Deciding he needed more experience before tackling a production of this magnitude and complexity, Nolan shelved the project and instead worked on 2005's Batman Begins, 2006's The Prestige, and 2008's The Dark Knight.

Cobb tells Ariadne that he and Mal entered Limbo while experimenting with dream-sharing, experiencing fifty years in one night due to the time dilation with reality.

"We didn't feel that we were going to be able to shoot in IMAX because of the size of the cameras because this film given that it deals with a potentially surreal area, the nature of dreams and so forth, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible.

[5] In addition Nolan and Pfister tested using Showscan and Super Dimension 70 as potential large-format, high-frame-rate camera systems to use for the film, but ultimately decided against either format.

[32] Nolan has also criticized the dim image that 3D projection produces, and disputes that traditional film does not allow realistic depth perception, saying "I think it's a misnomer to call it 3D versus 2D.

Franklin had artists build concepts while Nolan expressed his ideal vision: "Something glacial, with clear modernist architecture, but with chunks of it breaking off into the sea like icebergs".

Édith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien" ("No, I Regret Nothing") appears throughout the film, used to accurately time the dreams, and Zimmer reworked pieces of the song into cues of the score.

[41] Hans Zimmer's music was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Score category in 2011, losing to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of The Social Network.

[43] David Denby in The New Yorker compared Nolan's cinematic treatment of dreams to Luis Buñuel's in Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

However, "he did get many aspects right," she said, citing the scene in which a sleeping Cobb is shoved into a full bath, and in the dream world water gushes into the windows of the building, waking him up.

[46] Paul argued that the experience of going to a picturehouse is itself an exercise in shared dreaming, particularly when viewing Inception: the film's sharp cutting between scenes forces the viewer to create larger narrative arcs to stitch the pieces together.

As in the film's story, in a cinema one enters into the space of another's dream, in this case Nolan's, as with any work of art, one's reading of it is ultimately influenced by one's own subjective desires and subconscious.

[8]: 10 Nolan began with the structure of a heist movie, since exposition is an essential element of that genre, though adapted it to have a greater emotional narrative suited to the world of dreams and subconscious.

While a traditional heist movie has a heavy dose of exposition at the beginning as the team assembles and the leader explains the plan, in Inception this becomes nearly continuous as the group progresses through the various levels of dreaming.

[50] Nolan drew inspiration from the works of Jorge Luis Borges,[20][51] including "The Secret Miracle" and "The Circular Ruins",[52] and from the films Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999).

[54][55][56] The film cuts to the closing credits from a shot of the top apparently starting to show an ever so faint wobble, inviting speculation about whether the final sequence was reality or another dream.

While reiterating that he was uncomfortable with definitively explaining the scene, Nolan in 2023 credited Emma Thomas as providing "the correct answer, which is Leo's character ... doesn't care at that point".

[59] Mark Fisher argued that "a century of cultural theory" cautions against accepting the author's interpretation as anything more than a supplementary text, and this all the more so given the theme of the instability of any one master position in Nolan's films.

Although Inception was not part of an existing franchise, Sue Kroll, president of Warner's worldwide marketing, said the company believed it could gain awareness due to the strength of "Christopher Nolan as a brand".

Kroll declared that "We don't have the brand equity that usually drives a big summer opening, but we have a great cast and a fresh idea from a filmmaker with a track record of making incredible movies.

[63] The rest of the campaign unrolled after WonderCon in April 2010, where Warner gave away promotional T-shirts featuring the PASIV briefcase used to create the dream space, and had a QR code linking to an online manual of the device.

[65] More pieces of viral marketing began to surface before Inception's release, such as a manual filled with bizarre images and text sent to Wired magazine,[66] and the online publication of posters, ads, phone applications, and strange websites all related to the film.

"[105] Justin Chang of Variety praised the film as "a conceptual tour de force" and wrote, "applying a vivid sense of procedural detail to a fiendishly intricate yarn set in the labyrinth of the unconscious mind, the writer-director has devised a heist thriller for surrealists, a Jungian's Rififi, that challenges viewers to sift through multiple layers of (un)reality.

"[108] In its August 2010 issue, Empire gave the film a full five stars and wrote, "it feels like Stanley Kubrick adapting the work of the great sci-fi author William Gibson [...] Nolan delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country.

"[109] Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film a B+ grade and wrote, "It's a rolling explosion of images as hypnotizing and sharply angled as any in a drawing by M. C. Escher or a state-of-the-biz video game; the backwards splicing of Nolan's own Memento looks rudimentary by comparison.

"[114] Time's Richard Corliss wrote that the film's "noble intent is to implant one man's vision in the mind of a vast audience [...] The idea of moviegoing as communal dreaming is a century old.

"[116] USA Today's Claudia Puig gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and felt that Nolan "regards his viewers as possibly smarter than they are—or at least as capable of rising to his inventive level.

[123] Yet other critics, such as Kristin Thompson, see less value in the ambiguous ending of the film and more in its structure and novel method of storytelling, highlighting Inception as a new form of narrative that revels in "continuous exposition".

[132] Critics and publications who ranked the film first for that year included Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times (tied with The Social Network and Toy Story 3), Tasha Robinson of The A.V.

[163] In February 2020, American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift released a lyric video for her single "The Man", which featured visuals bearing resemblance to the film.