This was one of those movies that I went to with extremely high expectations, only to have them exceeded.

"Intentionally or not, watching INCEPTION is similar to dreaming..."
You really have to wonder if it's intentional???! (good review tho)
Upon leaving the theater, I overheard "..nya I dunno, maybe if they'd had split screens while GordonLevitt was in one level while the rest were..." REALLY?!?! This film is a test for audiences. If you aren't engaged, interested, or fascinated, you fail the test and you're likely a moron. If you don't realize that this is AS GOOD as Hollywood movies are going to get for quite a while, take a cue from the film and put a gun to your head. Maybe you'll wake up or maybe you'll rid the world of one more cretin fuelling the market for sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations of cartoons and 80s television.

Good god, that's an idiotic statement. I "understood" the film, but don't really have any love for films that take two contrived hours to say very little. So now I'm a cretin that only enjoys "sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots" etc., etc. ad nauseum? It's a "good" film. "Good" people like this film. If it doesn't float your boat, you're not "good". Yeah, sounds like I'm the cretin, although this reaction is probably what we should expect from people who were weaned on Donnie Darko.

That's the problem with this town. It's chock full of douches who think they know it all, don't really know much, and don't know when to be civil.

We should recognize gimmicks when they see them by now, shouldn't we? The aforementioned sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations traffic in them constantly.

I agree that the CGI was its weak spot, and some of the dialogue between Cobb & Ariadne was pretty stilted - I'll even say that Leo DiCaprio derails his own movies and maybe shouldn't have been cast, but declaring the film a failure or a gimmick?

Considering Nolan's immediate influences were some of the "dumbest," or at least the widest-appealing, Hollywood properties (Bond, the Matrix, etc.), I thought his was a damn smart film. And as engaging as they come! I swear, in the last few seconds, I was holding my breath.

I keep wondering when people, other than critics in New York, or going to notice that Christopher Nolan is a terrible director. I also keep wondering how and why I end up getting dragged in to seeing every one of his adolescent boy fantasy pictures.

Inception is awful even by Nolan's dismal standards. If you pay attention to film language, you already know how its done: imaginative set pieces wasted on unimaginative shooting (an incoherent barrage of mid-range close up shots), editing that seems to have been accomplished by a toddler who had Skittles and Coke for breakfast, and dimly-lit scenes where the seemingly endless line of plot devices are obscured. I don't begrudge any director using a MacGuffin now and then, but I'd like to be able to see it in the midst of whatever dramatic action scene its being tossed around in. And did I mention Zimmer's blaring, trombone-saturated film score playing the entire time? Do you not know what you're supposed to feel during certain scenes? Don't fret. The score will tell you everything. Hint: Every scene is suspenseful. Its a white knuckle ride, according to Zimmer's exhausted horn section.

By the way, news flash: Christopher Nolan cannot direct actions scenes. He can't do it. Cannot. Do. It. Remember that 20 minute, nonsensical truck chase sequence in the last Batman? The bad news is he isn't getting better. He's actually gotten worse.

The point is moot since, evidently, Nolan has absolute contempt for the cinematic medium. Lost in what seems like hours of tedious expository dialogue in Inception is, uh, the film. Nolan seems completely bored pasting enormous blocks of his rambling script over his jarring, ADD edited film. I would kill to see this script's storyboard -- if it has one. Because no time or effort, as usual for Nolan, has been put into conveying the script in cinematic terms.

And what of the script? Its strictly for the birds. Excuse me, I mean strictly for the boys. 12 year old boys. I really don't mind a glorified Twilight Zone yarn. Really. I suffered through 6 seasons of Lost. I would truly be fine with watching a movie built entirely around a good ol' "it was all just a dream..." cliché. But my dreams aren't nearly as tedious, and they're usually better realized than that. My dreams also don't include armies of faceless G.I. Joes armed to the teeth with machine guns, grenades, bazookas, & a multitude of other Hasbroesque vehicles and accessories. And showing a spinning hallway gun fight with invisible strings, or a van falling into a river in bullet time (over and over...) really doesn't alleviate my boredom in a film where every reel is 90% full of obnoxious chase scenes and fight sequences.

There's a love story somewhere in there. In fact, if you pared away all of the mind-numbing exposition, gunplay and corporate intrigue, you may have a nice Solaris-style story about memory, love and loss. But this film is too conventional, cold, mechanical, and impersonal to invest in its characters. Scenes of Cobb's supposedly haunted past reveal details of his family life that are as dimensional as a Sear's catalogue. Plot fodder worthy, at most, of daytime television. Nolan doesn't really take much on an interest in people; his preoccupations are found elsewhere, presumably in the pseudo-scientific prattling about dreams crunched in-between bursting rounds of gun fire and action film one-liners ("Sometimes you have to dream bigger," says one character, as he summons a dream missile launcher. COOL!)

Did I mention that the good guys are representing one mega-corporation attempting to steal from another? No wonder Nolan can't be bothered with character development. How are earth are you supposed to care about the success of such a mission, or the well-being of such awful people? Heist movies are about the down-and-outs, the subversive elements getting their short-lived revenge on capitalism. Rififi, Asphalt Jungle, Le Cercle Rouge, Dog Day Afternoon... these are heist films. This is just capitalist masturbation.

I won't go on any longer. I'll just say that you'd be better of subscribing to Scrooge McDuck (http://comicbookmovie.com/fansites/blinkul…) rather than witnessing the subpar film treatment.

http://himay.org/blog/2010/08/17/5-reasons…