While many critics are raving about Inception, I’ve never heard so many expressions like “What in the BLEEP was that about?” upon leaving the theater after seeing the film. And, although I don’t believe moviegoers are unintelligent, I can’t help comparing this movie’s transitions to someone reading the Cliff Notes of a Shakespeare play to a pre-school class. Inception becomes its own nightmare by trying to be “too smart.”
Leonardo DiCaprio
If written down in outline form, the plot of this futuristic story is somewhat simple. A group of expert thieves offer their services of dream manipulation to corporations who desire illegal espionage in order to get ahead. And what looks like mayhem and dead bodies across the globe is okay because it’s only in someone’s dream – or is it? You have two and a half hours to figure this out while watching Inception, and I say good luck with that.
Marion Cotillard & Leonardo DiCaprio
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is so good at this game he’s an international fugitive. Apparently not only can Cobb get into someone’s subconscious to steal a dream or “extract information” as they refer to it – but he can also implant a dream or information which makes him very desirable in the black market underground.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Leonardo DiCaprio
At the heart of Cobb’s “I’ll do anything for the job” lies a desire to get done with it all and go back home to clear his name for supposedly killing his beloved wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). This entire subplot is so tedious to follow I didn’t care what happens after sitting through the first hour. The rest of the film deals with Cobb’s team – Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Ken Watanabe (Saito) and Tom Hardy (Eames) – hooked up to a machine while transferring dreams. Numerous cuts back and forth of buildings being blown up around the world are shown as well as people lying flat all over rooms, supposedly in dream states, while Cobb’s team floats around crawling up and down walls and ceilings.
Ellen Page & Leonardo DiCaprio
DiCaprio is a great actor, so it’s not hard to watch him even if you have no clue what’s he’s doing. The rest of the cast members come across like cardboard. Even the usually ominous Cillian Murphy, who becomes the next target, lacks his usual intensity. Page and Cotillard, both respected for their abilities, have such poor dialogue with little emphasis on their characters that they blend in with the wallpaper.
Ken Watanabe & Marion Cotillard
One of the dialogue lines in the movie, “Whose dream is it this time?” was met with resounding laughter at the screening I attended, as if many in the audience were thinking the same thing.
I’ve read that writer-director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) spent 10 years working on this story; so maybe that’s the problem with this overblown movie. While listening to an interview with DiCaprio, many of his remarks reflected some of my own thoughts. Some of his comments included: “We run around in someone’s head,” (viewers only have to figure out if it’s in the first, second, third or fourth stage of human subconscious, all which have different affects to the real world); “it makes you think” (until you realize you can’t rationalize this hair brain plot); “it’s really challenging” (you think?) and when asked to clarify one particular plot point in the film, DiCaprio answered, “I’m not sure; you have to figure it out.”
Other than being impressed by some of the CG affects, and that background music included that of Edith Piaf, which Cotillard played in La Vie En Rose, I figured out rather quickly that watching Inception gave me a headache
Photo credits: Warner Bros. Pictures / Stephen Vaughan / Melissa Moseley/
