It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).
Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.
As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.
> In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
It's true that the rules are changed, but they're changed almost immediately; we have one encounter in a dream where we see that being killed means that you wake up, and this understanding is then taken away from us during the next dream (not counting the various tutorials). One may question the utility of a rule that is given only to be immediately taken away, but I believe that the point here was to make us feel the shock of the unexpected danger in which the characters found themselves—we are supposed to be shaken out of our complacency just as they are.
The second point seems truly bizarre. I think it's fair to say that a large chunk of the ‘meaning’ of the movie is that we are left to wonder at the end whether we have reached a ‘real-life’ ending, or are still watching someone's dreams. The fact that everyone seems fine, despite the severe dangers that were advertised, is, from this point of view, not lazy story-telling but a way of making us uncomfortable with the easy answer of taking the ending literally.
It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).
Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.
As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.