Inception demystified

Christopher Nolan's sci-fi opus Inception is shaping up to be the most anticipated movie of the summer. We say 'shaping up' because, in truth, no one's been quite sure what it is we're anticipating.

The picture has become clearer, though, thanks to a piece in the LA Times, which shines a little light on the film's protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio's heistman Dom Cobb.
u00a0


According to the LA Times, which has laid its hands on a copy of the Inception script, Cobb drugs CEOs, including Cillian Murphy's young tycoon Fischer, attaching them to a device that plunders their ideas and business secrets.

"I originally wrote it as a heist movie," Nolan told the paper, "and heist movies traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms. They're frivolous and glamorous, and there's a sort of gloss and fun to it. I originally tried to write it that way, but when I came back to it I realised thatu00a0-- to meu00a0-- that didn't work for a film that relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realised I needed to raise the emotional stakes."

Expect that emotional core to come from DiCaprio's Cobb, a bruised dreamer himself, grieving for his wife and driven to new lengths of dream larceny.

Also expect a typically complex, layered narrative from Nolan. Expect minimal effects, but for those effects to be the other side of insane (see: the folding cityscape of the trailer). But most of all, as the saying goes, expect the unexpected.

Inception is out on July 16.