Overly complicated and devoid of emotion

Rating: 5/10 (11 July 2010)

Inception is mildly interesting but emotionally flat. There's nothing
DiCaprio's character does at the end that he couldn't have done at the
beginning of his story. He hasn't undergone an emotional arc at all,
he's just gone through a lot of noisy, silly plot machinations that add
up to too many action sequences (though some are fun) looking for a
movie. The "psychological" stuff in the movie is 1950s Freudian --
really it's at the level of a Looney Tunes cartoon's parody of analysis
in terms of a real look at what dreams are -- with certain phrases
repeated so often ("they're not real, they're a projection;" "If you're
killed in a dream, you wake up") you'd think the audience was taken as
morons. The story is needlessly complicated, with its three- level
examination of one story (a father-son relationship) given short
shrift, and the DiCaprio story never fully wrapped up given the
director's silly ending where he refuses to ultimately define what's a
dream and what's not. The movie will be praised to the skies because
early reviewers want to be seen as hip and sophisticated with what is
admittedly better fare than the usual Hollywood summer fluff (viz,
Predators). But this movie is as much a failure as Benjamin Buttons:
overly arcane story-telling by a talented director who's given an
unlimited budget to make a story no one is brave enough to say is banal
and turgid and opaque. The Dark Knight has tons of emotion (even if the
plot is weak, especially in the final third). Memento was a thinking
man's story if ultimately full of holes and devoid of any real emotion.
Inception has good acting, great effects and a plot that may or may not
make sense -- but why would anyone take the time to decipher it?
Because the story carries no emotion, it all feels like a trick the
director-writer thinks he's playing on us. It's The Game with another
level or two or three of plot, but just as devoid of real emotion.
While you may not be bored, you won't be satisfied, so it's still a
waste of two and one-half hours.