Last night, while reviewing what I’ve been working on in handy graphic form (which I will be doing again, because it’s fun and prevents me from actually working), Inception was the last square.

Up at Tor.com today, I talk about what we know about Inception, and what Inception means.

Hint: it means that smart sci-fi movies are thin on the ground these days, and a movie pitched as cerebral sci-fi is an event in and of itself. (Seriously, the only thing emphasized in the trailer is dreams/ideas/the mind, and also how all these people look really great in nice clothes.) This strategy wouldn’t have worked on a movie like, say, Moon, which was one of last year’s thinkiest sci-fi movies, but too indie for its own good somehow, and it ended up coming out in about eight theatres and disappearing off the face of the earth, except for one DVD copy that I put in a time capsule to save for later.

Obviously there’s no worries about that here, because Nolan made Batman cool again, which means he can basically do what he wants, forever. However, I am really hoping that this movie does not happen to suck. A lot of movies by good directors happen to suck, but when Channing Tatum gets tapped for the lead in a dimensional-sci-fi-action-romance that got suddenly greenlit because it’s vaguely like Avatar, I bet a lot of good scripts are floating around that could really benefit from some box-office proof that smart sells.

I’m just saying, in a world where Ridley Scott is remaking his own Alien franchise, Spider-Man is getting a reboot THREE YEARS after the last one came out, and Avatar can win Golden Globes*, we could really use a win, here.

NO PRESSURE, INCEPTION.

* To be fair, many undeserving people have won Golden Globes.

This week, Christopher Nolan and company released 14 new stills from his sci-fi thriller Inception.

These photos might require a spoiler warning, but honestly, it’s not as if we’d know. Nolan has been tight-lipped about the project from the beginning. For months after its announcement, he would say only it was set “within the architecture of the mind.” Early promotional material was equally vague.

More recently, a set of character posters have given us a lineup straight out of a film-noir caper (with titles like Point Man, Shade, Forger, and Mark), and theatrical trailers have inevitably begun to give hints as to the plot.

We now know for sure that Inception is about this guy, and there are dreams, and a girl who is maybe dreaming or not, and you can take ideas out or put them in, and lobbies, and guys wearing suits well, and Marion Cotillard has expressive eyes, and also there are lots of hallways, and people sitting looking at each other, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt signed up for a lot of wire work, and some other stuff happens.

The thing is, in a movie landscape that’s been slowly starved of anything mildly cerebral, this movie is in a pretty precarious spot. It has a power director behind it, and an A-list cast, and what we’ve seen of the effects has been well-done and unexpected. However, part of the reason the plot is being kept vague is because Nolan has pitched this from the beginning as a cerebral film (literally and figuratively), and in the wake of grinding comic-book franchises, sequels to sequels, 80s-toy adaptations, and 80s-monster reboots, Hollywood is holding its breath.

It’s up to Inception to prove that there’s still room in the multiplex for smart sci-fi.

Of course, this is not a particularly fair position for this movie to be in. Nolan is a solid director with a good track record, but many a director with a good track record makes the occasional bomb (lookin’ at you, Ridley Scott), and without a strong trend of downward spiral (…Ridley), if a movie doesn’t do well, then it’s technically just a data point on a larger graph with invisible juggernauts like Eclipse and Toy Story 3 affecting results.

However, in a Hollywood with a memory so short it’s already rebooting a franchise that had its last installment three years ago, even one underperforming movie is enough to put the red light on half a dozen other concepts. (That cerebral-sci-fi standby Michael Gondry is directing this summer’s Green Hornet movie speaks volumes about what the current movie market will support.)

And even if the movie does well, there are no guarantees that much will come of it. I’m not sure how many smart spec scripts have been stamped “Greenlit, Pending Inception’s First-Weekend Numbers.” But this is the industry that has declared, based on Jonah Hex’s opening box-office and her release from Transformers, that Megan Fox’s career is already over, and her franchise has only been around for three years. If Inception rakes it in opening weekend, six people in LA will ask for something just like it, and six smart-spec scripts will turn their conceptual little faces to the sun and bloom. (Also an angel will get its wings. Also there are dreams with restaurants.)

Christopher Nolan’s box-office record is that of a director who knows how to make a smart, noirish action flick that occasionally goes gangbusters at the box office. Let’s hope this is one of those times.

(A recent trailer for Inception is below. Look, hallways!)

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com.]