more glitz than substance

Rating: 3/10 (4 March 2011)

"Inception" seems to be taking the premises of such films as "Peter Ibbetson," "Altered States," "Being John Malkovich" and "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" to more elaborate lengths. Throughout this action flick – and that is what it truly is, despite its pretenses – I couldn't help thinking of the most recent James Bond thriller in which I lost track of who was who among the secondary characters because the identities they started with were revealed as false, but then the revelation itself was proved equally false (or at least dubious), to the point where you couldn't believe a word they were saying and ultimately you ceased to care.
With "Inception" we get a lot of technical jabbering from the mouths of Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page about what everything means or might mean as they "share" and "engineer" other people's dreams in order to infiltrate their subconscious to achieve their corporate goals. These dream states are filled with the usual action staples of racing and crashing vehicles, explosions and the liberal use of automatic weapons, accompanied here by huge crumbling cityscapes (less effective than the more modest melting away of various smaller environments in "Eternal Sunshine"). There is nothing particularly dreamy about writer-director Christopher Nolan's dream world; aside from a few interesting computer-generated images like a whole city appearing to fold over upon itself, none of the effects stick in the mind or affect the viewer's juices.
Marion Cotillard contributes her trademark broken heartedness. Page gives the same performance we are familiar with from her telesystems commercials. Cillian Murphy emotes richly as the kidnapped son of an energy industry magnate. The heaving score by Hans Zimmer sounds like hundreds of others.