You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
All right. So. I did go into Inception with high expectations. How could I not? I talked in my review of The Dark Knight about just how astonishing that eight-year/five-movie run that culminates in The Dark Knight is. I was as high on Nolan as I could be, I think, and this premise sounded fascinating. So, did my high expectations color my reaction to the film? Did I find it disappointing because of my sky high expectations? Look, I honestly don’t think so. Because I think I’ve now seen this movie three times and my most positive reaction to it was that first viewing. I went into this most recent rewatch, the one I did specifically as part of this project, expecting to have a pretty lukewarm reaction, but I was interested to see it again. I was surprised, really, to have a more negative reaction than I was expecting and in collecting my thoughts for this review, I’ve gotten even more negative on the film. Nolan has always been interested in crafting films that the audience will continue to think about after the movie is over; and he’s done it with Inception, just as he did with Memento and The Prestige and The Dark Knight, but in contrast to those movies, Inception is a movie that I find myself liking less and less the more I think about it.
I know a lot of people truly love this movie and I just want to say, I don’t mind if you bounce on this review. As I’ve gotten older, I enjoy tearing down something that I know someone loves less and less. If you love Inception, I’m happy for you. I don’t. I don’t want to convince you to hate it though. There’s no fun in that. There’s fun in tearing apart a movie that everyone agrees sucks and fun in defending a movie a lot of people don’t like and fun in dissecting a movie that’s interesting. But I wouldn’t take away your enjoyment of a movie. I don’t want to do that. So, if you love Inception, feel free to skip this review. Catch up to me again with The Dark Knight R . . . oh, um, well, maybe not.
But let’s load my opening tactic from The Dark Knight review into an eighteen wheeler and flip that sucker. There I opened with the minor things I didn’t love about the movie; here, let’s start with the few things I do like about Inception. Though even that comes with some backhanded praise because I can’t, for example, talk about the performances I like without first talking about the way the characters are underwritten. To some degree this is intentional, but it doesn’t entirely work for me. Essentially every character here is underwritten except for Dom and Robert Fischer. But Nolan’s got a gifted ensemble and so I do have to shout out the actors who really do make the most out of their fairly flat characters: Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dileep Rao and Ken Watanabe all bring their natural charisma, which is substantial, and a lot of energy and wit and even some warmth to the film purely by their presence, even though their characters are very bland. And I do think Fischer is written well and, aided by Cillian Murphy’s excellent performance, which is emotional but understated, he’s really the one character I care about in this movie. And I do have to give Nolan some credit for investing time and energy into that character; he’s essentially just the “victim” here, so it would have been easy to make him more of a villain or at least a mysterious character.
The film also has some striking visuals. The hallway fight really does hold up as a great, creative action set-piece and, since it’s Nolan, it was done practically with a rotating set and includes no CGI which makes it even cooler. The hotel sequence is, overall, the best bit of the movie, I think. Yes, they did really build an entire hotel bar on a huge gimbal rig that allowed it to be tilted slightly in various directions. Even in a movie about dream imagery, Nolan is still married to his mostly practical school of movie making; it’s kind of mind blowing that this movie has fewer visual effects shots than Batman Begins. Though I think that will lead us into some of my criticisms. Because as much as I admire that approach, I think it does hamstring Nolan a bit in this film. I mean, the dreams we see here are, by and large, really tame in terms of, you know, just my normal experience of dreams. I wish the movie had gone bigger and wilder and weirder with its imagery and its set-pieces. I find that third level particularly disappointing; it’s sincerely just Nolan doing the climax of a Bond movie and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with a ski chase or a mountain lair blowing up, there’s also nothing at all new or interesting or dreamlike about it. There’s a chance here to really unfetter the movie from reality and so I think that at least some of the reason I find that last thirty to forty minutes to dull is simply a failure of imagination on Nolan’s part. Limbo, frankly, is even more boring than the snowy mountain lair.
Let’s swing back to the performances since I’ve already gone on record with the ones I like. A lot of this does go back to the script as well. I’m not a fan of Elliot Page’s performance here, but, honestly, I think the character is just pretty poorly written. I think this movie is pretty evenly divided on the character front: you’ve got your underwritten characters and your badly written characters with, in my opinion, only Robert Fischer kind of getting right in that sweet spot of being well-handled. If Page is struggling, and he is, Marion Cotillard and Leonardo DiCaprio are just downright bad. I don’t really blame Cotillard at all; she’s typically an excellent performer and Mal is a character both poorly conceived and poorly executed on a writing level. I have a friend who is more of a fan of this movie than I am, but we’re both pretty down on Mal and occasionally one or the other of us will just, apropos of nothing, say, in a breathy and quavering voice, “You’re waiting on a train.” I don’t know why I find that speech as hilariously cringey as I do or, well, yeah, I guess I do: it’s not well-written and Cotillard is awful at delivering it. There’s also a moment where Mal is introduced with one of the most hilariously out-of-place musical stings of all time. I don’t know; it feels weird to call some elements of this movie incompetent because competence is absolutely a key word when talking about Nolan’s prior films. But what else is that? A cheesy musical sting when a woman turns around from her chair? That’s ******* ludicrous in 2010.
