Nolan's Worst Film Yet

Rating: 4/10 (17 July 2010)

I didn't like it, Nolan has done much much better work.
Memento is in another league creatively, TDK a much better action blockbuster, The Prestige a subtle masterpiece.
Here's the problems with the movie:
1. Ellen Page was miscast, she's too young. Either make her 5 years younger or 5 years older. If older she'd be a love interest, if younger she'd be an amazing prodigy.
2. Her prowess and quick acceptance were unbelievable. There needed to be a scene where she proved herself to LeoDC at the school, some amazing ability.
3. The script was overly simplistic because they needed to explain the intricate plot. Example: the snow level when they go over the timing of the levels again to remind the audience things happen at different perceived times the deeper down you go. As if the constant shots of the slowly falling van weren't enough. Let's not even discuss the ridiculousness that there is a direct correlation of time between levels. I get that the deeper you go the more time becomes blurred, but a direct numerical correlation?
4. Joseph G-L was given no room to show how great an actor he is; his character was stiff and wooden, strange for the "organizer".
5. LeoDC walked straight off the set of Shutter Island into this movie without changing character. Not his fault, the characters are similar, maybe they should have cast someone else.
6. The action sequences, apart from the hotel hallway fight scene, were unoriginal and obligatory, nowhere near TDK. The snow scenes in particular were straight out of an early Bond movie. It would have been better to have left them out completely and spent more time making the movie more complexly layered, with better character development.
7. The idea has been done before, and better. The comparison with The Matrix is inevitable, and Inception comes up so lacking.
8. The targeting of Cillian Murphy's character was very very mean-spirited, especially since we learn that inception can permanently ruin one's mind and lead to suicide. It's not for revenge, not for patriotism, not for the betterment of mankind, but for corporate greed. It's hard to get behind the characters when they are doing such an ugly thing: targeting a young man who already has major father/son issues because of his successful father, and making those issues much worse. This isn't Ocean's 11 where we don't mind Andy Garcia getting the shaft because we want to see George Clooney get Tess, and Garcia is a jerk anyway. The premise of inception was interesting, but the execution on a complete innocent was downright ugly.
Inception was a lot of movies I'd already seen, let's call it Ocean's 11 meets The Matrix, but had none of the light-hearted humor of O11, where I felt the crime was justified, or at least other "gang heist" movies so clever and the victim so nameless it didn't really matter.
In the end, I feel Inception is going to go down as one of Nolan's worst movies, a clever idea that was made with too high a budget and expectations, such that meaningless action was thrown in, and the film didn't know whether it was a psychological mindbender or an action movie, and wasn't able to pull off both in the manner of the ever-brilliant Matrix.