All right.....

Rating: 6/10 (23 August 2010)

The film is a disappointment, because it did so little with so much. Basically what you have here is a very interesting sci-fi heist premise; Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are partners who use dream-invasion technology to steal industrial secrets from unsuspecting mass transit passengers (why any powerful people in such a technological age would travel on mass transit, is just one of the many obvious questions the film expects us not to raise) while they doze. In exchange for immunity to a troubling criminal charge against Cobb, they agree to undertake an unprecedented mission: to practice "inception" on a powerful business scion, that is to plant an original idea in his subconscious through the dream manipulation.
All of this is great, but unfortunately none of it has any emotional weight. To find that we have to look into the mystery of why Cobb has been in exile, and this plot has to do with his wife (Marion Cotillard) with whom he shared a disastrous and traumatic experience of dream sharing. This is to me where the movie essentially falls apart. It seems like Nolan and the other writers never fully synthesized these two dominant strains in the film, so that most of the time the emotional drama is just getting in the way of the heist film or vice a versa. At no point did it seem to me that the heist was complimenting the drama or vice a versa. And in fact after some very impressive effects sequences during the scenes where Cobb shows his new assistant Ariadne (Ellen Page, too green to hold up her role) a lot of the action becomes outright tedious, never more so than when we're "treated" to about a reel or ten minutes of numbing snow-mobile and gunfight action, right at the point where the film should be reaching a climax. It all starts to feel very obligatory, and Nolan is not a good enough action director to make empty content feel like fun.
As a basic action/heist movie with sci-fi premise, it still works well enough that I would recommend it as a rental. Nolan works in some of the elements that have made some of his better films work on a higher level, such as the association with totems and icons (the spinning wheel, etc.) and the connection between memory or memory devices and identity. However when all the pieces are laid out, the film seems overly simple and mechanical. The plot is just this -- the guy takes a job, he does the job, he gets to re-unite with his kids. Although he constantly mopes about in a depression because he tried inception on his wife and she died, he has no ethical or moral problem with doing the same thing to Cillian Murphy's character, even though nobody knows the real consequences that could befall or the true motives of Ken Watanabe's character. I was hoping that some larger picture would emerge, but instead this film is politically naive and instead attempts to be dramatic. The constant shots of adorable children playing on the lawn made me feel I was watching a bad Spielberg film. The entire emotional anchor of the film is put on the shoulders of these cute kiddies in true Spielberg fashion. If you don't buy into this ridiculous soft-target hook, then the whole film collapses like DiCaprio's dream world.
This isn't a bad or stupid film, but after a while you start to yearn for at least some human warmth or humor, which is almost always missing from Nolan's films. The characters are so sincere that it starts to become suffocating, especially considering how ridiculous the premise is when taken seriously. Basically this is like "Total Recall" in terms of ideas and in terms of stupid action scenes, except that it takes itself hugely seriously. It does not become a better film by doing so, nor a more intelligent one.