A great action flick, but pounds the eye, ears and brain a bit with a sledgehammer

Rating: 8/10 (29 March 2012)

I thoroughly enjoyed this elegant puzzle-film / hard-driving action flick but thought how much more it might have been.
It takes on the complexities of the dream world in a way that mirrors the MATRIX, or TRON, an alternate-world film where the laws of physics can be bent, and the same people can play many different roles.
The fact that one person is killed every minute or so, and occasionally more, in the midst of crashing, explosions, beatings and other mayhem actually interferes with the ability for the observer to enjoy the story and care about the characters. This isn't a gentle ride, this isn't a roller coaster. This is a beating. And so it's every man and woman for themselves - especially the audience.
There is no time for us to care about the characters, except the protagonist, because, oops, the walls are crashing down and three people are shooting at us!
The dream world also is multi-layered, but Nolan's layers are not subtly tied to each other, just as the cast's relationships do not exist apart from the single story layer.
For example, every layer looks real and very similar. The entire movie is about dreams, but there is only one surreal element in them : the juxtaposition of buildings. In true dreams many things that could not exist including people, personalities, decisions, even time-lines, are molded, twisted and amalgamated in remarkable and unreal ways.
It would have been a better use of the opportunity to explore those layers rather than making them just different sets in the same James-Bond like world filled with testosterone and adrenaline.
Where old houses are mixed with the modern, it simply doesn't work. The beloved house from youth just looks like a heap. The characters who created those places loved them, and they could have been shown with greater love.
What might have been? Characters that are mostly from one dreamer but infected by the sentiments of another, one world slipping into another world altogether - Paris and China mixed up on the same street.
What might have been? The story elements themselves reflect emotions. The walls are made of feeling, and when they are threatened they fall, but often they are loving us, protecting us, encouraging us. When we fall in love with that world, it falls in love with us and we fall deeper and deeper into the dream. And yet that dream at ever deeper levels, tells us more directly about what is truly inside us. Yes, even the dreamworld would be warning us about the dangers.
The film buys shock and confusion but pays with lost character, story and sentiment.
Dreams can be confusing and shocking, and in this way the story certainly is dreamlike.
In Dom's testimony at the end to his wife he says she is not really as deep and multi-layered as his real wife. Well, that applies to every character in the film except Dom.
What might have been? The most multi-faceted and interesting of characters and relationships in the dream world, not the "real" one.
That would also have helped us understand the sentiment at the end, about coming to peace within one's own self, and finding a richness within, love within our own selves that may indeed be the real source of our happiness,the hidden reality that informs the dream world we live in during our waking lives.
And indeed, Dom's inner Mal might be much more subtly in-tuned to Dom than any flashback of her. Dom's Mal is not just memories, as the film suggests. Characters in dreams can be as fully fleshed out as we are because they have the full resources of the subconscious, which "awake" people do not. They can be much funnier, wiser, stronger and helpful than we are.
And if Dom realized that the woman who killed herself was not really the woman he loved, but a stranger with an obsession he could not save her from, a woman who loved her dream more than her husband or children; and that the woman he really loved, who was really caring and filled with self-sacrifice was a part of himself, his own projection, that might have helped him let go.
That "inner" Mal might explain that Dom made a tragic mistake and to forgive himself as he forgave the real Mal her obsession. That inner Mal would remind Dom that he did indeed spend a lifetime together in that second region with the real Mal, and that somehow she got lost, addicted, unable to get out of the honeymoon, unwilling to do so. He failed to save her,but she was already lost before he planted the doubt in her mind. She didn't want to leave that dream world anyway, and so doubt was the only hope for her escape, though it failed.
The story Nolan crafted was brilliant, but he did not bring it fully to life.
In the absence of that depth, we are just left with a man who accidentally caused his wife's death and who cannot really escape, except into fantasy. How much more this film might have been!
And then the audience might have walked away with a deeper insight: Each of us only knows the other by the image we make of that other person, and that image, fed by our senses and the other's behavior, is the only way we can know them in this dream world in which we live.