He's made another movie. He keeps doing this, and a warned public keeps buying tickets.
The warnings come because these aren't just popcorn pictures he's making. The public is fooled by a high concept, and Nolan's busy slipping vitamins into everybody's oatmeal. This is criminal, because you're just not supposed to be be able to make hundreds of millions of dollars making people think. We're being duped into accepting more than we paid for, and better than we expected.
"High-concept" is generally regarded as a disparagement. Films based on a large premise tend to be absent-mindedly executed. Nolan's particular skill, he takes this core idea and then winds plot, character, tone, and dialogue around it like a thread. Inception is totally a high-concept film: man invades dreams, blurring the lines between dream and reality. It's an old, old idea, and probably an easy sell.
Inception treats dream walking as a matter of course. There are well-defined rules to the dreamworld, which is some kind of pedestrian Matrix. There aren't any magical powers here--none of the freedom that lucid dreaming might normally afford. This is a terrific decision, because it constrains the narrative in a couple of important ways. First, characters can't just wish themselves out of predicaments. They have to accomplish objectives in linear and defeatable ways. Second, if dream is really indiscernible from reality, it has to be verisimilitudinous. Dream hasn't really been handled like this before.
The film is also terrifically cast. Leo DiCaprio. Ellen Page. Ken Wantanabe. Pete Postelwaite. Character actors all. This matters greatly, because characterization isn't Nolan's first strength. Characters don't live and breathe and evacuate bowels here--they're ciphers, types, archetypes. They're lips in service to a great idea, but because they're fleshed by great actors, you barely notice. Who *is* Cobb (DiCaprio) apart from his broken obsessiveness? Who cares? because Leo is just so broken.
Plot? Oh, it's sparse. Broken Leo wants to get home to his needy children, and his super Jedi dream skills can get him there. Assemble an ensemble, do one last mission impossible, ???, profit. Plot isn't important; it's another cypher that proves the central idea of this universe, that time and space are context-based fictions. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the movie's climax, which contains 4(!) nested dream universes that ostensibly occur in a few seconds but can, according to the rules of dream, last years. Trying to keep track of the same characters operating at different levels of dream in synchronicity bends the mind. It is an incredibly ambitious bit of filmmaking, and surely the thing to point to when talking about how great the film is.
But this, that reality is relative to the level on which you're currently existing, well--it's neat. It's not profound, exactly, but it's not platitudinous either. It doesn't resonate emotionally--it's no Toy Story 3--but apart from Pixar's annual and maddening high water mark, it's got to be the best movie of the year.
