Overrated...

Rating: 4/10 (10 March 2019)

Why would Saito hire a group of people for a job when they couldn't even accomplish their first job extracting information from his mind? Wouldn't he want to hire people with a better success ratio? Cobb says he's the best and then his whole team fails right after, so... I guess perception is subjective eh? Lol
Why did Cobb rush to the belief that accepting Saito's inception job offer would also solve his law troubles so he could return back the states on faith alone so quickly? Wouldn't he want to know more information about him first before accepting the offer? When he talks to Michael Caine in the lecture hall he sounds overwhelmingly convinced the job offer is the solution to everything, but why? Overacting?
Where did the first "kick" come from to trigger the avalanche in the 3rd level if JGL hadn't blown the floor in the 2nd level and the van hadn't hit the water in the 1st level?
How also was JGL on Level 2 with only "3 minutes" remaining able to make it down a flight of stairs and fight/kill a guy in the process, then fight/kill a guy in the hallway while bouncing around, THEN find the time to rope and bundle all of his comrades, push them into the elevator and THEN blow it.
When Fischer dies on Level 3 and gets pushed into Level 4/Limbo, why is Level 4 Cobb's world? Shouldn't it still be Fischer's limbo world since they're all still inside his multi-layered dream??
Every few years, I rewatch this movie hoping to get insight into why so many people consider it in their Top 5 of all-time, but it falls short every time.
Yes the CGI and slow-mo is uber creative and cool and the concept is a nice spin on the "dream within a dream" trope, but a little more attention to the story setup would've been nice to add some plausibility. Suspension of disbelief really only stretches so far in the minds of your audience, not to mention Marion Cotillard and Leonardo Dicaprio have ZERO on-screen chemistry with each other and we're supposed to believe they were married and he can't get over her? Eh...
Names...
Dom Cobb, Mal Cobb, Ariadne...
There's something that feels pretentious about the character names chosen for the story. None of them seem to fit any particular person terribly well, which adds to their unrelatability. Even though you know the names of Cobb's children, it feels like he's fighting to get back to the "idea" of them, but you don't get any sense of why really? Come to think of it - most characters in the movie feel like "ideas of people" instead of multi-dimensional characters we can invest in. Granted not every movie requires a backstory for every character, but I do want to at least care about some of them?
Cobb doesn't emanate love for who his kids actually are and we get no real sense of them as people. They're one-dimensional plot devices used to justify his obsession, which is incredibly disappointing. I would feel a lot more for Cobb's struggle if we could actually feel for and empathize with the people that matter (or are "supposed to matter") most in Cobb's life. Also, who the hell is his children staying with after he flees the country? Their grandmother we're meant to insinuate from the earlier phone conversation? If he was able to arrange for them to have someone to stay with, he would've had time to see their faces again, no? Are the grandparents divorced or why does Michael Caine's grandpa work and live in a different country than grandma but will still be able to bring home "presents" for Cobb's kids? Is he flying back to the states after the semester? Who gives Cobb the suggestion/plane ticket to flee in the first place and why does he have to leave at that EXACT moment? You mean to tell me he couldn't have taken 5 seconds to run outside and wave goodbye to his kids to see their faces even while in a rush? Yeah, no.
And how long has Cobb been gone from the states exactly after he fled? A few months, a few years? If it's the latter and the kids still haven't aged at the end of the movie, why is everyone asking if Cobb is still dreaming? They're literally wearing exactly the same outfits and have the same hairstyles as the day he left however long ago lmao.
I wonder if the studio execs demanded Christopher Nolan cut down the movie's runtime significantly which subsequently removed a lot of the necessary plot setup scenes, which would be a damn shame. Nolan is a great director, but I doubt an extra 10/20 minutes to smooth out and not rush through all of the aforementioned issues would've been that big of an issue. They did a disservice to what could've been a truly great story, hence why I keep rewatching.