Many clever ideas ruined by a horrendously bad execution.

Rating: 3/10 (26 August 2010)

I will start by saying that Inception does indeed have a clever premise, or at least one that sounds good on paper: A group of people who steal information from people's dreams are hired to put an idea in someone's head. Cobb's back story and the way he was haunted by his mental image of his ex-wife was genuinely fascinating. However, all of these nice, fresh ideas are lost in a hurricane of absolutely awful and pretentious storytelling. People have often praised this film for having clever writing, but it strikes me that the film is just deliberately trying to be needlessly complicated to appear smarter than it really is. I say "needlessly" because, when you get right down to it, the overall plot of Inception is not all that complex, so the film just comes across as pretentious.
One of the first problems I had with the film is something I thought was present in Christopher Nolan's Batman films to a lesser extent (but those films had the benefit of having straightforward story lines and memorable characters): We are presented to a concept that could never happen in real life. That's not the problem. The problem is that the film delivers its ludicrous plot in such a straight-faced dead serious manner that it breaks my willing suspension of disbelief. In a film that took itself slightly less seriously, I might not wonder as much about where the technology to travel into someone's dreams came from, but here, it just begs for an explanation. If the film weren't trying to have a realistic atmosphere, I might buy that you can do this by injecting chemicals into your arm, then dream up more chemicals to travel into dreams within dreams, but here, it just comes across as absolute nonsense.
None of the characters in the film, with the possible exceptions of Cobb, Mal and Fischer, were interesting or memorable in the least. In fact, most of the characters don't really even feel like people as much as they feel like soulless chess pieces that exist only for the purpose of advancing the plot. As a result of this, I could not have cared less about what was happening in the film, and towards the action sequences at the end, I was on the verge of falling asleep. I'm sorry, but watching people with no personalities battling generic gun wielding masses (who, in a stunning lack of originality, are apparently supposed to represent Fischer's subconscious) just isn't entertaining.
Bottom line, Inception is a boring, pretentious and rather nonsensical film. It has a nice premise that sounds good on paper, which is why I really expected to like it, but found it a letdown.