Speaking of that musical sting, let me take a quick detour. I’m not that high on this score from Zimmer. I know a lot of people really love it, but the blu-ray actually had a section of just music that was about forty-five minutes long. It wasn’t an isolated score track; it was just a separate item on the menu where you could play the tracks individually. And it’s . . . okay. I think it is worth saying that it isn’t the culprit in terms of the big brass BWAMS that everyone is always blaming it for; those are in the trailers which feature a different piece of music, one not created for the film.
Back to the performances, there’s DiCaprio who maybe had a shot at coming out okay in this movie; his character is not awful. But I think Inception is a movie where Nolan is trying to take onboard some of the criticism about his films being emotionally cold or maybe DiCaprio is the one pushing him in that direction with the performance. Anyway, wherever the blame lies, it lies; the important thing is just recognizing how godawful DiCaprio really is here. It’s a performance somewhere on the wrong side of melodrama and, while I usually find DiCaprio compelling in dramatic performances, this one just doesn’t work. It goes from pathos to bathos by about the thirty minute mark and it just keeps floundering.
Okay, last thing and then I will start wrapping up. I talked about the script having a failure of imagination; I talked about the script containing really bad character work. Can we talk . . . can we talk for a second about the double-damned exposition in this movie? Every time you turn around in this movie, someone is asking a very pointed question and someone else is giving a very flat answer. I get it; there’s a lot of unpacking here. But it’s done in such a repetitious way that it becomes really obvious really quickly and then it just sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s still happening when they’re in the LEVEL THREE dream. WHILE THEY’RE HAVING A GUNFIGHT! “Wait, are you killing little pieces of his brain?” “No, no, they’re projections; the underlying tissue is taking no da-“ WE ARE TWO HOURS INTO THIS MOVIE AND YOU’RE STILL TRYING TO EXPLAIN THE MECHANICS OF THE WORLD TO ME. It’s kind of impossible for me to get mad at Tenet for being incomprehensible because, you know, I’d rather not understand parts of a movie than get exposition this terrible. And I’m just gonna say it: this movie does not follow its own rules. I mean, a movie does not have to follow real world rules. But if a movie is going to make its own rules, it should follow them. It doesn’t have to be consistent with anything but itself; but it really must be consistent with itself. But, for instance, the way the zero G rolls downhill doesn’t really make sense. When the people in the level 1 dream go into zero G because they go off the bridge, that throws the entire hotel in level 2 into zero G. So, since everyone in level 2 has gone zero G, then, well, obviously nothing changes in level 3? Wait, what? Also, the mechanics of the kick. But this has really gone on long enough. The kick doesn’t make sense. I’ll leave that there.
I started this movie kind of expecting it to be a solid three-star movie: very flawed, but still entertaining for long stretches and visually well-crafted. And, look, something I do like about Nolan is the fact that he still has faith in the blockbuster format as a vehicle for non-pre-existing IPs. So, this movie has to get a little boost from the fact that it’s not a sequel or a remake or a franchise entry; for a blockbuster to even have that amount of actual imagination is worth something. So, I gave Following three-stars and if you’d told me when I was cuing up Inception that I’d end up liking it less than Following, I’d have said you were crazy. I mean, all the blockbuster trappings and all the plot movements and the imagination of Inception up against a no-budget indie film noir? Come on. But, look, if I had a gun to my head right now and I had to watch either Following or Inception, I would take Following over Inception in a hot second. I mean, for one thing, Inception is literally more than twice as long as Following (148 minutes next to Following’s downright emaciated 70 minutes). And, man, Inception really starts to feel every one of those minutes by the time you leave the hotel. Up to that point, it’s pretty entertaining for all its flaws, so it’s not a complete trainwreck (which is a good thing for all those people, you know, waiting on a train), but once you get into the third level of the dream, I just really lose all interest. I’m kind of on the outside on this one among Nolan fans, I think. A lot of people love it; some people even say it’s their favorite or Nolan’s best. I had only honestly forgotten this and it blew my mind when I ran across this fact in my research for this review, but this movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. That is incredibly strange to me. It was probably at least partially penance for not nominating The Dark Knight, but still, how strange. Anyway, every time I gave another Nolan movie four stars, it became less and less likely that the streak would continue. And it has certainly come to a screeching halt now. Inception isn’t quite a nightmare, but the dream is certainly over. 2 stars.
tl;dr – a script that fails on almost every level is boosted by some good performances, but a poor lead performance pretty well seals the deal on this disappointing blockbuster. 2 stars.