Your mind is the scene of the crime.
Some controversy about this film, some saying it's brilliant, others that the plot is too confusing or the overall emotional impact is lacking, that it's emotionally cold.
I would say it's very good in the SF action/thriller genre, like Total Recall (1990) or The Matrix (1999): a lot of action, chase scenes, fight scenes and special effects, structured with a clever dream-within-dream story-line, nicely written, including some great action scenes, especially the brilliant fight scenes with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which I've heard were done pretty much "in camera". Other special effects were good, but not that mind-blowing, given the precedence of The Matrix, etc. Michael Bonner remarks on: "zero gravity fights in a hotel corridor, an assault on an artic fortress and a car chase through a dreamed city".
I was apprehensive about Inception because of the director's previous film, The Dark Knight (2008), which I took a real dislike to: a film with lots of cool machines, speed, action, but without heart, a perfect film for Top Gear-loving lads. I would say that Inception is an emotionally cold film: plot, not character-driven. The stakes, as others have pointed out, are not very personal: corporate espionage, for God's sake!
For all the hype about Inception being an intelligent blockbuster that doesn't dumb down a challenging plot to accommodate lazy audiences, in the end, for science fiction fans, it wasn't that challenging at all. The tropes were fairly standard in the genre of science fiction; I didn't have trouble following the plot, and I saw the final end twist coming a long way off. In toto, although it's true that the film does feel fresh, in reality, it follows the standard action thriller template, with quieter scenes alternating with noisy kick-ass action sequences.
The characters were pretty standard too: fine, but not very memorable. De Caprio was good, as was Cillian Murphy and Ken Watanabe (the latter superb in Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006). Not quite sure why Ellen Page was used, she was fantastic in Juno (2007), but seemed a bit out of place here. Shame Lukas Haas, very effective in Brick (2005), was not used more.
- Rating: Full price
- When seen: 8 Aug 2010
- Where seen: Cinema
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
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Amendments: Added label for actor Lukas Haas. Removed link to Wikipedia-sourced image. Added ranking image.
