Film time is always a tricky thing to manage balancing how long a certain sequence is supposed to span in movie time vs. real time is a challenge directors face daily. In that regard, Inception is nothing short of a masterful high-wire act. I call this film one of the best uses of slow motion for a number of reasons, but the first and most important of them is how any and all slow motion is relative between dream levels. This is probably the most heavily stylised Christopher Nolan movie, but Nolan is nothing if not excellent at justifying his stylistic choices in the narrative. As the mind sinks further and further into dream levels in this universe, the brain works at faster and faster speeds, expanding time within itself like a bizarrely reversed Russian nesting doll. The slow motion (and inversely, the fast motion) is used to transition between dream scenes, and contextualise the relative speed at which they're all taking place. It is an impressive achievement in editing that not only do these transitions work, but they flow almost seamlessly from one to the next, amplifying the tension and stakes. The crowning moment of slow motion in this film is the one that connects all the dream levels: The van falling off the bridge. This moment ties the entire second half of the movie together, becoming an active measure for how much time they have left to accomplish their mind-heist. It works similarly to the Untouchable's baby carriage, but unlike that one, it has to provide tension for an entire heist, not just a single gunfight.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
