A blurred line between dream and reality

Rating: 4/10 (18 March 2020)

I was profoundly disappointed because a so-called masterpiece like the movie Inception would be an overrated action flick of mediocrity. Inception is far from a masterpiece: it is not intelligent nor mind-blowing. With a shallow story, plot holes all over the place, uninteresting characters and bad cinematography, the movie proves one thing: that a basic, undeveloped, but polished idea, is enough to get loved by people and capitalize hundreds of millions with the help of expensive CGIs and tons of dumbfounded action.
First off: the concept. The movie was simply able to get away with various inconsistencies and poor world building because of its shallow idea developments and lack of specificity. While the idea of "a dream within a dream" is a cool concept, the movie never spends time setting up all the fundamentals and world building. How does it work? Do you just plug yourself in and create everything? What can you control in a dream? How far is the scope of imagination? If you can just imagine a bazooka to kill your enemies, can't you just heal yourself? If you go deeper to three or four dream levels, how do you perceive time and think thousands of times as normal without overworking or blowing your brains out? All these work on kids' logic, that you can imagine anything, and things would just miraculously operate in an inexplicable way you want. OH LOOK! TURN AWAY! Here's a one-hour action sequence with a van slow-motionally falling into water, a guy walking around the hallways with zero gravity and explosions and killing and massive CGIs! Ha! Bet you didn't notice all those inconsistencies did ya?
Now, to the ending, let's not kid ourselves, that wasn't twisty and mind-blowing at all. Okay, he was still living in a dream at the end, so what? If Mal kills herself and wakes up, wouldn't she wake him up too? Why is he still here? Why do they show him fly to America, hack into that guys' mind, they wake up many times still being in a dream? The twist doesn't mean anything and offers no one closure or meaning to the story. Oops no time to explain that since we already skipped all the world building at the beginning. When everyone wakes up at the end, the dream machine with all the strings has already disappeared so they have no risk of getting caught by the rich guy.
Whether most of the actors were miscast, have bad acting, or bad writing, the characters have no personality nor attraction for me at all. Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings out no other dynamics than his straight serious cop face like in 'The Dark Knight Rises'. Ellen Page's character is unconvincing, who looks confused and worried for the whole movie. Her voice is flat out without emotions and her mouth constantly moves unproportionately to her face as if she's reading from a textbook. Everyone in the movie delivers lines like robots talking about math. However, this is not to include that most of these lines are redundant, and repeating to the audience with information that were already given in the previous scenes.
The film holds no impact, no momentum. Supposedly emotional and introduction scenes were rushed through and action sequences were stretched out obnoxiously long. Even the scenes with Cobb and Mal were boring and unimpactful. No stakes were set: Cobb's reason to get back to his kids (which is really not that important since we don't know how close he is to them) seems to be stressed more than everyone falling in a permanent brain-dead state. Nolan tried to cram all the unimportant technical information and characters into the film and forgot to tell a good and fulfilling story.
With that being said, I refuse to recognize this movie as anything near to good or masterpiece.