Inception

It's increasingly rare for movies to arrive about which you know little before they begin, and so I hesitate to criticise something like Inception because on balance I'd place it on high on an arbitrary numerical scale purely because it's something of a high stakes gamble from an industry that generally refuses to take risks, and continues to stagnate as a result. It is ultimately a positive force in the universe.

But I just didn't like it very much. It had some nice ideas. The five dimensional peril angle for example, was fascinating, especially with the time dilation, but it takes some really rather large leaps in logic to create this complex setup. Quite aside from the whole "my dreams are about things like my teeth falling out, pretty sure I'd find a coherent kidnapping plot very suspect": Why do the "kicks" work on the dreams within dreams? Your dream self has a dream inner ear? Why is the time effect multiplied? Wouldn't your real brain hemorrhage if you were running it at like 1000% capacity? And this five way threat is the only pay off.

At heart it's a story about con men, pulling as so often the case, the ultimate con. While it might be pandering to convention, stories about con men have a very specific structure, from The Sting, through Mission Impossible, Hustle and a surprising number of Stargate: Atlantis episodes, tricking the audience is a key part of the appeal. Pulling a twist in the third act that makes you go "Ahhhhh, I see". Coming from the guy who made both Momento and The Prestige (and to a lesser extent, both Batman films), being a film about deception and deceiving people and the way we interpret what we experience, I thought it was pretty much a given that was the purpose of the films complexity. Instead it exists purely for complexities sake and it becomes essentially an action film, albeit an intelligent one. Maybe it could have all been a dream (and directed by Terry Gilliam) or his wife had never been real, anything, something, to tie all the narrative strands together into one solid puzzle, instead of just showing you the individual pieces. It's an astounding amount of setup for very little in the way of punch.

Also I just didn't really care about any of these people. There's no chemistry and none of them are very well wrought characters (the only one I was even slightly interested in was the forger, and only because it took me fifteen minutes to work out where I knew the voice from. And he only had slightly more hair in this). Maybe it would work better if you're a DiCaprio fan, but while I respect much of his work, I find his default setting of "intense moping" grating.

The more I think about this, the less my initial hesitation seems to be a factor. Given another half an hour I'm sure I'd be frothing at the mouth and pounding at the keys, but it really doesn't deserve such derision. Despite some personal disappointment at it falling short of it's potential, it's an interesting film, with interesting ideas and with luck could lead to some interesting decisions made by whoever it that makes decisions about which films to throw money at.