Drowns in its own ambitions...swim along while you can!

Rating: 6/10 (20 October 2012)

Two years after its release I've watched this movie. My expectations were high and I couldn't help thinking back to the big impact The Matrix had on me 13 years ago. It blew my mind. I'm not going to try to compare the movies in detail but there is one big similarity: the 'world in a world' concept. Inception takes this idea a lot deeper than the matrix and this is the main draw of the movie as it keeps you intrigued throughout it. But brace for impact: for I must rant a little.
The problem with the whole dreamworld thing is that sometimes everything goes so fast that it often gave me the feeling I was missing half of what everything was about. I appreciate the movie trying to be smart but it should have contemplated it's own smartness a bit more, as to give the viewer solid ground for the next scene. Now it felt like my topics of confusion were just piling up throughout the movie and this left a unsatisfying feeling in my mind when the credits rolled.
For example: more than halfway the movie there is a chaotic chasing scene with a lot of snow speeders and I was thinking 'who the f*ck is chasing who?'. All the while montage is shown from what happens to the main characters in other dreamworlds. But where was the focus? About whom should I care?? The overload of scenes made me feel disconnected from the story. I had this feeling of chaos way too often. Also 'jumping from worlds' felt too casual and the dreamworlds seemed too unrealistically realistic to me, despite a few awesome scenes where the dreamworld gets warped.
Everybody who dreams knows how weirdly fragmented and incredible dreams can be but in Inception the dreamworlds look just like 'the real world'. This helps strenghtens the feeling of confusion about 'which world is more real' but to me it feels more like a conservative choice in artstyle whereas the director could have done so much more with the weirdness of dreamworlds!
Other issues i had with the movie is the characters seemed pretty flat to me. This is due to the confusing nature of the movie which for me made it difficult to bind with the characters. Or maybe it's that I don't dig DiCaprio that much. He has to carry the movie but he is just too smooth for my taste. Only in the end i genuinely felt moved by the climax of his emotional complex but it took me the whole movie to really felt moved by it.
For me, as a Science Fiction fan, I love it that this movie creates some intriguing adventuring in dreamworlds but i just wished the movie would've cared to explain itself better, also that the dreamworlds would have been more bizarre and that the 'real world' in the movie would have been more futuristic. I mean, the movie plays in the future but besides the dreaminfilltrationequipment being used I never saw any sign of it portraying the future. Offcourse you can say 'it's in the near future' but for me that would be a lazy excuse. I don't expect the movie to be like the matrix but a little effort would have been welcome.
Excuse me for nagging so much but I just feel mixed about this movie and would like to make a point in contrast to the heaps of praise this movie gets. It might be that a second viewing will shift my mixed feelings to the positive side because this roller-coaster, in all it's confusion, is perfect for a second ride. I just wished it already would have been awesome the first time.