It's overblown, for sure, but the effects and the concept--and DiCaprio--are flawless!!

Rating: 8/10 (18 July 2010)

Inception (2010)
It's hard to fault a movie that intends to redefine reality and do so with lyrically beautiful effects, and in an action adventure, high stakes genre when it pulls it off so well. It's a total trip watching, simply watching, all the realities shift, either before your eyes or from one scene to another. It's also a great mind game to follow the increasing complexity of the dreams and the dreams within dreams.
Daunting to imagine filming it, and impressive to see it filmed without undo confusion. Yes, oddly enough, it makes sense! Within its own set of rules. Hats off to Christopher Nolan.
Of all the actors, it's Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb who holds it all together, and who delivers some great lines well and some improbable and corny lines equally well. Without him the movie might tip into a self-congratulatory excess of superb technical achievement, and great directorial stage managing. Ellen Page, a favorite of mine, is just a hair miscast, and if she's lovable, she's not strong enough or forward enough to carry her part. The other men are up to their secondary tasks really well, each fitting some kind of stereotype just so, not to excess, with the exception (I think) of the master of magic potions. You'll see. It's all in good fun, though, so you go for the ride. Even the mysterious wife is complex in her various appearances, appearing only as a projection, though you'd never know it. Or is she real? Haha...the enjoyment of a slippery truth.
The grandness of the themes, and the grandness of the film-making in "Inception" are going to appear grandiose to some. There's no denying the effects are sensational and seamless, but the effects do overwhelm the humanity involved. Don't forget, Nolan's "Momento" made you really enter one man's dilemma, his derangement as well as his struggle for clarity and logic. Yes, we care here for Cobb's own well being, but it gets swamped (gladly, some will say) by the effects, and by the larger logic of the movie. I'm not sure how many people were really moved by Cobb's getting home to his children by the end, even with the ever supportive Michael Caine to warm up the scene. Surely this is a sign of some kind of forced human plot that was needed, absolutely, but need to have more feeling.
It's also easy to argue one way or the other that the movie is just too long. The snow scene shootouts were repetitive and not especially original or exciting, for just as starting example. "Inception" is a calculated, cold, masterpiece of a construction, lastest in a growing line of this kind of mind bending "what is reality" movie from "The Matrix" and "Solaris" to "Synecdoche, New York" and "Moon." Even "Shutter Island," an interesting parallel from the same year.
I can't emphasize enough what a great, impressive, mind-blowing experience "Inception" is, even if it isn't really a masterpiece in the long run, once the rush of newness wears off. But see it now, while it's still at its best.