Don't believe the hype

Rating: 2/10 (20 July 2010)

Clumsy, derivative, lazily scripted and massively over-long. I know this isn't what most people are saying about Inception but I'm afraid this is the cruel truth about the film. There is simply nothing new here, despite the "originality" everyone has credited the film with. If you've seen The Matrix, Dreamscape, Total Recall, Blade Runner, or Johnny Mnemonic (to name but a few) then there is going to be little here to surprise you. The opening half hour of the film spends its time frantically throwing complex and very clunky exposition at you in a desperate attempt to explain the highly contrived rules of the dreamworlds which provide the backdrop for much of the narrative. The action is there, but as always, Nolan struggles to film it in an exciting way, generally pushing the camera so close to his subject that it is impossible to really make out what is going on. Even the dream worlds in the film are remarkably bland and unimaginative - apparently we all dream as if we are in a Hollywood high-concept film dominated by CGI. The small scale nature of most dreams is nowhere to be found here and nor is any of the fascinating strangeness and mystery associated with dreaming; apparently the subconscious only really expresses itself in our dreams by manifesting itself as a lot of rather tetchy people who try to beat up anyone who invades the dreamer's mind (sound at all like the agents in The Matrix?). There are of course some impressive visual effects along the way (for instance at one point Paris suddenly folds back on itself so that streets run vertically and upside down like something from an M C Escher picture) but these are calculated simply for spectacle and Nolan really misses a trick in picking up the potentially genuinely fascinating subject of dreams and the way in which they link to the fantasy world of films. I'm sure this will be popular with a lot of teenage boys who might be impressed with the cod-philosophy of the film, but if you've seen any of the films listed in the first few lines of this review or if you've read novels by Philip K Dick or William Gibson, you aren't going to find much to engage with here. Massively over-rated, incredibly tedious and a waste of an excellent cast who, in fairness, do the best they can with the dreadful screenplay they were handed.