Basically a weaker spinoff of the matrix

Rating: 6/10 (10 April 2019)

This is nowhere near the 8.8 rating it gets on here.
This is pretty much just your standard big budget action flick given Christopher Nolan's signature touch of psycho thriller confusion. But the suspense here is lacking due to a lack of character and story development.
This movie counts on it's special effects and quickly confusing direction to impress but to an experienced moviegoer this falls flat.
After having seen several of Nolan's films now I find them to mostly be a charade of darkness in which the moviegoer is supposed to be impressed by the way he has complicated matters.
This film certainly makes little sense and it is not so much that it is complicated but that it has little direction or an essential truth.
I can see why it resonates with the younger audience because parts of it plays like the action video games they play with a dark side.
Much of this film plays to me like a bad Snl episode though the ending is very sad and dark and I can see how the emotional play could effect people.
For example, there are scenes of mobs of people and explosions which make no sense and are unexplained except they are a part of somebody's dream. One minute we are in a hotel. The next we are at a ski hill with the characters wearing outfits out of a GI Joe cartoon. Why are we there? Why are some of the characters scaling mountains? Who knows and who cares at this point.
Nolan gives his ode to Citizen Kane but this is not half the movie citizen kane is yet the younger voters in here put this ahead of it's class which is unfounded. It is like he is trying to check off a list of things to make his film great but the trick is too obvious.
There is definitely an emotional impact at the end that can feel overwhelming but is sitting through 2 hours of rather pointless nonsense make this a great movie? Not to me. The biggest emotional scene for me involves one man who is only on the screen for two minutes.
Part of the emotional ending is the music finally changing after seemingly being put on repeat for the first two hours.
The scenes with DiCaprio and his wife are not believable in the least just another trick that a lot of people will fall for.
I think the best parts of the movie are the five minutes of Michael Caine.
Decaprio is decaprio always solid but always pretty much the same. U know what you are getting - a professional, reliable performance. Not a game changer and neither was this movie.