Sort of like a pastiche of mediocre action adventure espionage thrillers dating back to the 60s

Rating: 4/10 (7 March 2011)

Before Leonardo DiCaprio agreed to play the lead part in 'Inception', he spent months with Christopher Nolan trying to improve the script. It was at DiCaprio's insistence that the part he was playing, Cobb, the corporate dream extractor, had to have a more beefed up internal arc. Otherwise, Inception would turn out to be another shallow, action adventure thriller. Despite Cobb's triumph over his internal demons (particularly the way in which he expunges his dead wife, who has been haunting him in his subconscious), Inception is much more an exploration of the mechanics of dreaming than a chronicle of emotional catharsis.
At the basic level, Inception can be divided into four distinct parts: Intro, Exposition, Journey and Resolution. The Intro consists of the initial scene, a flashback where Cobb must save his employer, a sleazy Japanese businessman, Saito, now far advanced in years, who has been stuck in a limbo-like purgatory for decades, unaware that he was mortally wounded in someone else's dream. It's a nice, little compact scene where we see a near-dead Cobb, washed up on a beach and dragged into Saito's fortress compound. A gun is left on the table in front of Saito and we're trying to figure out whether Saito is going to kill Cobb or himself.
Cut to the next scene where Cobb and his associate are involved in a trying to extract information from a much younger Saito inside one of his dreams, as they all sleep on a bullet train somewhere in Japan. Apparently, Saito was expecting the dream extractors and informs them that this is their 'audition'; the extractors' 'architect', the guy in charge of designing the dreamworld, somehow lets things get out of control when a mob of men invade the room where they're all staying, and Saito later has his thugs toss the architect off the roof of a heliport. Despite the botched job, Saito is impressed that Cobb and his partner are able to move through different 'levels' in the dreamworld. Cobb's 'audition' could have been compressed into one or two minutes but Nolan insists on illustrating every aspect of his convoluted plot. We finally arrive at the film's inciting incident: Saito's proposal to Cobb that he enter the dream world of his business rival, Fischer, and plant a suggestion in his subconscious, leading to the dissolution of the rival's entire business empire. 'Inception' is the reverse of what Cobb and his team have been trained to do—extracting information and Cobb has doubts about successfully carrying out Saito's proposal. But when Saito promises to pull some strings, enabling Cobb to return to the United States, despite murder charges hanging over his head, Cobb can't resist jumping at the chance to see his two children again.
The next part of 'Inception', the 'exposition', takes about an hour. This is where Cobb assembles his new carefully selected "Mission Impossible" superstar team who will penetrate Fischer's mind and plant the suggestion to break up his dying father's business empire. Nolan's explanation of the mechanics of the dreamworld is so complicated, that he has Cobb explain it to his new architect, a naive graduate student who manages to acquit herself rather well despite facing major obstacles inside multiple dreamworlds. Nolan manages to violate a major tenet of screen writing technique: Show don't tell. Unfortunately, during these expository sequences, there's a lot more 'tell' than 'show'. Yes, there is a rather neat scene (reminiscent of an M. C. Escher illustration), where one Paris landscape folds on top of another but most of the visuals are much more mundane: for example, a speeding locomotive appears out of nowhere during a car chase on a Paris street.
Much has been written about the 'journey' aspect of 'Inception'. Critics seem to be impressed by the three dreamworlds the 'dream team' penetrates, coupled with the way in which they're able to return to reality—the so-called 'kicks', where a huge sound or explosion propels them through the different levels back up to the surface. Nolan, however, serves up some of the dullest and derivative landscapes that our 'heroes' must navigate through—in fact, these so-called dreams don't look like dreams at all. Take Level 1—just a typical shoot em up with faceless bad guys chasing the 'good guys'. As for level 2—I felt I was watching a parody of Space Odyssey, with our dreamers floating through a hotel without the benefit of gravity. Finally, I have heard 'Level 3', compared to 'Ice Station Zebra', the schlocky 60s action film set in the Arctic.
Inception's Resolution is as unsatisfying as the earlier parts of the film. What are we to make of Cobb? Just because he has made this deal with Saito and it enables him to see his children, does not mitigate the fact that the whole plan to literally change Fischer's mind, is reprehensible. After all, shouldn't have Cobb walked away when Saito had his men murder the first architect? Cobb, by and large, remains a tainted and unsympathetic character, precisely because he looks the other way when he's quite aware that Saito has committed murder.
We're also told (by Saito) that the breakup of Fischer's empire is a good thing but should we take his word for it? He's a thug and Nolan has provided us nothing to go on to evaluate the nature of the Fischer empire. Finally, why does Fischer cry at his father's deathbed? He's just learned that his father put his mother in a mental institution so shouldn't he be angry? Or are those tears of joy so that he can be now 'his own man'?
The bulk of 'Inception' is merely a pastiche of mediocre action adventure espionage thrillers dating back to the 60s when the genre was in full bloom. The long-winded 'B' story, Cobb's tortured machinations in trying to literally kick his dead wife out of his subconscious mind, merely serves to distract us from the hollowness of the overall plot.