InSiption

Rating: 5/10 (19 July 2010)

Nolan is a workaday director - very good, but not an artist. He has a utilitarian approach and this film felt way too much like a Michael Bay film. Annoyingly loud sound effects and sharp and tinny mix to give the shock repeatedly to the audience with the bullets and car crashes, etc. The music - terrible. Nolan was obviously going for that David Lynchian surreal pulsing which is evocative of the subconscious mind but it just sounded like a boring, thudding drone the way his composer did it - and this dirge overlayed too many scenes which were flat without this sonic element.
The acting very much has that Minority Report feel to it - this is a big Hollywood movie - lots of preening, lots of thinly drawn character archetypes rather than richly textured characters. It almost felt like a Lara Croft or Oceans 15 movie the way our motley crew of dream-invaders were brought together. And as with Sunshine, a complete waste of the talents of a noted Asian actor - this time Ken Watanabe.
The forlorn protagonist played by DiCaprio, Cobb, very much reminds you of Bruce Willis from 12 Monkeys - pining for a lost love as his ground state: inexorably marching him to his destiny. The repeated use of the dining room, hotel room, and yard with little kids felt like the Vanilla Sky vignettes (with the Iain Softley lighting in K-PAX) - who's who, what's what - is he going insane? DiCaprio is a wonderful character actor and I can't wait for him to get old enough to stop playing these leading man roles he is not suited for. He lacks the heft and the gravitas to properly play them. He still seems like a boy, and a boy that my sister can beat up. It's over-the-top and mannered when he does his macho posturing and tough guy stuff.
The dream element to the story was its weakest link. First off, you cannot dream-within-a-dream (however many layers) concurrently. As you are dreaming your journey morphs and sometimes you find yourself waking from a dream only to be within another dream and it can take some layers to get to actual consciousness. Inception had this dumb device of "tipping" our hipster team simultaneously to wake them from their various dreams levels - but they were existing in several levels at once. Meant to be clever, but just felt forced and didn't really work. Scenes and shots went on way too long. The stupid sky chase stuff in the snow and the endless assault on the fortress in the snow - ugh, get on with it.
Most disappointing was what a sap our ostensible victim, Fischer, was - played by the always good Cillain Murphy. You kept hoping he would turn the tables on Cobb/DiCaprio and his gang once we got deep within the dream layers but he was just a patsy. We could have had a Dreamscape-like showdown between DiCaprio and Murphy if they had made Fischer more savvy and more vicious. It was a waste of Murphy's talents.' The subplot which became the main plot - Cobb/DiCaprio's dead wife invading his dream-piracy jobs was just stupid - this sci-fi action film devolved into a weepy chick-flick of a man making peace with his obsession with his dead wife who he thinks he killed by planting an idea in her head. Cobb/DiCaprio must take hipster-actress-flavor-of-the-moment Ellen Page, A-r-i-a-d-n-e, down to the dead zone of dreamland because psycho-dead-avatar-wifey kidnapped Saito (Watanabe) - who is going to pay them all in the real world - so they need him back. Ugh ... What a Dreams May Come lift.
The spoof of oblivion in the Spongebob episode where Squidward walks in the void and his voice echoes is far more compelling.