Deception

Rating: 1/10 (22 November 2011)

It's a heist movie with a banal twist, placement rather than extraction. Forget Sigmund Freud and Lewis Carroll. Dreams are misconceived as just a version of reality with some CGI tricks and so we move through conceptual layers rather than anything that might reasonably be passed off as subconscious states. Any ambiguity about what is real and what is dream merely has us guessing about whether any of Nolan's crafted layers of so called consciousness actually matter at all beyond supplying opportunity for clever-clever editing sleight of hand gimmickry.
To See Cobb (Di Caprio) and Mal (Cotillard)poncing about in their mental construct with a hand wave that its ordinariness is due to their fondness for modernist architecture (serial reiterations of skyscrapers worthy of a Hanna-Barbera loop)puts paid to any claim that we are witnessing the like of surreality we visit in our sleep. Dreams in this film are nothing but different locations arrived at by means of taking a pill. We sure don't get to see Wonderland.
All this leads us to wonder about the entire premise which turns out to be nothing more than a bunch of corporate malarkey. Absorption into the plot rather depends on the audience buying into the elaborately technical internal logic about who has to be where and doing what in various levels of a subject's mind to perform the exercise at hand. That's your mission should you accept it.
So if you happen to swallow the director's pill at the outset then Nolan's fake world will draw you in -James Bond's Impossible Oceans Infinity. Take the pill that powers your critical judgment and for a couple of ours you'll find yourself staring at some overblown money drain that invites you to consider the deception that marketing and production gloss can pull off.