reversed, foreign language were part of the film. Memento after all was a story told partly in reverse. That’s how buried in complexity Nolan had us. It didn’t dawn on me until the theater forced an “intermission” and fixed the film that something about Inception made me think Nolan used Stanly Kubrick as his “totem” while creating this monster of a maze. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) comes to mind in images of monoliths, music, and a certain old man who appears in a closed room in Inception much the same way astronaut Dave Bowman looks near the end of Odyssey. Even the reverberating sound acoustics of the closed off room these elder gentleman dine in has a familiar ring to it. Also, like in Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) Inception is about a group of individuals each skilled with different talents for their chosen occupation which is thievery. Like that film, a large chunk of Inception’s plot is planning a theft.

There are even centered, symmetrical composition of shots like those used in The Shining (1980). I would even go so far as to say the images that linger within the slow zoom of lens in a Kubrick film is honored here in extended slow motion shots of our characters in dream state. In doing so I believe Nolan gives us more to look at and enjoy about the film aesthetically rather than just delivering straight-forward narrative. It’s a huge addition to the film and it further enhances the characters’ dream states.

Non Je Ne Regrette Rien, “I don’t regret anything,” or so the song goes. The choice to cast Marion Cotillard who won an Oscar for her role as French singer Edith Piaf in the film La Vie En Rose (2008) is a curious one. She’s both the ex-wife of DiCaprio’s character in Inception and a plot device. But it is the Edith Piaf song chosen for Inception as a means to escape from a dangerous dream mission that is further proof of an underlying dream-web Nolan weaves.

And talk about Déjà vu, from the music that begins, appears throughout and ends Inception to the similar inner conflict DiCaprio’s character Cobb wrestles with in Inception, it’s as if Shutter Island (2010) was chosen as a dream component for Nolan to build his film from. The pounding, getting-louder-as-if-on-approach electrified chords of Hans Zimmer’s score opens Inception and re-visits the film from time to time just as Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes open and close Shutter Island. You won’t find contemporary music scores more comparable to Bernard Hermann’s work (Double Indemnity (1944), Psycho (1960)) than these two. And it helps in giving Inception a familiar, dream-like feel as if we’ve been there before.

The Flaws: What Inception needs is a clearly defined antagonist. A humorous villain played by the likes of Peter Sellers, if I’m to stay with the Kubrick references. There are no bad guys per se in Inception and more than anything, in terms of what Nolan is trying to deliver in the second half of Inception characters are sorely in need of one solid villain. Or at least one villain that can successfully personify all of the threats in their dreams. The only major conflict within their dreams is the dreamer who can at any given moment conjure up a person or object that has nothing to do with the job at hand but could put everyone involved at risk. Nolan tries to put a face on that risk and label a person as an antagonist, and in the middle of the film he creates gangs of anonymous enemies, all of them men we wouldn’t recognize as anyone familiar to the story but no single Mr. Smith from The Matrix (1999) or even disturbing, faceless goons from a film like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) to mess with our heroes. Not even in-your-face monsters like Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), or government bad guys like Christopher Plummer from Dreamscape (1984). Instead we get a substantial amount of action in the second part of the film that feels artificial—I think unfamiliar, run of the mill dudes in suits and dark cars chasing our guys through dreams with machine guns cheapens Inception, in parts, to the equivalent of a throw-away Sunday matinee action thriller like From Paris With Love (2010), Crank (2006), or even a Chuck Norris film like Delta Force (1986). It’s the biggest flaw of the film and something akin to what put The Matrix films in hot water.

Inception is also chock full of exposition which is to say characters tell us what’s going on rather than show us. It results in a lot of talking but to Nolan’s credit it never meanders. What would have been nice is if some of that exposition went towards clarifying for the audience in simple terms how we arrived at this point in civilization, that technology is so advanced that we can enter other people’s dreams. Movies like Flatliners (1990) or Fight Club (1999) deal with complicated details like this more extensively through individual character mini-plots, voice over, or graphics on screen. Some characters in Inception like Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur are not fully fleshed out adding more confusion to the film by providing thin, one-dimensional depictions of characters in a multi-layered, omni-dimensional world.

The Call: This is not to say you should avoid Inception. In fact, you should spend the ten (or more) and enjoy peeling back the layers of Nolan’s art and complexity. If you like heist films and science fiction, I say enjoy it on the big screen while you can. At the very least it is one of the most thought provoking films in years. It’s Christopher Nolan’s best dream yet.

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout. Running time is 2 hours and 28 minutes. Also starting Tom Berenger, and Oscar winner Michael Caine. Visual Effects are stunning, and surprisingly not affiliated with Weta Digital or Industrial Light and Magic.