Fancy graphics without much heart

Rating: 3/10 (18 December 2010)

For the amount of effort that went into this production, I found the result to be ultimately pretty dull. Like nearly 99% of what has come out of Hollywood in the past 15 years or so, this film has loads of technique but little heart. It offers little to care for, and therefore little to remember.
Yes, there's some fancy graphics, but that's about it. The internal logic of the nested dreams is routinely disrupted, the action sequences don't make much sense (why all the shooting, really?) and none of the characters are emotionally involving. Di Caprio's character has a nominal story arc at best, and the angst he's supposed to feel is not grounded because we don't know neither his nor his wife's history, or how they got together.
Yes, Inception is a fun mind game. But like most mind games, it ultimately doesn't make for a worthwhile experience. And at 2.5 hours this mind game is far too overblown. Its lack of proportion (too much talk, too many levels, too much trivial action, complicated for the sake of complicated) unfortunately makes things worse. The incessant music, typical of Zimmer, is trivially repetitive, as are much of the action sequences. Ultimately these become much more intrusive and annoying as the film progressives.
When I compare this film to older ones, like The Woman in the Window, which achieves so much more of a memorable experience and story, yet with so little, one has to wonder if technology and truckloads of cash are getting in the way of memorable storytelling.
This film would have fared much better as a comedy, or maybe as round-table discussion about dreams, or maybe as a survey of a Facebook clique of friends sharing dreams. But the film needed to have far more fantasy to really evoke the sensation of dreamscapes. And most importantly, it needed a far more soulful and compelling story with characters we are allowed to learn about and therefore care about.