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It's like The Matrix without all that Chosen One crap! Wait... no, it's not like The Matrix at all.

Inception does what any good science fiction movie that isn’t focused on the “science” should do — it gets the central conceit out of the way with a minimum of explanation and moves on. Thanks to a futuristic chemical concoction, human beings can now enter one another’s dreams, experiencing them as a shared reality and manipulating it to their own ends. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief for hire, tasked with the nearly-impossible task of “inception” — planting an idea in another person’s subconscious without them realizing it’s been planted.

One of the greatest pitfalls of any movie like this is the descent into pseudo-scientific technoblather, a pitfall Inception dodges by creating a very simple internal mythology and sticking to it. There’s the “architect” who creates the dream setting within the subconscious mind; the “dreamer,” who populates it with subconscious projections, and a set of simple rules: pain hurts in a dream, but killing someone will wake them up — unless, of course, they’re sedated, in which case they can fall into a limbo where dream and reality can no longer be distinguished.

If you die in a dream, you die in real life! Wait... no you don't.

No effort is made in justifying these mechanics to the audience; they’re set up, accepted, and get out of the way of the story. The lack of emphasis on the sci-fi conceits gives Inception room to explore its real themes: information as a virus, the nature of reality, and the meaning of choices. The central plot revolves around a single, binary choice by Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a corporate heir whose rivals want to break up his empire. Cobb and his associates invade his dreams, Ocean’s Eleven-style, and take him on an emotional journey that, in testament to Nolan’s directorial skills, manages to be compelling despite the cynical motivations behind it.

Along the way, Inception runs into the kind of story problems that any movie of this sort runs into: how to raise the stakes in a world where nothing is real, how to immerse the characters (and audience) in an imaginary reality without confusing the viewer, and how to play on the question of “but is it only a dream?” without falling into hoary old cliche.

Inception somehow manages to leap deftly over these obstacles — replacing the “if you die in a dream, you die in real life” cheat used in similar but far inferior films with a more plausible alternative, and unapologetically leaving the “real” world behind for the majority of the film.

Though Inception contains plenty of spectacle — freight trains appearing out of nowhere, entire cityscapes bending like rubber or disintegrating like sand castles at high tide — the real meat of the movie is in the characters: Cobb; who’s pursued by a past that literally comes back to haunt him; Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose understated humor and competence keep the film from sinking into angst; Eames (Tom Hardy), who nearly runs away the entire show, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), whom the viewer will probably come to think of as “the sensible one.”

Perhaps the biggest strength of Inception is that it is, ultimately, not about the dizzying, flexible landscapes of the dream world that the characters inhabit, nor the inevitable questions about whether or not the characters are really experiencing the events of the film or dreaming (perhaps second only to “what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?” as one of the most overused movie questions of all time). Inception is a movie about the choices we make, the regrets we carry with us, and how even the smallest idea can grow to define a person’s entire life. Cobb is a character haunted by regrets that are worth regretting, and dwells in a place where even happy dreams of bygone times provide pain instead of comfort.

Like the medium of film itself; Inception is about artifice that can provide genuine emotion and even self-realization, even if those moments have been carefully crafted from without. Inception seems to ask not whether its characters are experiencing dream or reality, but rather what they choose to do with the reality they experience.  “You keep telling yourself what you know,” says a character from Cobb’s dark past.  “But what do you believe?” In the end, Inception seems to tell us, it’s the second question that matters most.