Reel in your expectations and enjoy the movie.

Rating: 5/10 (23 July 2010)

It is rumored that Christopher Nolan took eight years to complete this story, his first original work in over a decade. Perhaps he just needed a little more time.
It doesn't surprise me that Nolan, the guilty party behind Memento, would come up with a movie where gratuitously Byzantine convolution is served up instead of anything resembling story. What does surprise me is that Nolan manages, eventually, to steer this vehicle to a reasonably satisfying conclusion. And it is for the sake of the marginally effective dénouement alone that I am willing to forgive a movie for having a blatantly video game structure, complete with levels and avatars and an artificially aggressive ticking clock to manufacture urgency.
I suppose one could carp about the fact that Ellen Page as Ariadne goes from badly dressed student to the Yoda of shared dreaming quite literally in the blink of an eye, but that would be complaining about the table service when the restaurant is on fire. Perhaps the biggest failing of the writing in Inception is that all the characters are forced to deliver lengthy, tedious expository dialogue to explain what just happened, what is currently happening, or what is about to happen.
Without giving too much away, this probably explains why, in the second act, Nolan has the wrong character delivering a speech. Basically, there are the main characters in a dream and then there are projections created by the characters. In one scene, a key plot element is explained by a projection, who would have no knowledge of the element, instead of the character, who is there to introduce it. It's an amateurish blunder that shows what happens when bad writers get in over their heads.
This basic story itself was done decades ago with far more finesse and wit in everything from Dreamscape to American Werewolf in London. In fact, the whole plot, if you can call it that, is as convincingly fresh as yesterday's dry toast. It's The Matrix meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who then get hijacked by Total Recall while Memento and Dark City stand back and laugh on the sidelines. It's as if Nolan wanted to outdo all of them by forcing them into a single mashed up meta-story.
So why watch this movie? I guess it all comes down to this – the movie, quite simply, is fun to watch. Lots of fun.
What Nolan lacks as a writer, and the list is long, he more than makes up for as a director. Inception is taut and energetic from start to finish. Even though the characters are ridiculously flat, they move effortlessly through Nolan's heightened reality. Inception may not be the best story literarily, but Nolan's way of telling it cinematically is superb.
In short, the story revolves around a team of people, scientist, spies, we're never really sure, who have perfected a way of entering other people's dreams. Once inside, they use the warped reality of dreams to extract secrets from the dreamer.
Apparently there are numerous rules regarding dream intervention. Violating them leads to dire consequences. Mercifully, the old saw that if you die in a dream you die in real life is not true here. It just wakes you up. Usually.
But along comes the mission to use the dream to implant an idea in the dreamer – Inception. Apparently this is difficult, but, of course, it must be done. Fortunately, it seems that the whole world is up on the dream-jacking process, and experts abound. It's even so commonplace that ordinary citizens go to seminars on how to fight back in their dreams, making them formidable foes in dreamland. So a new team is assembled and the game, as in video game, is on, and on, and on.
Suffice it to say that, in typical Nolan fashion, the story revolves around itself until it generates a tasty little paradox, within which the (almost) redeeming moments of the film reside. Ersatz intellectuals are already asking the central question of the film as proof of their depth, a sort of "Who is John Galt?" meta-meme. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand was such a pedantic, didactic writer I ended up not caring who John Galt was. In similar fashion, after Nolan has drummed away at his central issue for so long it grew tedious, I walked away from this movie not caring about the answer to "The Question."
I'd say, reel in your expectations a tad, then go see the movie and have fun.