By Geoff Boucher
CARDINGTON, England - July is the month when movies get dizzy (or is it ditsy?) from the heat, and this year is no exception, with films featuring heartthrob vampires, evil aliens and the never-gets-old concept of talking dogs.
But on Friday, in the middle of the usual popcorn parade, director Christopher Nolan will deliver "Inception," a strange thriller that has been a Hollywood mystery for months thanks to its cryptic title and the fact that the studio has guarded the Nolan-penned script like a state secret.
So it was no surprise last summer that, at a musty old dirigible hangar outside London, Nolan welcomed a rare visitor to his "Inception" set with a guarded smile.
Mazes and masked intentions are the specialties of Nolan, who burst on the scene 10 years ago with "Memento," a noir riddle told in two alternating narratives presented in opposite chronological directions - a masterpiece of watchmaker cinema.
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In 2008, Nolan performed an even more impressive sleight of hand when he delivered a $1 billion success with the Batman movie called "The Dark Knight," the most cerebral of superhero films and one that barely used any computer-generated effects.
"Inception," the 39-year-old director's seventh feature film and his first foray into science fiction, combines the perception riddles of "Memento" and the sheer scale of "Dark Knight" with its $160 million budget and location shoots in Morocco, France, Japan and three other countries.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a specialist in the new branch of corporate espionage - he's a dream thief who plucks secrets from the minds of tycoons after pumping them full of drugs and hooking them up to a mysterious contraption.
The movie may be Hollywood's first existential heist movie, and though that may not sound like typical fare for the air-conditioning months, Warners and Legendary Pictures are banking on the movie catching on as a brainy "Mission: Impossible" by way of "The Matrix."
"Complex and ambiguous are the perfect way to describe the story," DiCaprio said in a recent phone interview.
"And it's going to be a challenge to ultimately pull it off. But that is what Chris Nolan specializes in. He has been able to convey really complex narratives that work on a multitude of different layers simultaneously."
For Nolan, "Inception" was an elusive dream. "I wanted to do this for a very long time, it's something I've thought about off and on since I was about 16," he said last summer.
It was the success of "The Dark Knight" that allowed Nolan to put his most ambitious idea on the screen.
Altered states and untrusted perception are recurring themes in Nolan's films: "Memento" is about an amnesia victim; "Insomnia" (2002) presents a corrupt cop addled by lack of sleep; "The Prestige" (2006) is about rival illusionists; and in the two Gotham City films (the first was "Batman Begins" in 2005) there are no truly superpowered citizens, but the senses are blurred by fear toxins and ninja mind tricks.
In all of them, Nolan put a premium on achieving the unreal on camera as opposed to in computer, which runs counter to Hollywood's obsession with the pixel possibilities of green screen and 3-D.
