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The formula for a big summer action blockbuster could not be simpler:

1. Start with an absurd premise.
2. Use the absurd premise as a pretext for generating loads of over-the-top action sequences.
3. Flesh out those action sequences with a bunch of over-the-top special effects.

With Inception, Christopher Nolan has followed the formula dutifully, and I think there can be no further discussion (as Stephen raised on Twitter the other day and again here on one of his Twitter round-ups) about whether this movie is going to be a flop. It isn’t.

It’s got all the right ingredients to pack the summer movie popcorn munchers into the seats. I just returned from a nearly full-house screening of Inception, and the mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings who made up the audience were highly appreciative, especially of the very end of the film, on which I’ll have some comments in a moment. 

So, yes, the film appears to have summer movie chops, but it offers a bit more than just that. For example, it provides a rather sly commentary on the movie business — Leonardo DiCaprio and his posse of dream-manipulators are really just a kind of specialized film crew. One of the challenges discussed early on in the film has to do with how the artificial dream world is established and made real to the dreamer. It may just be coincidence that this issue is raised during a sequence in which we go from Kyoto to Paris to Mombasa all in fairly short order, and each time with a visually stunning establishing shot (or set of shots) telling us where we are now. Sure, it might be coincidence, but I don’t think so.

Along the way, Inception asks some fearless questions about the power of ideas, where they come from, and, ultimately, the nature of reality. I don’t think that a spoiler alert is required before writing that one of the film’s principal conceits is the notion that dreams can be embedded within dreams. Watching characters deal with the various levels of reality, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Simulation Hypothesis. The chief problem with establishing multiple layers of reality is a simple but profound one — how can you ever know for sure that  the world you are experiencing is the real world?

In taking on the question of where ideas come from, Nolan does something brilliant. He pulls off an Inception of his own. That is to say, he plants an idea in the audience’s mind so subtly that we believe that we came up with it ourselves. A theory is introduced in the film which is described as a grave error. Believing it leads to tragic consequences. And yet we as an audience are led to conclude that this theory may, in fact, be true.

The movie ends with an amazing confirmation, not that the theory is true or false, but that somebody has, indeed, been messing around in our heads for the last couple hours. That’s a pretty scary thought, but maybe one we should consider more often than we do.