I think I might have to watch this one again. I left feeling like I missed some of it, despite my rapt attention.

Visually, the movie is all kinds of impressive. The part of the movie that happens in dreamtime is awe-inspiring. If my dreams had that kind of cinematography, I’d spend a lot more time asleep. The real world in Inception has the same sort of chilly color palette as Nolan’s Batman movies, but the dreamworld is vibrant, strange and alive.

There isn’t a lot that I can say about the plot without ruining the experience for you, but I’ll say what’s in the trailers. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a guy who’s paid to steal ideas from people’s brains while they’re dreaming. He’s always just taken ideas out – this time he has to try and put an idea in. Implantation is apparently far more difficult than theft, and therein lies our tale.

Now, I don’t accept the premise that you can steal a usable idea from someone’s dreams – my dreams are full of ideas that seem brilliant to me while I’m sleeping and completely unintelligible the moment my eyes snap open. I am willing to bet that my experience is common. If people’s dreams were full of clever, usable ideas there would be more than one Ron Popeil in the world.

I’ll let that objection go and charge it to willing suspension of disbelief.

The movie sets up a fairly strict set of rules for the dreaming world, and for the most part it seems to play within them. Things get a little murky when we begin descending into dreams within dreams within dreams, but that gets a pass from me, too. It’s nice to see a sic-fi film that assumes i’m willing to puzzle over a complicated idea or two, so I’m feeling very forgiving.

The action is engrossing, and the film rewards your close attention. I recommend it even though I’m not sure how I feel about the ending, and I really didn’t like seeing bad guys menace Juno. She’s so TINY. Note to Hollywood: don’t do that to me again. From now on Ellen Page is not to be jeopardized by anything more dangerous than an unplanned pregnancy.