Row Row Row Your Boat...

Rating: 6/10 (19 July 2010)

I knew it was coming, and by the final frame of "Inception" my strongest reaction was a compulsion to watch it all over again; and this was something of a resentful feeling, as the motivator was not to witness its stunning visuals synthesized in a tight narrative, but to simply make SENSE of the narrative as it shoots off into increasingly difficult directions (even within the illogic of the Dream-World our characters inhabit for most of the film). Since his indie breakout "Memento," writer/director Christopher Nolan has ascended the ranks of major Hollywood filmmaking, injecting his work with a sense of wonder and intelligence; yet like "The Dark Knight" (a great, yet somewhat flawed film) my feelings toward "Inception" (those I can clearly rationalize, that is) wind up a few notches below where I believe they should be. While the film -- centered around a group of "dream hackers" (headed by Leonardo DiCaprio) looking to plant an idea in a corporate heir's (Cillian Murphy) headspace -- has its share of visually stunning setpieces and fascinating ideas (it's nice to see some Jungian concepts get their toes wet -- if not immersed -- here), the ultimate result is overlong, overindulgent, and marked by distracting, unsatisfying diversions (the prime offender being the haunted, memory-based relationship between DiCaprio and wife Marion Cotillard) and leaden exposition that completely deadens a sometimes-glacial pace. And for a film about dreams and their origin in the mind, Nolan's action-movie transitions come across as counterintuitive: instead of reminding us of the jagged inconsistency and incoherence of dreams, the jerky cutting merely comes across as...well, just incoherent (which becomes particularly tiresome when the film dissolves into dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream action-movie territory in the final act). "Inception" is most fascinating in its first hour, which lays the ground rules of dream-logic and how dream-worlds "work"; once it settles into the main plot, it derails somewhat, and it soon becomes clear that Nolan, in his attempt to not only dazzle, thrill, and stimulate the collective consciousness of the viewer, but build on the astronomical expectations established by "The Dark Knight," has a reach that far surpasses his grip.