Very entertaining, but NOT some influential masterpiece!

Rating: 8/10 (31 May 2011)

Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan scores with the general movie-going audience once again with his highly anticipated film INCEPTION (2010). The hook for this film is it's exploration into the concept and idea of "dreams". Frankly, my immediate response when I saw this film was that the it's definition of dreams seems to be more based on NOLAN's interpretation and not the general consensus! Some of it sounded correct, while some of it sounded like mumbo jumbo! At the same time, Nolan essentially executes the dream aspects of the movie within his own set of rules and more or less does not violate them, which is actually part of the problem. In the big picture, I don't think dreams work the way this movie portrays them.
INCEPTION stars Leonardo DiCaprio as dream expert extractor Cobb. DiCaprio gives a passable performance, but it's not anything mesmerizing or Oscar-caliber. Frankly, I think that this actor is probably the most overrated major star of the last decade. It's partially that he's a victim of his eternal youthful look, so it makes it hard to take him seriously in these "adult" roles; I feel like he's being forced upon me as a star, rather than truly being one! Unlike when he was a teen actor in the early to mid 90s, I don't find him very engaging as an adult actor. He simply doesn't draw me in. And, actually, in this movie, I was more engaged by the other ensemble's performances more than his. He felt like a 5th wheel, especially since it was his character that was actually an impediment to the mission succeeding.
The real acting standouts in the film for me were Cillian Murphy and former Best Actress Oscar winner Marion Cotillard. Murphy plays the team's target Robert Fischer, whose billionaire industrialist father had recently died, so Cobb's team was on an assignment, paid by Fischer's main competitor Saito (a solid Ken Watanabe) to implant an idea in his mind to liquidate his father's empire. Murphy did a much better job showing depth and character detail than DiCaprio, whose tale was actually more tragic, with his dreams haunted by the memory of his late wife Mal (hauntingly played by Cotillard, and I actually didn't realize it was her until the end credits rolled!).
The capable supporting cast playing Cobb's "dream team" is led by up and coming star Ellen Page (as Ariadne, a specialist in architecture, who constructs the dream landscape for the film's big mission). Although she was underused mainly as a fascinated observer and Cobb's support, I found Page to be very engaging. After constructing the dream landscape, Ariadne's assignment was to protect Cobb from his demonic subconscious in the form of his late wife Mal. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fine also as Arthur, Cobb's sidekick who monitors the dreamers to ensure that they eventually get "kicked" (treated rather flimsily in this movie!) out of them. Tom Hardy is also good as Eames, a forger whose expertise is needed in the dreams to shapeshift his appearance to the dreamer. Dileep Rao soundly functions as chemist Yusef, creator of the drug that will allow the team to go into 3 levels of dream states in order to execute the mission.
Where INCEPTION actually drew me in was in the last half, with it's steamrolling action sequences as the dreamers went from level to level, which I did not expect at all! I thought this was going to be some kind of mind-bending, trippy exercise, which it really wasn't. The way the movie portrays dreaming is actually very pat and linear, and the miniscule complexity is what allows the viewer to follow and be more engaged in the action. That is, while not completely mindless (pardon the pun!), the dream state stuff is pretty easy to follow. Also, Nolan did a good job of defining how the different levels work in the film's opening sequence.
My biggest complaint about the film is it's rather simplistic way of describing dreams, and this ties in with the DiCaprio character Cobb, who was the biggest detriment to the mission because of his subconscious drawing his wife Mal into the dreams at inopportune moments. Other than the dreamer himself, why weren't any of the other teams subconscious in the dreams coming into play? Basically, Cobb was the only team member whose subconscious posed a wild card threat, which is hard to believe. If you take Cobb out of the equation, the mission runs a lot smoother than it actually did. Cobb is the only reason for a true threat to exist and for there to be any suspense, and after a while, I found the Cobb-Mal stuff to be more of a distraction than an important plot point. Minus Cobb, the movie is really just a simple action flick with no true threats in the dreams other than the main dreamer's typical subconscious threats, which were basically a bunch of useless gun-toting brutes who couldn't hit the side of a barn! Again, it was all very entertaining, but definitely not groundbreaking.
INCEPTION was nominated for Best Picture, in part I think due to the fact that there are 10 nominations now. Chances are it would not have been nominated if there were only still 5 since Nolan himself didn't garner a Best Director nomination. Enteraining experience, but definitely not Oscar-worthy.