Inception

Going to make this one quick.

I liked the movie, but I feel like I'm still going to end up being a bit of a killjoy here because I'm going to mainly be talking about why I didn't like it that much. So let's first talk about why I liked the movie in a quick and dirty 1-2-3 list.

1) It's nice that Nolan trusts in the intelligence of his audience. The dream scenes got pretty complicated with the different time frames and time going slower in one scene than it is in the next. It was fun to keep track of all that without too many stupid visual clues with close ups of watches and shit.

2) The fight scenes were neat. I liked how the physics of the dreamworlds overlapped, with the van in freefall resulting in no gravity in the hotel and all that stuff. That was pretty unique and tense, although somewhat subverted by the fact that if the guy on the upper layers actually lost the other scenes would just collapse (and you knew it wouldn't end like that).

3) Witty banter, good music and a fairly original premise kept me interested. Little funny moments like the firefight that Eames ended abruptly with a grenade launcher helped piece this together.

So in other words, it was a popcorn flick. A few hours of good honest fun. If you want to see a movie that you can spend a few harmless hours enjoying, then Inception is a good pick.

Here's why it's nothing more than that:

1) Leonardo DiCaprio.

At no point in the movie did I find Cobb's character to be convincing. The story with his wife and kids, his emotional problems, his character as a smart dream spy guy... really everything about the guy just seemed so flat and artificial. I think he was a fine character on paper, but the problem is that Leonardo DiCaprio is a ham actor who had no business playing this kind of part.

The whole movie I was wondering why Nolan hadn't gotten Aaron Eckhart or raised Heath Ledger back from the dead or at least hired some sort of actor instead of a damn aging pretty boy that can read a script in an Acting Voice. It's especially weird since everyone else in the cast put on a fairly strong and convincing performance. Did Nolan think people wouldn't notice how fucking terrible DiCaprio is if he surrounded him with talent perhaps?

2) "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling" is a nice line, but the movie really did seem to be quite afraid to dream a little bigger.

Everyone has a different way of dreaming. When I dream (and remember it) it is usually a long tragic narrative, but other people just see images of sheep eating grass or something. What more or less everyone agrees upon, however, is that in a dream anything is possible. You can fly, you can breathe underwater, you can shoot lasers out of your eyes and lightning out of your fingers.

In Inception, everyone used guns. Nothing else. There's one instance where that one guy used dream magic to use those 'paradox' stairs to get the drop on a projection, but that's really just about it. You could argue that they can only use the things that the architect provides before they go in and that she isn't supposed to twist the world too much lest they attract the attention of the projections, but she's shown to have the ability to affect dreams on the fly. Why didn't she just manifest a fucking giant fire breathing robot dragon when things started getting ugly? What was stopping her? She could have hidden the thing when Fischer was around.

It feels to me that Nolan just wanted dream gun battles and nothing else and so nothing else was put in.

3)It was predictable.
I feared at the very beginning of the movie that it would end with some bullshit 'it was a dream the ENTIRE TIME and he was just trying to get the last secret from the Japanese guy' ending. I was relieved when it was apparent that that wasn't the case, but everything else was fairly predictable and straightforward. DiCaprio's wife being the first inception target and the entire story with her could really be traced twenty minutes in advanced.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you combine it with the fact that I never gave a fuck about Cobb or anything related to Cobb thanks to the ham acting of Leo DiCaprio you get certain stretches of the movie that are really fucking boring. If I'd had control in the theater, I would have skipped a bunch of those fucking scenes and just gotten back to the people with funny accents shooting assholes.

And that's about all I've gotta say about that.