Deceivingly excellent

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2010)

When film-makers make a movie that deals with the human subconscious like inception, they have millions of trinkets to play with. Literally, the film-makers own imagination is the limit.
Inception does this very nicely, it creates rules for which the inception (-planting an idea in someone's subconscious while they sleep) takes place, and tries to get the absolute most out of the story, action and graphics within the rules it created for itself for this inception to take place.
Even though I found the movie very entertaining, in the end I felt a bit conned. This was because the movie kept telling me over and over again how brilliant it was, and how superbly complex it was, while in fact, it wasn't complex at all. The basic story is very simple actually. It's just made complex with a lot of gimmicks.
This isn't really a bad thing, all movies do it. So I wondered whether 'feeling conned' is a good argument. I guess it mainly had to do with the ending of the movie. The ending is a cheap way to have your audience question whether it was real or not. Of course, there is no correct answer. And that's OK. But why ask the question than? If it all wás real in end, the movie is that much better. Now they choose to be oh so 'deep' and 'thoughtful'. Where yet again, it really is not.
I guess the 'feeling conned' sentiment comes from all the 'this movie is oh so complex, oh so deep, oh so thoughtful' gestures it makes. But it fails to deliver actual arguments (for me at least)to back that claim up. The gimmicks are (needlessly) complex indeed, the basic story itself is not, not by a long shot.
This all sounds very negative, and the movie doesn't deserve it, it's a very good movie and to all the people I know I recommended watching it. Mainly because it spawned interesting conversations. However, that bitter after-taste of 'feeling conned' has made me come to feel this is a movie without heart. To me it seems they didn't want to make this movie so 'complex' and 'deep' because they loved doing so or because the story deserved it. They only did it to try and trick me to think this was a brilliant movie. And when you try to do that with me, I tend to back away.
All in all, a very good movie, which left a cheesy after-taste. But at least it was a lot better than the Dark Knight (the directors previous blockbuster) which I found horrendously bad (and over-hyped). So, Final Verdict: 7 It would have been 1 or 2 points higher if the movie had more heart. A lame argument I know, but I don't know how else to put in words.