A mediocre blockbuster

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2010)

I like Christopher Nolan. I did before he even did the Batman movies. Following was quite an interesting movie and Memento is one of the best movies of its decade. The Batman movies were good too, Nolan did something new and interesting with Batman and made Tim Burton look like an art school douche.
This is all to preface that Inception is a mediocre movie. No, it's not especially deep. A dream within a dream within a dream. It's about as philosophically deep as The Matrix and the execution is slightly better.
Leo is Leo. He essentially plays the same character he did in "Shutter Island", which I thought was a total mess. His wife is crazy and Leo just wants to set everything straight and go back to a normal existence. He'll do anything it takes and meanwhile will grimace, look stern and squint his way through the movie.
The plot is decent but I thought it got bogged down in senseless shoot-outs, three layers of shoot-outs actually, which are all happening simultaneously. The direction here is pretty clever but the movie isn't. The scenes in the second dream layer take place in a wintry landscape where there is a fortress on the side of a mountain. The whole thing is very James Bond, especially when guys on motorized ski-machines start coming out of the forest shooting guns. There are a lot of shots fired from guns, all kinds of guns, with probably thousands of bullets, few hit anyone. At that point I give up. I've seen it before and I pretty much started losing interest.
This is a blockbuster, not a movie about characters, plot or right-and-wrong. It's not thought-provoking in the least. The technology is never explained, which is probably for the best as it's inexplicable. Although, 'Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine" both did a much better job without ever explaining much of anything. The story is interesting enough to recommend. A few effects scenes are good.
The acting isn't very strong either. Leo acts like he does in most of his other movies, notably "Shutter Island" and "The Departed". He has his game face on. I'm kind of sick of his game face. It's that 'Something very serious is happening' look that is way over the top. http://tinyurl.com/29hqqcp (Let's discuss the serious part of the movie).