It was no Matrix

Rating: 6/10 (17 July 2010)

Well, I know when I utter the words "plot hole", my friends will ask me whether I have heard of "suspension of disbelief". In a lot of movies I am (really?) willing to overlook occasional incongruent details or fill in the gaps just for the pure enjoyment, but unfortunately, Inception is not one of those movies, and it suffered because it was unable to weave together a convincing tale for me.
Why? Because the very thing that holds this movie together IS the complexity and ingenuity of layering out subconsciousness. It was *supposed* to be clever, believable for some far distant future, it was supposed to be something that challenges the viewer to question reality... or at least so was my expectation, especially after seeing such high scores on IMDb and RottenTomatoes.
Throughout the movie I couldn't help but try to unravel the over- convoluted plot, which was thrown at the viewer so quickly and so conclusively, moving right off to the next thing before the viewer had a breath to digest exactly what had been fed to them, so as to sweep any unpleasant signs of discrepancy or contradiction under the rug. Trying to figure out exactly what is happening and why certain things are so turned out to be a mistake, because answering questions only led to even more questions and that certainly was a point of distraction for me.
In short, as the title of this review says, it was no Matrix (and I'm only speaking of the 1999 movie, forget the sequels). Perhaps it had tried to be, certainly now, 11 years later, this duality between reality and mind is no longer as novel as what it had been at the time of Matrix, so maybe they tried to compensate for this by complicating things up, you know, the "hey, if this isn't new, I'm sure compounding this by X times is!" idea. But it looked like that was just too much for them to handle with a handful of plot holes, loose ends not well tied up, etc etc. And when the plot holes reside in the crux of the story, if one were to generously overlook those... well, there just won't be very much else left.
I am sorry to be so critical, but just as I'd expect great fighting scenes from an action flick, great chemistry from a romance, when a movie like Inception is pivoted in virtual reality -- in fact, virtual reality so real that it fools the characters within the movie, well, it better be very convincing for me too.
On the positive side, I definitely enjoyed the special effects, the cinematography was very well done, and the entire cast did an excellent job at acting. So yeah, if you are good with letting go of your rational logic self and not caring too much about the what's and why's and how's, then this movie will certainly take you on a very exciting ride. Just, it's not my cup of tea.