A surreal cityscape folds in on itself while Ellen Page and Keanu Reeves, clad in glistening black body suits, gaze heavenward with wonder. Keanu lets out a breathy “whoa.”

Wait a minute. Something’s not quite right.

Oh right — replace Keanu with Leonard DiCaprio and strike the “whoa” (and the patent leather body gloves). Now you’ve got a glimpse of Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan‘s summer mind-bender, Inception.

Inception is rather reminiscent of Speed Racer writers/directors Andy and Larry Wachowski’s 1999 blockbuster, The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. If you also sense a similarity between the two films, you’re not imagining a connection. In a recently published L.A. Times interview, when Nolan was asked whether or not Inception would be another second-life film akin to Avatar and Surrogates, he responded, “I think ours is of an older school … more of The Matrix variety and the concepts of different levels of reality. I think when I first started trying to make this film happen it was very much pulled from that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.”

Inception, a film which Nolan says he has been contemplating since the age of 16, centers around Dom Cobb, a wounded dreamer (after the loss of his wife) who excels at a new branch of dream-thieving corporate espionage. He pilfers secrets from the subconscious of tycoons by pumping them with drugs and then attaching them to a mysterious device. Like The Matrix it smacks of a brainier breed of sci-fi than the CGI-muscled, 3-D-flexing, video game-styled adrenaline contenders that have been duking it out in theaters as of late. Of course, Inception will employ computerized effects in its psychological landscape, but audiences can also expect some old-school spectacle — for example, (500) Days of Summer‘s Joseph Gordon-Levitt battling in a giant, hamster-wheel whirling corridor or a massive tilting nightclub that Nolan had built.

Inception also appears to exude the same existentialist anxiety, film noir feeling, and dream-nightmare disorientation as the Wachowskis’ consciousness-freeing revolution. Both Inception and The Matrix offer audiences a rat’s-eye view from within, rather than above a maze or matrix-like reality. A maze, alluded to in the Inception trailer’s labyrinthine skyline title and by Nolan, who in the previously cited L.A. Times story noted that he always finds himself, in films like Memento and Inception, “gravitating to the analogy of a maze.” These thoughts-as-weapons thrillers also both have an emotional backbone that tethers the blood-racing exhilaration to something more meaningful. Though while Neo strives to save humanity, Cobb, at least from what we’ve glimpsed so far, has less altruistic, corporate-greed-generated ambitions (mingling with his widower heartbreak).

Undoubtedly Nolan will stamp the film with his signature genius, unique from the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix vision. The same can arguably be said of DiCaprio’s singular talents. (So expect a lot fewer “whoas” and a lot more anxious brow creasing.) And ultimately, Inception’s intriguingly tight-lipped trailer leaves moviegoers only one place to satisfy their curiosity and discover how Matrix-y the film will (or won’t) be — in theaters on July 16.

Tags: inception, leonardo dicaprio