Great special effects, unnecessarily convoluted story

Rating: 8/10 (20 July 2010)

I just saw this a few hours ago, and while I enjoyed it, I don't think it's up there with the all-time greats. Yes, the special effects are top-notch, but the story line is unnecessarily convoluted and the movie is too derivative to win any prizes for conceptual breakthroughs. If you've seen The Matrix, Dark City, Eternal Sunshine, and Blade Runner you'll feel like you've covered a lot of this territory before. And having three (four? five?) levels of dream/reality/whatever eventually becomes more distracting than intriguing. The process of "kicking" between different levels - why and how it works, or doesn't - is not explained convincingly or consistently.
All that aside, however, the main problem for me was that there's little reason to care much about Cobb, the main character. For all the talk of emotions and psyche, we learn surprisingly little about Cobb. We are told that he is driven by the hope of "going home," and the scenes with him and his lost wife are meant to evoke empathy, but for me they fell surprisingly flat. And finally, I just couldn't buy into Ellen Page as the "architect." She's too young to be the designer of dreamworlds, and I kept wishing that they'd cast an older, wiser actor in that role. Yeah, I know, they wanted at least one young/cute female in the movie, but ... Ellen Page? Sooo ... 8/10 is all I can give this movie. Worth seeing on the big screen, maybe even more than once, but not Nolan's best.