Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)

Rating: 3/5

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”
- Jean Renoir

There’s a great deal of applicability of this quote when it comes to Christopher Nolan. In Memento a man accidentally kills his wife and can’t deal with the guilt so he creates a world of his own to live in in order to come to terms with what happened; in Inception basically the same thing happens but instead of telling the story backwards & from the perspective of someone who no longer has any short term memory this time the gimmick is dreams. Being the spontaneous internet forum wanderer that I am I’d heard here & there comparisons to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of just how intensely visceral of an impact the film has on one’s psyche. Now, I didn’t go into my viewing with this in mind, but it lingered there back in my subconscious where the guy from Third Rock from the Sun & Bronson were trying to steal whatever secrets I have.

The difference between a film like Kubrick’s awe inspiring masterpiece and Nolan’s film which only makes it to the level of ‘just good’ is that there’s this sense in Nolan’s film of being scared of alienating too many people from enjoying his film. “Well, I’ll make it sort of complex, but only include the most base ideas and the most placid dreams imaginable. Oh, and the end will be kind of ambiguous but not too much, don’t want to make anyone angry or instigate any kind of lengthy discussions.”

As seems to be the deal with Nolan his main actor is really cringe worthy or laugh inducing (“OH JESUS CHRIST!!!!”) DiCaprio doesn’t go through the film growling at people but he is still pretty bad. To be honest the only one who doesn’t seem to be phoning in a performance is Tom Hardy, and that’s only barely the case.

The folding of Paris was pretty nice, but everything else just seemed flat and Nolan never, in 150 minutes, gets the feel of a dream quite down; not when DiCaprio is Mr. Charles in the bar, not when Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Jamiroquai-ing it up with some guys in a hall or hauling a floating bundle of his buddies into an elevator. 

There’s nothing in this film that you can’t learn about dreams from Richard Linklater’s phenomenal film “Waking Life”, so, Inception proves to be a fairly useless film in the end, but it is, oddly enough, worth at least one viewing.