The teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Inception was released in some theaters with Inglourious Basterds last Friday, and the one-minute clip is now online thanks to Yahoo. Your mind is the scene of the crime, after the jump.

We’ve been talking about the film based on the logline “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind” for quite a while, and we have the rumored plot that says “Inception is about entering peoples’ minds/dreams. A technology to do so has been developed and is done through an injection. DiCaprio and his team work to enter the minds of other characters in order to retrieve/plant information.” Those things could well hold true, and the ‘your mind is the scene of the crime’ tagline suggests that more planting info will be done than retrieving. After seeing this teaser I expect The Matrix will be brought up fairly frequently. Here we see a brief fight scene in what appears to be a hotel corridor, with the participants bouncing all over the walls and ceiling. And in general, a lack of solid grounding and perspective is what characterizes the teaser. There’s a reason that spinning top was used for the initial tease on Inception’s website.

Meanwhile, the cinematography seems to be a direct extension of what Wally Pfister did for Nolan on The Dark Knight. I loved Pfister’s work on that film, so I’m curious to see how he pushes it forward here. And while the Hans Zimmer score for the teaser is on the bombastic edge, it is also not the typical bombastic movie teaser music, but more in line with the atonal work Zimmer did for The Dark Knight. What is Nolan going to unleash here now that he’s not bound to a universe owned by DC? We see overhead city shots (as per TDK), the WB logo as a maze of streets, and a similar set of buildings resolving into a maze for the film’s logo. Is Nolan mapping the human mind to a cityscape?

Inception features Leonardo DiCaprio as Jacob, a CEO-type, Marion Cotillard (La Vie en rose, Public Enemies) as his wife, Ellen Page (Juno)  as a young college grad student named Ariadne,  who is also DiCaprio’s sidekick, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, an associate working for DiCaprio. Ken Watanabe will play the film’s villain, a man named Saito, who is blackmailing Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. Tom Hardy (Bronson) plays Eames, a member of DiCaprio’s team. Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Sunshine) plays Fischer and Michael Caine is also involved.