My long, spoiler-filled defense of my grade for Inception.
Posted by
Dano (aka dano)
Jul 18 '10, 20:48
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To me it comes down to what the movie is about and whether it succeeds at that. Distilled to its most basic, Inception is a movie about a man looking for redemption from the guilt he feels for inadvertently causing the death of his wife and then abandoning his children. Everything else about the movie is in service of that central theme, so if that theme doesn't work then everything else is just window dressing and no matter how pretty it is, it can not compensate for problems in the foundation.
It all comes down to whether you are invested in Cobb's redemption. If you are then I think the movie will work like gangbusters for you, but I could find nothing about Cobb or his plight to empathize with and therefore whether he ultimately accomplishes his goal meant nothing to me. In the moment it was just a plain subjective feeling that I didn't identify with Cobb, but giving it some thought I can pinpoint some specific reasons in retrospect why I didn't care about him. The main issue is that every one of his emotional beats is explained to us in literal detail through expositional dialogue. I saw no evidence that he loved his wife or children or that he felt guilt other than he explicitly told us. In general I think the movie is so worried about executing its complex plot that it forgets completely about emotion or character. It's a problem that exists for the main character and is only amplified in the supporting characters.
While I don't think the character of Cobb is developed successfully at all, I at least can imagine someone identifying with him by projecting their own experiences onto him. I can not imagine anyone caring about any other character in the film. We know nothing about them. Remember that 70 minute Phantom Menace review where they ask you to describe characters not by what they do? I don't think you can do that with any character in Inception. Why are they even involved in the first place? Is it just money? Would you feel any sense of loss if any of those characters died? This is a big problem because it eliminates any sense of tension when the characters get into jeopardy.
Finally, I do believe the fact that it is a big budget Hollywood blockbuster does feed into some of the problems with Inception. After The Dark Knight, I am sure that Nolan had a lot of freedom and that's why the studio was willing to take the risk on spending so much money on a complexly plotted film. Whether it was Nolan's decision or the studio's, it felt like the film was given carte blanche in complexity but the line was drawn at vagueness. Everything had to be completely spelled out, which led to a lot of boring and clunky exposition. I appreciate the economic reality of it, but it makes the movie worse. Comparisons to Primer are apt, and I prefer Primer not because it is a low budget indie, but I do think that the freedom afforded Primer by being a low budget indie contributes to its being a better movie. There's no way that even Christopher Nolan would have been allowed to spend that much money on a movie that vague and ambiguous, and so the only ambiguity at all is left to an "is it real or not" ending.
I am willing to admit that I probably graded it somewhat on the hype curve and would be willing to raise the grade to a B-. He certainly has a technical mastery (again, the editing in particular is an amazing feat) and the plotting (while you might find a small hole here or there) is complex and tight, but the movie fails on the character level and most importantly at its very core essence. That's too important a failure to give it a rave.
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