Christopher Nolan is said to have spent ten years writing the script for "Inception." That had to take a lot of attention, like playing blindfold chess when walking across a tightrope. The hero of the film puts a young architect to the test by asking her to construct a labyrinth, and Nolan puts us to the test with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.
 

The story can be told in a few sentences or it can be left out entirely. Here's a film that won't give you any spoilers: Even if you knew how it ended, you wouldn't know how it got there unless you knew how it started. And explaining how it got there would leave you perplexed. The film is about the journey, about battling our way through engulfing sheets of truth and dream, reality inside dreams, and dreams without reality.

It's a stunning juggling act, and Nolan may have used "Memento" (2000) as a warm-up; he reportedly began writing this screenplay while shooting that film. It was the backwards story of a man who suffered from short-term memory loss. The spectator of "Inception," like the protagonist of that film, is lost in time and space. Even the connection between dream time and real time is never completely clear. The hero states that you can never remember the start of a dream, and that even dreams that seem to last for hours can only be a few minutes long.

Yes, but when you're dreaming, you don't realise it. What if you're trapped inside some man's nightmare? What is the relationship between your dream time and his? What exactly do you know?

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a high-ranking corporate raider. He infiltrates other men's minds and steals their ideas. Now he's been recruited by a wealthy billionaire to do the exact opposite: put an idea into a competitor's mind and make it so convincing that he thinks it's his own. This has never been achieved before, because our minds are just as sensitive to foreign concepts as our immune systems are to pathogens. The wealthy matriarch Cobb is forced to flee his home and family when a man named Saito (Ken Watanabe) gives him an offer he can't refuse.

Cobb assembles a team, and the film follows the well-established protocols of all heist films in this regard. 

Sequels, remakes, and franchises all seem to come from the recycling bin these days. "Inception" accomplishes a daunting task. It's completely new, but it's structured around action movie fundamentals, so it seems like it makes more sense than it (possibly) does. "Memento" had a flaw in my opinion: How does a person with short-term memory loss remember that he has it? I'm not sure if there's a hole in "Inception," but I can't seem to find it. "Batman" was reimagined by Christopher Nolan. He's not inventing something new this time. Few directors, however, would try to remake "Inception." I believe Nolan threw the map away when he exited the labyrinth.