Inception

Inception (2010)

Runtime: 148 minutes

Directed by: My “favorite” director

Starring: An all-star cast... who I wish could have been in an actual good movie

From: Warner Brothers

Monday night I saw both Predator and Predator 2 on Blu-ray; Predator is still awesome and Predator 2 is still pretty good. Both are better than this, which I only saw for the first time last night. I don't want to have major problems with all of Nolan's films I've seen, but it's true. I explain why I did not love this below:

NOTE 1: I know that most people here love Nolan to death so what I'll say in this review won't be popular with a lot of people. I do have to be honest here, though.

NOTE 2: I don't want this to be as long as my review for Interstellar (which has to be by quite a bit the lengthiest one I've ever done here) so I'll be more brief than I want to be.

One reason I saw this movie so I could say a few words about Christopher Nolan in general. I realize this won't be a popular opinion here but I am baffled as to why most people think he's a great director; I wouldn't even call him good. Admittedly I have not seen all of his movies by any means but what I've seen... “The emperor with no clothes” may be the appropriate phrase.

To be clear, early in 2013 when I first joined the site I rated the Nolan Batman movies based on seeing them back to back to back on the big screen in a ridiculous night where I was in the cinema for a little more than 9 hours and did not get home until almost 4 AM. Batman Begins was a 2 star movie and in hindsight, that's also what I should have given The Dark Knight Rises due to all the story issues and how overlong it was. I'll likely always rate The Dark Knight highly but that is mainly due to the first two times I saw it and I basked in the legendary performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker; if it wasn't for him I imagine I would hate the movie for its nonsensical plot it has and how The Joker's schemes are the definition of “illogic” as they require like 20 things to go a certain way each time for them to work and of course they do... I'll review them again in the future so I can go more in depth on the problems I have with each one. I can quickly say a general problem with him is how too much of his dialogue is EPIC PROCLAMATION after EPIC PROCLAMATION rather than anything sounding natural, and unnatural dialogue always bugged me.

In the past, I said that all three Batman movies “have badly filmed action scenes, more plot holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese and a lot of illogical moments”; I stand by that. I also stand by him not getting called out for making the sorts of mistakes that “lesser” filmmakers make, for Lord knows what reason. Interstellar, I wrote an admittedly Nolan-esque review for it at the time-meaning, “too lengthy”-but basically, the story left me cold; it's a shame as on paper it sounds like something I should have dug, and it was supposed to be a heartwarming sort of tale. The rest of his filmography I never bothered with as I was worried I'd also find those to be massively overrated.

But onto me talking about THIS movie and why I don't love it like most people do. I presume most reading this have seen it already so I feel safe in making the assumption I don't need to go over the basic plot. Before Tuesday night, I only knew that it was about going into dreams to steal information and the ending is famously ambiguous. I'll leave it at that. My impression of this movie... what overly convoluted malarkey that has the typical Nolan hallmarks of unnatural dialogue & stories that not only are filled with giant plotholes, but are littered with contrivances. The one example that I'll mention from this movie: Ken Watanabe magically being able to purchase an airline immediately as it's an important part of the plot... in many ways that is just stupid and that makes no sense in the real world, the film world, a dream world, this film's dream world...

There are plenty of other things that make no sense, and that's not because of the story trying to be “complex”; rather, it's the story conveniently explaining and not explaining certain things-even with some things not being elaborated upon, the movie is still chock-full of exposition-like how only Tom Hardy can do those things in dreamland or hell, basic things like how exactly Watanabe can magically fix DiCaprio's serious problems in the United States... and come to think of it, why did Michael Caine implicitly help Leo after saying all those things in the lecture hall? Once you learn what happened... I'm befuddled. Considering those fundamental issues, such things as Hans Zimmer's score being mostly forgettable doesn't seem as important, you know.

Then again, as I've mentioned in previous reviews I am not a fan of modern Hollywood in general; besides the whole “remake/reboot” thing polluting things and things being too homogenized-looking at the box office this year, I wonder if the general public has finally gotten tired of the feces that's been fed them-there's also the lack of logic/common sense that has polluted the scene and a lot of people get a pass for it, especially Nolan.

I imagine I could go on for paragraph after paragraph and really break things down and go into spoilers concerning all the problems I had with this film; but, I'd better stop now and instead I'll mention that only after watching the movie did I see a popular review from popular Letterboxd member DirkH and not only does that share the same low rating as this, but a lot of the points he brought up I strongly agree with, and he probably said it better than I could. Heavens knows that I did not go into this movie hoping to dislike a big-budget movie with an original idea and a great cast, despite my previous issues with the director. Alas, considering all things I mentioned beforehand and the critical issue of not liking any of the characters nor being given a reason why I SHOULD care about any of those weirdos, this motion picture did not weave its magic for me like it has for most people, and I think I'll always be baffled by Nolan's work. Maybe there's a film he's done before that works for me... maybe.