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You can say at least one good thing about Inception--it's hardly your usual summer blockbuster. Yes, there are battle scenes aplenty and enough special effects to make even the most die-hard Fanboy weak in the knees. But there's also a truly deep plot--one that keeps you guessing to the very end (and I'm afraid that a lot of the movie-going audience won't be able to follow). If anything, that's where the movie trips up: the story begins if not in the middle than certainly well after the start. We literally jump into the action with no explanation who these characters are or how and why they do what theey do. The audience is merely expected to accept them at face value and go with that. Eventually you do get some explanation but the whole story is never fullly-revealed (as so often happens in real life).
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Describing the plot is difficut so I will just give you the barest bones. Cobb (almost every character in the movie only gets one name) is an "Extractor"--an espionage agent who enters people's dreams to steal their secrets for profit--and that's all I can easily explain. (If you want to know more go see the movie.) ANYway--Leonardo DiCaprio--plays Cobb as a one-note character as does the rest of the cast. True, they all play their one not well but together it's not a tune I found particularly enjoyable. Worse, I found it hard to work up a lot of sympathy for any of the characters so I had nobody to root for.
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The movie is beautifully shot: virtually every scene is shot through a gray, sepia or blue filter to give it just that extra bit of moody atmospherics. The dream sequences whey they veer away from reality are suitably spectacular and the FX are first rate. (To quote KTLA Entertainment Reporter Sam Rubin: "you see every dollar on the screen"--and you really do.) The visual style is almost enough to make it worth the price of admission (to a Matinee at least).
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For me though, it takes more than a spectacular visuals to make a movie truly good. I've already spoken about the characters so I guess I need to talk a bit about the script. I can accept not knowing an entire character's story but knowing NO character's story is a bit hard to swallow. Likewise, the endless twist-on-a-twist-on-a-twist theme to the plot got tiresome after a while. I quit caring about an hour-and-a-half in and just waited for the movie to be over.
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I can honestly say I'm glad I saw Inception--even though I can't say I truly enjoyed it--and I definitely don't feel the need to go back and see it again (even though I might get more out of it in a second viewing). It deserves to be seen on a big screen so all the depth and detail can be fully realized. Can I recommend it? That I don't know: the theater where we saw the movie was crowded and fans walking out seemed equally divided between "wow, what a great movie" and "geez--what a piece of crap!" I guess I fall somewhere between the two extremes. Go see Inception for yourself and tell me how you like it.
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FINAL GRADE: B-
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