But in hopes of not making this strictly a film review, I’d like to talk mostly about the film’s thought provoking capabilities and the possibility of cinema to finally, in a generation of sequels and remakes in flashy 3-D, make a creative, non-referential effort. Granted, there have been others through the past years that have had this inventive spark, but “Inception” is one of the only films to carry the large financial and promotional backing that is necessary to reach a wide audience.

In the theater, I was completely sucked into what was happening on the screen, wholly invested in the plot and attempting to figure out just what was going on. “Inception” is the type of film that doesn’t provoke you to figure out what’s going to happen in the end. It’s the type of thing that makes all the puzzle functions in your brain start whirring and spinning. The idea that reality is not reality, a concept once foiled by “The Matrix” (though thoroughly explanatory in its own mechanical wasteland), is a driving force in “Inception.” But it is not an attempt to describe what in fact is real if reality is not; it is merely offering the question. Is it our dreams, our subconscious mind that is really our conscious mind, and not the other way around as we are for the most part convinced?

However, it was in considering this that I eventually panned out from those specific thoughts and realized what had triggered this train in the first place: a movie.

It’s absurd that actors and directors get paid the salaries they are paid. It’s also absurd the lifestyles that some of these high-class citizens of the world decide to lead, whether it’s the fault of their parenting or the lack of morality. I’m not bashing Hollywood, but I am bashing that obnoxiously decrepit part of Hollywood that most of the public gets to see. “Inception” has granted the film industry the opportunity for redemption, a real heavy-intellectual hitter that will awaken in you some challenging paradoxes, and the chance for you to reconsider the motives behind creative thought, or at least, creative thought in movies.

On a side note, the 12,500-watt sound system that provides the audio for an IMAX is quite powerful indeed, as witnessed by a friend and I in the midst of watching “Inception.” In a particularly tense scene, with explosions imminent and nerves in a bind, a light bulb, in the real world, decided to exhaust from its last thread and drop into a shattered mess of pieces next to my left leg. So, in recommending the intensity of the IMAX theatre, I’d caution you to sit in a section of the audience that is not directly beneath a light bulb. To clarify, it was in the real world that this light bulb incident occurred, and not a dream state, as you might have been wondering. And yes, I understand the contradiction in saying that.

Zach Lutz is a sophomore English major and columnist for the Summer Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].