Review of Inception (2010) by Andy M — 16 Jul 2014

Inception tries very hard to be ground-breaking but surprisingly I would call it below average. Inception fails in achieving everything that Nolan usually does brilliantly. Inception is one of Nolan's weakest screenplays.

The people who think that Inception is a very clever and smart film are the one's who are being fooled by Nolan. The entire Act 1 was dragged and stretched and was all about about establishing rules most of which seemed to broken towards the end.

In fact the rules just started to become random towards the end. The character development was very very poor. They're wooden, heartless and almost seem as though they exist as mere subjects of experimentation.

The only 2 characters portrayed well were Cobb and Mal. The entire idea of "The Kick" doesn't make much sense. They started off saying that it was the effect of Gravity, the sense of falling that wakes you up.

But then how is it that no one woke up when the Van was rotating and fell to a lower ground? How is it that no one woke up during the period when the Van was falling from the bridge? Why did the kick, kick in only when the Van touched the water? The introduction of Limbo is completely pointless.

So if you're highly sedated, and you kill yourself in a dream, you wake up in Limbo, but if you kill yourself in Limbo you wake up? Why didn't they just think of doing that when Saito was shot.

(And for some reason Saito had men working for him in Limbo as well.) The entire plot of taking over Fischer's company seems a bit too McGuffin-y. Inception took all it's ideas from an animated film called Paprika and unlike Inception, Paprika treated it's characters as humans rather than machines.

This has always been Nolan's problem. The characters (in Inception, The Prestige, Insomnia and even Memento to an extent ) are so emotionless that you don't even care about most of them. That's what he got right in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

You don't feel emotionally detached in them. There's always a risk that these types of films may outsmart themselves, I'm not sure if that's what happened with Inception but of the back of a couple of extraordinary films, one would expect better.