Inception has a lot of ideas and it doesn't do anything with them

Rating: 6/10 (20 July 2010)

I cannot ignore facts. I cannot ignore mistakes and plot holes, bad writing, or bad marketing. I cannot ignore hype, especially when it's already on the IMDb top 250, it received praise from critics, cashed in a lot of money, and people call it stunning and unforgettable. The simple truth is that Inception does not live up to the hype. Let me start with the trailer. All the coolest things (the folding city, the collapsing cliffs, the train in the street) are totally unessential to the plot. None of that takes more than a few seconds. So why did they put them on all the posters as well? Nevermind. I'll move on to the real problems of the movie.
So I heard all these people saying how complex the movie is. How I'll need to watch it twice. How the shocking ending will blow my mind. I knew exactly what that "shocking ending" would be half way through the film. The very last paragraph of this review deals with the ending. It's not exactly a spoiler but you can skip it if you don't want to know anything.
Cobb (DiCaprio) takes on a mission to implant a thought into Fischer's (Murphy) mind. As a reward, his contractor Saito (Watanabe) will clean his record with the LAPD. Cobb is wanted for the murder of his wife and consequently he can't return to USA and see his children. Throughout the movie, this is Cobb's main inner conflict, that before he fled the country, he didn't get a chance to see the kids' faces and he wants to see them again. Michael Cain has a very small role as their grandpa and DiCaprio's father-in-law. Why doesn't Cain take the kids someplace so they could be with their father? People move all the time. Or why doesn't he send Cobb some home movies if he wants to see their faces so much? They could even have video calls and all that stuff. It's a long distance relationship but it's something. Well, apparently no one thought of that, and so the main character's main motivation for his actions makes no sense.
As for acting, DiCaprio was good. But if you've seen Shutter Island, You've seen a third of Inception. Dead wife, small kids, a sense of loss, a pretty wooden house in a field, all those flashbacks Teddy had in Shutter Island it's all in Inception. Minus the funny Boston accent.
The mission these mind thieves embark on is to plant an idea into a rich guy's mind. This is called inception. Hence the title, I guess. Everyone says it's impossible to do, so you know they are going to succeed in the end. Inception is essentially a heist movie, but instead of getting into a vault, Cobb's team has to get inside someone's mind – which happens to look like a vault. The supposed complexity of the movie boils down to the idea of a dream within a dream. Basically, imagine that once you are plugged inside the matrix, you plug yourself into yet another, deeper, matrix. There, I just explained the super complex plot of the movie. But in case that wasn't enough, there is Ellen page's character, Ariadne. She is the obligatory new member of the team that is introduced to represent the audience and their questions. I'm fine with that. Every movie has one of those uninitiated people. The thing is, she understands everything too quickly and becomes suddenly becomes the most competent character. Pretty convenient, if you ask me.
Let me finally get to the mission. It's the worst part of the movie. Watanabe wants Murphy, who just inherited a huge corporation, to dissolve it, because it was going to become a huge monopoly. So Watanabe hires DiCaprio to plant the idea of splitting the company in Murphy's mind. And so they do that. For two and a half hours. But I don't care if he splits the big company or not. Why should I care if Murphy has a bigger company than Watanabe? The stakes of the movie aren't high, they are nonexistent. I am not given any reason to care about whether or not they succeed. I'm only given more and more action set pieces to look forward to, and a lot of cool slow motion and zero gravity fights reminiscent of The Matrix, but I'm not given any reason to care for what is happening. I liked Watanabe's character only because I like Ken Watanbe. As for Saito himself, I don't give a damn if his competitor destroys his company or not. They don't tell us what consequences it would have, they don't show us what happens with the company, they don't do anything with this initial idea. Which is strange, because the movie is all about ideas being important.
Okay, so I didn't like the plot and the acting was nothing new. What about the rest? Hans Zimmer's unremarkable score works well with the scenes but it would be super boring to hear on its own. The visual effects are good but since all the coolest city-folding scenes were so short, there wasn't really that much to do. The zero gravity stuff was done well, I'll give them that. Cinematography was good, bordering on too much shaky camera.
Here's the paragraph about the ending:
The big ending is that you are supposed to be unsure what was a dream and what was reality. If it was real, then it's stupid because DiCaprio had dozens of ways to be with his kids without making things so incredibly complicated. The movie is supposed to make you think, but if you think about it the whole plot falls apart. If it was a dream, then it's a stupid cop out on Nolan's part. An excuse for all the things that didn't make sense. It was all a dream, so screw you, audience.