Nolan's first soap opera

Rating: 8/10 (6 August 2010)

Christopher Nolan in the past has established himself as one of the best directors working the circuit, equally able to balance the delicacy of smaller pictures and the sheer constructive size of summer blockbusters, making them equally engrossing as a viewing experience.
However, as even the best directors do, you have slam into a brick wall somewhere along the career path. Inception is Christopher Nolan's first brick wall, really.
In one of those weird complexes of stage and screen, Inception has far fewer flaws as a film than most summer blockbusters, yet is not anywhere near as engrossing as its compatriots trying to dominate the summer ticket aisles every year. The Dark Knight, Nolan's previous outing, was a very flawed film but had me and all of my fellow viewers staggering out of the cinema from the, well...awesomeness of it all.
However when I walked out of Inception, the exit doors acted as two erasers, wiping what had happened in the film and refocusing my attention on how I was going to spend the rest of my Friday night.
Here are my biggest problems with the film. Firstly the plot. The idea here is a very good one, and the first thirty minutes are the best in the film because it is time spent exploring the dream infiltration, its various levels and the implications of flogging off ideas to the highest bidder etc. etc. But then Nolan makes his biggest mistake of the film, using this high concept into the basis of a soap opera - albeit a soap opera with best visuals ever. This suspended my interested because with all his golden properties one thing Nolan is not good at is emotional storytelling. And so this means the film becomes a battle with trying to keep the plot intensity up and somehow squeezing some emotion out of the beast. In the end the emotional transfer on to the audience gets lost and the 'mega-cool' plot becomes horribly clichéd.
The dialogue isn't great either, and the only people who can drag something out of it are Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy, and only because they are mega-cool. MC DiCaprio and the rest of the cast are not, because they rely on emotional impact for their performances, as above mentioned something this film does not have.
Speaking of casting, it is on the majority fine. However Ellen Page is not treated with respect by the script and as a result I became annoyed by her rather than inspired by her. DiCaprio is once a again the workhorse, as he usually is in these films, but really does not suit ensemble casts. My biggest difficulty with casting is not who is cast but who Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and to a lesser extent Tom Hardy, are cast as. If I was doing this film I would have had the script rewritten and JGL cast as Cobb and TH cast as Arthur. I have absolutely no Problems with DiCaprio, but I can't shake the feeling that he just doesn't fit in this film, and JGL and TH are class acts.
So in the end a film with enormous potential doesn't quite make it is hailed the next big thing because of an excellent marketing campaign but is really quite mediocre.