So we’ve got a little something special for you this week, folks–trying to choose between the Disney movie and the Chris Nolan romp was no small feat, so now, you get BOTH.  Oh yes, we tackled Sorceror’s Apprentice mere days ago, and now, we’re handling Inception.

Inception follows Dominic Cobb, a man who’s mastered a new kind of thievery that’s making the MPAA and RIAA cringe in their boots: intellectual property theft.  But they’re not making copies–they’re taking actual intellectual property right out of people’s intellect.  But things aren’t going so well for Dominic.  His wife’s a dead lunatic who’s constantly haunting his dreams.  His friends are convinced he’s losing his mind.  Oh, and he’s wanted on a murder rap for killing his dead lunatic wife.  But Dominic’s got a chance to get back home and beat his murder rap–all he’s got to do is take on one last job.  Not to take anything…but to put something in place instead.

When I walked out of Inception, I was shaky legged and confused about my entire time sense.  I couldn’t actually tell how long I’d been in there.  It was like I’d been asleep.  Of course, it was a bit of a surprise to discover it was a two and a half hour movie.

See, Inception does funny things with your time sense.  And while there are a lot of incredible visual elements going on here, sometimes there are bits of the plot that don’t fall into line.  You’ll wonder, much like in an actual dream, where things that were unaccounted for mere seconds prior are now somehow in full view.  I know I asked myself more than once, “where did they get that (fill in the blank)?” or “where do they keep getting all those (add an item here)?” or even the much more general “where the hell did that thing come from”?

See, it’s both the biggest upside and downside about Inception: its sheer raw ambition.  They were so busy asking if they could do something that they never bothered to ask if they SHOULD.  And thus, so much of what they’ll do won’t fit the narrative.  The narrative is pretty much a total loss–an impenetrable maze of intermingling factoids that’s deliberately set up so as to be difficult to get through.

But that said, it’s also spectacularly compelling.  They’ll do some truly amazing things in this movie, some things that I’d never thought I’d see in a movie–like Joseph Gordon-Levitt floating weightless through a hotel.  Or Leo DiCaprio doing a convincing job of acting.  I sat through a two and a half hour movie and left rubbery-legged and thoroughly confused about what time it was.  One thing I was not was bored.

And in the end, that’s the truest expression of how well a movie did.  Inception may be a bit confusing in points and forced to draw a lot of plot points out of a hat, but it’s going to do some amazing stuff that you’ll absolutely want to see.  Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands it a nine out of ten for not being perfect, but for being sufficiently amazing to be close.