Creative concept that falls monumentally short of the hype.

Rating: 4/10 (29 July 2010)

While the conceptualization in this film was better in some ways than the movies it can and obviously will be compared to such as the Matrix trilogy,What Dreams May Come, The Cell, Memento etc., Inception is a tepid foray into brain-twisting cinema. Though it was enjoyable to wade through in some parts (the high tension in any of the scenes that Cotillard's Mal appears in), over all it was a lackluster and vacuous failed masterpiece of the same ilk as a Thomas Kinkade painting. To wit: after you realize that those pretty glowing windows embedded in pretty little thatched cottages and dreamily lit street lamps are all the same cookie cut-outs, without context or variation, you are either irretrievably bored or just plain irritated by the time your brain wasted on this pretty patchwork of nothing - or both.
Most of the cast is just pacing the prosaic floors of patent "decent" acting against Nolan's backdrop abyss of homogenized scenery. Two notable exceptions to this were Marion Cotillard as Mal and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur. I found myself rousing to pay more attention when both were on screen. Cotillard fairly stole the movie (not a necessarily hard feat, given that the rest of the cast aside from Gordon-Levitt appeared to be sleepwalking through most of it) keeping one on edge waiting for (and hoping desperately for) "Mal" to return in some way to cause havoc. The name Mal is a complete symbolic stretch as the word "mal" in French means "evil" or "bad." Is Mr. Nolan attempting to moderate a Great Books club examination of symbolism in junior high literature?
Gordon-Levitt's Arthur is a cool character that screams of being secretly afflicted with OCD. He's definitely ready for more mature roles, but this film could not do his performance justice.
DiCaprio turns in a solid, if not slightly bland, performance. The role was clearly not much of a stretch for him and immensely less compelling than his performances recently in films such as The Departed, Shutter Island and Redemption Road.
My biggest issue with the movie is with the casting of Ellen Page as Ariadne. First, the character of Ariadne is even weaker and more limpid by contrast to the other characters. It is not the youth and inexperience of the unseasoned apprentice that is driving the weakness of the character. It is the character altogether and the way in which it and the corresponding dialogue was written. In addition (and this will no doubt be an unpopular assessment), Ellen Page has once again turned in an uninspired, wooden, robotic performance. Juno was perfect casting for Page and I enjoyed her in that movie in-so-much as she was practically playing her unflappable, sarcastic, pseudo-intellectual-underachiever self. Great role, but from what I've seen of her after that - a complete one-off. In Inception she appears asexual in contrast to Cotillard who fairly oozes the stuff of warm bodies and sexuality even in death and as a ghost of a memory. While the part may not have required Page to be overtly sexual, her lack of anything approaching genuine emotion and reaction ends up further robbing her portrayal of veracity and meat. Playing against DiCaprio, who is able to channel and evince convincing emotion and reaction at the drop of a hat, does not help her case.
The backdrop scenery and visual conception was a CGI snooze fest. The intended poignant (and, again, symbolically heavy-handed) decaying ruins juxtaposed with the generic modern linear lines of any old corporately urban scape are meant to showcase the mind's dilemmas and free-style architectural skills when in a dream state. Instead of exploring and creating these scapes in some Borgesesque way that might actually tease order into chaos and the reverse, these elaborate digitized models looked like the computerized simulations an urban-planning student might create to illustrate how a disaster effects structures or where to build the next access ramp - confusing, decaying, crumbling and boring.
I initially gave this film a much better review. Unfortunately for it, I watched both Chinatown and The Godfather II the very next day and snapped back into the realities of what master filmmaking should be. I must hand it to the studio on this one: your mega publicity campaign for this film served you well. You managed to convince a movie-going public that is so much in the throes of economic and political turmoil that it wants nothing so much as an escape into a good film for a few hours that this film is much, much more innovative and substantive than it can ever deliver on.