Speaking of Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre—did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol?
— RS Benedict (Blood Knife)
[One] difference between Inception and its Philip K. Dick-inspired 1980s and 90s precursors such as Total Recall, Videodrome (1983), and eXistenZ (1999). There’s very little of the “reality bleed,” the confusion of ontological hierarchy, that defined those films: throughout Inception, it’s surprisingly easy for both the audience and the characters to remember where they are in the film’s ontological architecture. When Ariadne is being trained by Arthur, she’s taken round a virtual model of the impossible Penrose Steps. On the face of it, however, Inception is remarkable for its seeming failure to explore any paradoxical Escheresque topologies.[…]
There’s something hollow about Cobb’s grief; on its own terms, it doesn’t convince as anything other than a genre-required character trait. It seems instead to stand in for something else, another sadness—a loss that the film points to but can’t name.
[…]
Cod-Freudianism has long been metabolized by an advertising–entertainment culture which is now ubiquitous, as psychoanalysis gives way to a psychotherapeutic self-help that’s diffused through mass media. It’s possible to read Inception as a staging of this superseding of psychoanalysis, with Cobb’s apparent victory over the Mal projection, his talking himself around to accepting that she is just a fantasmatic substitute for his dead wife, almost a parody of psychotherapy’s blunt pragmatism.
[…]
You yearn for foreign places, but everywhere you go looks like local color for the film set of a commercial; you want to be lost in Escheresque mazes, but you end up in an interminable car chase. In Inception, as in late capitalist culture in general, you’re always in someone else’s dream, which is also the dream of no one.
— Mark Fisher (Film Quarterly)
The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn’t care.
— Christopher Nolan (Interview)
Synopsis: Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.