Was It Really All That Good??

Rating: 6/10 (21 November 2010)

I have to admit – I did completely fall for the hype. Given the complete secrecy surrounding Christopher Nolan's latest offering prior to its release, the extremely promising trailer, and the incredibly over-the- top-and-fawning initial reviews, I really thought we had another The Dark Knight on our hands.
And now it feels like I have a rare disease – some infection of the senses that has prevented me from soaking in the supposed "awesomeness" that is Inception. I don't know what the exact ratio is, but I think I'm the one unlucky soul in every one thousand, that one lame boy who missed out on the land of dreams promised by the Pied Piper of Cinema.
Not that I didn't enjoy watching it at all – in fact, I went for it a second time, but mostly because there was so much of it that I didn't get the first time. The second viewing did help – as did the millions of plot theories available online that attempted to fill in the gaps – but, to borrow from that common (and dreaded) appraisal parlance, I really didn't get that WOW effect.
Some of the blame lies with my expectations – I was certainly expecting (aliens on) the moon from it. But I think it also has something to do with the fact that the film was way too focused on its myriad puzzles for me to feel any genuine connect, empathy, sympathy, hatred and/or wonder (I'm obviously thinking of you, Heath Ledger; RIP!) for any of its characters.
Take Dom Cobb for example. For a man whose wife has committed suicide, implicated him for it, and penetrated his dreams to drive him almost to the edge of insanity – not to mention (seemingly) separated him from his kids forever – he seems remarkably in control (apart from the odd freight train crashing through his plans). So much so that when he hesitates to shoot Mal at a critical point in the narrative, his indecision seem almost laughable (and extremely contrived) given how assured he is the rest of the time.
Not that I'd blame DiCaprio for it – he's already won me over in a very similar role in the much more fascinating Shutter Island, where he gets his man-on-the-edge act just right to create a really haunting portrayal. Nopes, all that restraint is purely Nolan's fault.
And then there's the bit about a film with 5-6 good guys – where the hell are all the bad guys dammit? How exactly do I feel that sense of fear, that sense of the stakes being really high, if all I can see is a bunch of gun-toting dummies just waiting to be shot? Heck, even the worst that can happen to these guys is only described in the vaguest of ways as being stuck in a 'limbo' – and then towards the end we're shown that it's possible to even retrieve people from such a state, which just makes me feel that I was cracking my head to figure out the danger for a good two hours for no reason whatsoever. And I don't like being made to feel that way.
Even if I'm totally wrong about the logic of this, I don't care – if I want to rack my brains out, I'll go take CAT, instead of paying 500 bucks (+200 for the food and popcorn courtesy my better half) to have my brains liquefied and oozing out of my nostrils. If not for the fascinating premise, and the genuinely innovative weightless sequence with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (and a really funny line from Ken Watanabe which I won't mention because it's the only bit of comic relief in the entire film), I might just have come away entirely disappointed.
And yes, while it may be true for the freight train, you have to be kidding me if you say you didn't see that end coming from miles away.