“Inception” (2010)
Rating: 
The reviews on this one were awesome, hailing it as “the next Matrix.” Well, given that I thought most of the Matrix movies sucked, I guess that’s accurate. OK, I’m being somewhat unfair. I saw Inception on a Sunday night and there were a surprising number of people in the theatre, given that the film had been out for over two weeks. So I went in with high hopes.
The premise is decent enough – that our thoughts and dreams are the next battleground for espionage. The special effects were kept under control, the writing was decent, the acting and cast were pretty damn good. So where did Inception go wrong?
For starters – the length. Two and a half hours is a long time to sit through a movie that really isn’t all that fast-paced until near the end. They could have told the story just as well with thirty-minutes less footage. Then there is a lot they just sort of assume the viewer will take for granted – like the ability to invade someone’s dreams and thoughts has become de rigueur at some point in the near future. They never really convey the sense of what it feels like for the people supposedly doing this. I mean, they set the stage of how the subconscious reacts to it all but they don’t really convey what this must feel like to be in a dream within a dream. I’m not sure how they’d manage that, but however it needed to be done wasn’t done.
Some of the battle and action scenes are a bit hard to swallow. How some people are so adept at combat and dozens of others so hopeless is always tough to swallow. The whole “weaponized subconscious” was a bit much.
What really disappointed me was how off-the-cuff they were about the mission of inception – that is to plant an idea on someone’s head. To really do so, it must feel like it came from the person, the movie explains. But then they’re like: “Oh, just do this and that, and you’re done.” There could have been a real exploration into the creative mind and just where thoughts and ideas come from going on here. They laid a nice foundation that in the dream state the human mind both creates and observes it’s own reality. But other than launching some nice special effects from that, that’s about as far as it went.
Dicaprio’s mental issues stemming from his past in the movie were well done, but over-indulgent. That whole subplot wasn’t needed at all and it kind of cluttered things up. In fact, they spent so much time on that that you never really get that much of a glimpse into the rest of the team that follows Dicaprio to the brink of limbo. So you end up watching a bunch of people doing something kind of interesting, but you’ve seen way too much of one of them (Dicaprio) and not enough of the rest of them, and end up really being too emotionally invested in any of them.
The ending is well done, though kind of predictable.
All in all this isn’t a bad movie. Production values are great and everyone did a good job. It just could have been so much more. As far as being a “mind bending experience” … uh … no … not unless you’re pretty easily amused or confused. But if you have time to kill some Sunday, why not see it.
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