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Memento's Christopher Nolan is at it again. In Inception, instead of playing with time only, his exploration of the human mind is also spectacularly spatial. The movie, an action-packed Borges-meets-the-Matrix blockbuster, manages to be both emotionally intense and philosophically deep, gathering film critics and audiences in almost unanimous praise. It traps you in its maze only to release you two and a half hours later, breathless, due to an amazing screenplay – almost ten years in the making – and visionary images, alternating plot-effective slow-motion a' la Matrix with metaphysic landscapes echoing Antonioni and De Chirico.

The movie features Leonardo Di Caprio in the role of Cobb, a professional thief specialized in extracting ideas from people's subconscious at its most vulnerable state: dreaming. Cobb and his team are tackling his final mission, a semi-suicidal trip where at stake are not only corporate interests, but also the protagonist's peace of mind.

I'm not going into detail about the complex time ellipsis and the frantic reality/dream/dream-within-a-dream pace of the plot, since I don't want to spoil the film too much. Especially in this context, Inception's relationship with architecture is more insightful.
Much like in The Matrix or the less famous Dark City – where extraterrestrial parasites shape people's lives and their very own city with their collective intelligence – in Nolan's movie the mind plays the role of an architect in building spatial environments. The director introduces the extra spin of lucid dreaming, where a person (architect) builds an imaginary environment and another person, in whose subconscious such an outline is planted, populates it with the texture/projection of their dream-reality.

The characters in Inception are thus able to shape space in many ways: by accessing known areas instantly from remote ones (which reminds me of Guy Debord's famous Naked City), by erecting buildings or architectural elements out of thin air, and even by altering the very dimensions of space; in the most fascinating sequence of the movie the young "architect" interpreted by Ellen Page literally bends Paris over itself, creating a seemingly specular environment where people are walking on both the "floor" and the "ceiling", each appearing as legitimate street levels.
The notion of the architect, as a creator of geometrical and physical constraints around a space that has ultimately to be filled by other people's experience, sharply points out the "virtuality" of architecture itself, today more and more explicit in the rendering aesthetics from which we routinely judge projects on the Internet every day.

In terms of urban aesthetics, the resemblance of Cobb's dream-space, which he has built for himself and his wife as an alternate reality, to actual urban spaces today is also worth noticing. The modernist blocks emerging directly from the water and populating the protagonist's dream horizon somehow look like the new housing blocks on the Eastern Docklands in Amsterdam: massive metaphysical solids standing out from the unmodeled, liquid surface of the water.
Furthermore, the architectural actuality in Inception is shown along the time axis: some of the imaginary locations where the movie is set (like Cobb's old houses) are rooted in particular slices in time, a property of Michel Foucault's heterotopias. According to David Grahame-Shane, who writes about it in his book Recombinant Urbanism, heterotopias have come to be the most relevant urban element in the contemporary multi-centered, "scrambled egg" city. Needless to say, the type of heterotopias Grahame-Shane focuses the most on are those of illusion.

In its use of architecture as a dream-like practice shaping actual experience, Inception captures a few key aspects of the field and represents them with a visually successful rendering. Not only does the movie deploy urban aesthetics as a fascinating leitmotif throughout the story, but it also sheds some light on them. Go see it.