Predictable, shallow and repetitive.

Rating: 2/10 (6 November 2011)

Seriously? Mesmerizing? Fantastic? Genius? No.
I was pretty excited about this film after all the hype, and I feel massively let down. The plot was overly drawn out and repetitive, and there was an over-reliance on action, with massive portions of the plot being taken up by filler scenes of silly shoot-outs and car chases.
Christopher Nolan has given this film a superficial sheen of meaningfulness, with the admittedly astounding visuals covering for a plot so full of holes it's almost falling apart. Why are Dom and Mal shown as having grown old and grey together in limbo when they are also shown laying their head on train lines to escape limbo as 30-somethings? Why does the incessant music come to dominate the film, making every scene feel climactic, which is actually detrimental to the final climax?
In a similar manner to the way in which the Wachowski brothers took the brilliant writings of Baudrillard and completely mangled them beyond all meaning in The Matrix, Nolan has taken a great idea and turned it into a teenage boy's shoot-em-up action fantasy. People might watch it and think "Wow, that's really deep". No, it's not. It has the appearance of being deep and meaningful when in fact it's just a shallow action film.
I'm sure people will read this review and think "she just doesn't get it". The problem is that I do it get. Unfortunately there's just not a lot to get.