Not as bad or as good as people are saying

Rating: 6/10 (21 August 2010)

I'm sure there are other movies like Inception in this regard - perhaps Avatar is a recent example. Reviews appear to be very polarized for Inception - love it or hate it.
I submit that the movie is actually somewhere in the middle. However, unlike with other movies that viewers rate between 4 and 6 stars, Inception is particularly lopsided in its imbalances. I arrived at 6 stars for the following reasons:
Pros: 1. The film does a good job of raising the relevant philosophical issues - reality versus dream, implanting ideas in people's heads (I think the modern term is "meme"), and so on. In this, I think Inception does almost as good a job as The Matrix or, say, The Machinist.
2. The cinematography is excellent, and each setting feels quite real, even in scenes where some crazy, unbelievable stuff is happening.
3. The acting is quite good, and I think Leonard Di Caprio did an amazing job - particularly getting through some of the implausible lines.
Cons: 1. Put simply, I think the film outsmarted itself. At times it felt like a Mensa puzzle, got a little too clever. I enjoy these puzzles in general, but at times during Inception I felt deliberately deprived of little clues that would keep you guessing without making you feel stupid or lost. Sometimes withholding a clue is not clever but merely frustrating to a viewer.
2. Too wooden in the explanations of the premise. Terms such as "architect" and "kick" felt contrived and almost as if they were being read from a printed sci-fi short story, not spoken by one character to another. I understand that this film deals in the fantastical side of things, but I don't think that's an excuse for clumsy dialogue. I think The Matrix and, say, Blade Runner, had to deal with those issues and still managed to make most of the dialogue sound smooth and integrated into the world being imagined.
3. Too many levels of dreaming. Again, I understand that part of the film's premise is to push the limits of what would be experienced by having opposing forces doing battle in the dream world of the human mind. But films (and audiences) have limits, and I felt that pushing it to the third and fourth levels of dreams detracted from the focus of the film. I'm not sure that just simplifying it to one dream within a dream would have worked either, but as it stands, the film felt as if it was left having to compress all of those levels in the last 20 minutes, hurried along by some fairly implausible gunfight scenes (even by post-Bourne standards).
In short, I think this film was very strong in the areas of its strength and very weak in its areas of weakness. Maybe that's why Inception is provoking love and hate. But I think a more balanced view takes into account what the film has to offer without giving it more credit than it deserves. For me, that nudged it up to a 6, and for others it might nudge it down to a 4, but I think Inception is somewhere around a 5 instead of a 1 or a 10.