“You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
Inception is clever, solidly constructed heist film that is well paced, has a great ensemble and is technically impressive. It just wasn’t mind blowing.
I wanted to be WOWED. I wanted to shiver at the awesomeness that was happening on-screen. I wanted to have a big giant grin forced onto my face...and that never happened.
The film is about a team of idea extractors led by a man named Cobb (Leanardo Dicaprio) that take attempt to perform an INCEPTION – putting an idea in a subject’s mind in a certain way that makes them believe that they formulated the idea themselves.
I was involved with what was going on, it was exciting, but I was never completely wrapped up. Director/Writer Christopher Nolan’s injects emotion into the proceedings, but they seem to be to move the plot forward instead of being true moments of audience connection. He lingers on them only briefly, and then moves on, never allowing us to really grasp the impact these moments should have.
I’ve been crippled by the hype. The people that have been screaming “INCEPTION IS THE BEST THING SINCE PLAY DOUGH!” have ratcheted my expectations too high. The film became something that could never, ever, reach the lofty heights I’d constructed in my brain pan.
After mulling it over for a while, I believe if I took this film in without any outside interference or prior reference my opinion would be the same. The concepts on display are well constructed, a world is built, but I was disappointed at their minimal use. For example, Ellen Page’s character who’s tasked to be an architect of the dream world, we’re even shown her creating a world around her in training, but she never does it again (unless I’m missing something) on screen. Once they enter the dream for the last chunk of the film, the world becomes fixed, all of the razzle dazzle of the opening scenes, all the promise it showed, are kept to the background and things turn into a straight forward action film with a few clever little switches.
Inception has one great action scene: The anti-gravity fight between Joseph Gordon Levitt and a bunch of faceless goons. Everything else is good, not great, and has already fallen out of memory. Christopher Nolan does a MUCH better job than the garbage action that BATMAN BEGINS, but he still hasn’t gotten there yet.
You could argue that the stripped down lean dream approach is better. It would be silly if things started to turn into a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET film, but there should be a fine line Nolan could have hit, that would have made the film work, but he never went for it. He kept up the bare minimum. The film is about IDEAS not IMAGANITATION. An idea can be the simplest thing in the entire world, but still dominate everything .
You should see INCEPTION. It’s nice to watch something in a packed multiplex that never talked down to its audience. Pay attention or you’ll get lost. Could this be a herald to a new wave of intellectual thinking man entertainment?
Ha. All we’re going to get is a wave of pseudo intellectual ‘dream films’ that completely miss the point.
Kind of like I have?
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