Inception reviewed

With Inception, Christopher Nolan had quite a feat trying to top his last movie The Dark Knight, one of the best superhero movies ever.  But when the first trailers for Inception came out, it seemed that Nolan might have a shot at equaling or bettering The Dark Knight.  There was a city that folded itself in two and some shootouts.  Those two elements are as opposite as something can be but we had faith in Nolan to reconcile those elements into something awesome.  And after months of waiting and hearing various fanboys implicitly declare this movie to be the second coming of Jesus, the time has come to let the movie speak for itself.  So are those lunatic fanboys right or is Inception just a failed experiment?  Let's find out as we dive into Inception.

The movie follows our intrepid "hero" Cobb, a man who can enter a person's dream and steal their secrets but it has cost him a terrible price, mostly his separation from his beloved family.  But there's a chance for Cobb to see his family and that's by taking one last job by some rich Asian guy, Saito.  However, this time the job isn't stealing an idea but planting one inside Saito's business rival so he can break up his father's empire which is infinitely more difficult than outright theft.  Obviously Cobb accepts the deal and he assembles his team to help with the inception but like all plans made of mice and men, things never go according to plan.

When you play around in dreams, you start to enter some dramatically dangerous territory.  You can do anything in dreams making actions null and devoid of tension.  Then there's IT WAS ALL A DREAM ending which, more often than not, is infuriating.  But what Nolan has done is try to make organize the chaos of a dream into an orderly fashion.  There's really awesome explanations for how dreams are different than reality in terms of time and events.  As we go deeper into each layer of a dream, we see the consequences that one layer has onto the other layers.  This is perfectly evident in the masterful fight scene with the rotating hallway, of course I'm not going to tell you why it's rotating but it's worth it.  And that's another thing about the action scenes, they are very well shot and edited into crystal clarity where we see what's going on.

Nolan is also smart enough to have half of the cast already work for him before.  It's no surprise that Cillian Murphy and Ken Watanabe give the best performances out of this film despite their somewhat limited screen time.  Leonardo DiCaprio does OK as Cobb but not he's great.  He does alright but he doesn't light up the screen like our hero should.  Everyone else seems to be having fun despite some weak characterization for almost everyone except Cobb.  And then there's Ellen Page, who isn't bad but all she does is be the audience surrogate that the guys have to explain things so the audience knows whats going on, that's her role and she only does what she must do.

But there is one thing that kind of bothered me about the nature of the dreams and, I guess, the story: It was really linear.  Now don't get me wrong, this is not a movie to watch casually since if you zone out a couple times you might as well give up and rewatch the movie at another time but there's a difference between exploiting the full potential of the story and making the story that is there as densely plotted as possible.  All the dreams are pretty much James Bond-esque situations without any real flights of dream-like fancy. For what we DO have it's very good but I just felt that the movie needed a kick in the ass to realize its full potential.

It may seem that I'm a bit hard on this movie but even though it's not great art, it is exceptional entertainment.  The action scenes are spectacular.  The camerawork is amazing.  The acting is fine for the most part even though I do wish that Michael Caine had a bigger part.  While I do wish that more was to be done with the dream imagery, it's still a very trippy experience to witness.  Does this equal or better The Dark Knight, not really nor does it equal Batman Begins for that matter.  But it is on par with Memento and that's a pretty amazing legacy.

9/10