Is it heretical to call "Inception" not that great?

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2010)

Running longish at over 2 hours Christopher Nolan has his work cut out to engage his audience - indeed, keep them on the edge of their seats - for the bulk of that time. Largely he succeeds in this difficult task.
The premise, while completely improbable, is interesting, albeit in a mind-bending sort of way: a group of guys (and ultimately a girl) who are essentially con men are led by Leonardo DiCaprio to work their cons in the dreamscape of unwitting marks, convincing the dreamer to give up secret information to corporate competitors eager to pay for it. How exactly they manage to do this is never articulated, but a black box with various throbbing pumps and tubes running out of it that connects the dreamers together is the apparent answer. This is where your heavy duty suspension of disbelief has to begin with "Inception" or else on a mundane level the entire movie would appear to be rather silly.
With that for context, "Inception" works because this kind of subconscious manipulation is not only possible but apparently routine with heavily sedated individuals around the globe who spend much of their lives sleeping and dreaming. DiCaprio and his team of ne'er-do-well Morpheuses travel around this surreal world, cashing in by creating scenarios in the dreamscape that are carefully constructed to pull information from the participants they've scammed into the dream world partially of their making but primarily the making of the dreamer.
I won't lay out the intricacies of the plot - it's far more interesting to follow it yourself and not spoil it - but the movie builds to a point where an extremely involved web of events has to occur to create a scenario for "inception" - the very challenging endeavor to seed an original idea into the mind of a dreamer that was not generated by the dreamer themselves. If they succeed in this task a shadowy Japanese corporate titan - played by Ken Watanabe - who has employed them will provide a big payday and pull strings to give DiCaprio's character the ability to come back home where he is currently a fugitive from for reasons that reveal themselves in those plot intricacies.
This sets up the climax of the movie: A long series of dreams and dreams-within-a-dream (ultimately 4 levels of dreams within a dream) to create a wild series of events all setup to convince the dreamer/mark to think a particular original thought that was seeded by the "dream team" (literally). Make sense? Probably not, but see the movie and it will come together.
If there is a fault with this climax it is that while it exists as what is supposed to be a set piece for the suspenseful build-up of the entire movie, it falters in maintaining its high-wire act. Certainly not entirely, but at least partially it begins to drag and feels somewhat tedious. The earnestness of the climax creates a kind of self-consciousness about how awesome and mind-blowing it's all supposed to be. We end up with scenes in this climactic denouement that go longish to explicate the reasons why some things are the way they are and the explanations feel drawn-out. Not sure about others, but this failed to build the suspense of the final scenes for me. It felt like we were getting setup with information that should have been revealed earlier so they wouldn't have to insert longish digressions into the final climax.
"Inception" reminded me quite a lot of "The Matrix" in the sense that it introduces you to the concept of a parallel universe that is set for a whole series of wild adventures. Beyond that the similarities probably end as I think "The Matrix" succeeded far more in presenting this parallel world and also in maintaining the suspense and action throughout.
Still, "Inception" is by no means bad. With Nolan involved that's nearly impossible. It is in many ways masterfully built to establish credibility for the ideas it presents. I don't expect to have my specific expectations catered to - in fact, I hoped that Nolan would create a movie that would completely upset them - but the process to create an involving story built around those improbable ideas is incredibly challenging. He succeeds mostly, but stretches too long to make the idea credible and makes the action and suspense slog in the process.
Interestingly there was actually not nearly as much CGI as the trailers would lead you to believe. When it is used it is used to manipulate the "real world" in a way that makes you realize "hey this is a dream" but otherwise it isn't like a Salvador Dali painting come to life or anything that extreme. If anything Nolan did an exceptional job of not stretching the film into the realm of clichéd surrealism. "Inception" portrays the dream world as a concrete place that can be manipulated with some degree of precision, as a place that can be gamed and milked for advantage.
Enjoy this for its plot intricacies, which are extremely well composed, and you may ultimately find it more suspenseful than I did.