Inception -or- a Summer 2010 variant of "The Emperor's New Clothes"

Rating: 5/10 (24 July 2010)

First of all, let me assure you that I am not writing this review just to be contrary or go against the grain, but in all honestly I am completed baffled by the public's response to Inception, and even more so by the IMDb community's reaction.
Before seeing the film I had been hearing rave reviews, so I admittedly went into it with quite high expectations. I sat in the cinema expecting to be blown away. The film started...I saw some cool special effects, heard an interesting plot line, observed moderate to poor character development, lots of completely typical action-movie sequences, and then the film ended. I walked out of the theater confused.
"10/10"? "a masterpiece"? Please! I keep reading reviews that describe the plot as "complex" and "multi-layered"-- but it simply is not! Just because Leonardo Di Caprio and his team are traveling through "multiple layers of consciousness", does not in itself add additional layers to the plot. In fact, the plot was fairly one dimensional: there was one goal (inception) and almost everything in the movie was directly related to achieving it. The only other vague subplot in the entire film was related to DiCaprio's past with his wife (Cottilard). Beyond that, where is this "depth" everyone is talking about? Am I missing something? What is so mind-boggling and ingenious about the thought of a dream that is within a dream which is turn within another dream? I really admire Leonardo Di Caprio and Marion Cottilard's talent (I thought Blood Diamond, Revolutionary Road, and La Vie En Rose were great films) but their real talent is not on display here. Their acting felt flat and forced. And I also agree with other reviewers that the casting of Juno's Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was awkward.
I really wanted to love this movie just as much as everyone else, I really did, but I can't put depth where it isn't.
Don't get me wrong, it is generally a good movie, but not THAT good. Come on people, Inception does not even begin to live up to all of the hype surrounding it. By typical IMDb standards I can't see how this would get much higher than an 7.5/8 or so.
I'm just astonished at all of the excessively positive reviews on this site-- some even compare Inception to a religion, and put Nolan in the same category as Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Tarkovsky, which is completely absurd.
A week of reflection on this film has not changed my opinion of it, and I'm left thinking the hype surrounding Inception is either a (more successful version of) the Emperor's New Clothes or else that there's a beautiful suit there and I just can't see it.