I really, really, really, really, really don’t like going to a movie mentally prepared to wedge myself against or behind conventional wisdom about that movie. I like writing about movies with that sort of thing in mind even less. But for once, in seeing Christopher Nolan’s much-lauded, much-backlashed Inception a couple months after it first came to dominate the pop-culture conversation, all that business had me in the perfect place as a viewer. I knew a lot of people loved it. I knew a lot of people, especially people whose taste I trusted, thought the emperor was, if not naked, then at least in his PJs. I knew I have a tendency to disagree with the people I trust. I knew I have a tendency to like Christopher Nolan movies even less than they do. And so I went in with not high expectations, not low expectations, not no expectations, but simply expectations. I expected it to be a fun time at the movies. And that’s what it was.
One thing I enjoyed to a degree that surprised me even in the moment was the young, or at least young-looking, cast. Starring as Dom Cobb, an expert dream-thief pulling One Last Job so that he can buy himself back into a life he was forced to leave behind for reasons to do with the death of his wife, Leonardo DiCaprio brings that same aging-babyface sourness he brings to all the parts he plays in this stage of his career. He looks like someone who’s aged more in mind than in body and the pieces just don’t fit together; his physicality has the rage and regret of someone who’s still living in his parents’ basement during his ten-year college reunion. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page look like they’re in grad school and college respectively; Tom Hardy looks like he just got back into town after blowing his trust fund. Put it all together and you’ve got a core group of stars who look, perhaps, like you looked when you first realized you were good at a certain thing, learned to respect yourself for it, and learned to expect respect from others for it. It’s a much more exciting set of casting choices than the umpteenth “band of grizzled operatives gets together for one last score” flick of the year.
I also dug the confidence with which Nolan draws us into the world he’s created–echoed, perhaps, by the mechanics of Extraction and Inception themselves, in which operatives create a dream world then basically knock their targets in and out of it with them. The technological advances that allow for this are cursorily addressed, mostly I’d imagine to head off questions from the sorts of viewers who would demand those answers, but for the most part you’re just rolling with it like this was the un-whimsical version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. True, the worlds these dreams create are surprisingly straightforward, maybe even disappointingly so–most of that cool-looking zero-gravity stuff you see in the commercials really is just run-of-the-mill bodies in free fall, and aside from some perfunctory M.C. Escher staircases there’s very little reality-warping of the sort you saw in the movie’s print and billboard ads. But while they don’t look wild, or particularly dreamlike, they do look nice, like cool places to chase and be chased. The worlds constructed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Arthur in particular come across like the Gordon Willis World Theme Park. And all of them make a fine, sumptuous home for Hans Zimmer’s subconscious hum of a score–it’s leagues beyond the almost aggressively forgettable stuff (the Joker’s cues excepted) he turned in for Nolan’s two Batman movies. (Batman movies without theme music! I still can’t get over it!)
And pacing-wise, Inception is crackerjack stuff. Nolan constructs a scenario that at one point had no fewer than five simultaneous countdowns built into it, each level of which had a crystal-clear entry and exit point for viewer and character alike. After seeing the mushy, nonsensical Expendables or the hero’s-journey-by-numbers Clash of the Titans remake, I can’t tell you what a relief it was simply to see an action-movie blockbuster where the directors and the characters clearly knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, let alone where all did it with such aplomb. (Iron Man 2 doesn’t count–it was basically banter interrupted with the occasional armor fight.)
Problems, you ask? Oh, for sure. It’s a damn good thing the structure was so propulsive, because Nolan again shows himself to be perhaps the least skilled director of action to have somehow forged a career making action movies. Chases through city streets–on foot in Mombasa, by car in Los Angeles–are flabbily edited, blurry, context-free messes, everything that everyone complained about, wrongly, in the rigorously, gloriously shot and choreographed Bourne action sequences. Later sequences involving sniper rifles and sneak-and-shoot maneuvers are stronger, mostly because quickly becomes clear that in terms of staging Nolan is relying almost entirely on the viewer’s sense-memories of first-person shooters. The film’s biggest setpiece, the storming of a snowbound fortress, feels so much like a level from GoldenEye or Call of Duty that I found myself imagining what buttons I would have had to press for each character to do what they were doing. (Sidenote: As best I can tell, the entire snow sequence tell was mercifully and wisely left out of any trailers or commercials; it was nice for it to come as a surprise all these weeks later.)
What’s funny is that the film also contains a…well, not a knockout, it didn’t light my world on fire like (say) the Darth Maul duel in Phantom Menace or the subway fight in The Matrix did, but the zero-gravity fight between Gordon-Levitt and various subconscious-security goons in the hotel hallway was quite strong. It’s the one action sequence in the film, if not Nolan’s entire career, where he just let the camera record the movement of bodies through space and the physical consequences of their actions without all the shake’n’bake smash’n’grab slice’n’dice. Clearly he knew he had something special here, and thus got out of the way of it; why didn’t he realize how much stronger that made it, and apply that technique to everything else?
Nolan’s also an enormously dour and sexless filmmaker. I laughed a grand total of twice during the entire film, which let’s be clear is not some exploration of soul-crushing sadness, it’s a sci-fi heist picture–once at the kiss Gordon-Levitt’s character steals from Ellen Page’s, and once because I thought, and thanks to the way Nolan shoots action I’m still not sure, the Chemist was flipping his pursuers the bird as his van plummeted off the bridge. The movie feels like one of the very classy brown suits the characters favor, rich and stiff. And forget feeling any kind of sexual chemistry between any of the characters (beyond my own budding crush on Tom Hardy, perhaps)–Nolan’s films are David Lynch for squares.
It’s also surprisingly emotionally flat. Over and over we are told how dangerously attached Cobb is to his memories of Marillon Cotillard’s incomprehensibly named character (Maude? Moll? Mauve? Maume?), but their final confrontation is simply a repetition, in some cases a literal one, of their previous scenes together–including one endless recitation of their history by DiCaprio to Page that grinds the film to a fault halfway through. Only Cobb’s believably blasphemous reaction to his wife’s suicide cuts through the fog of stylized regret that hangs over this supposedly pivotal relationship. Particularly compared to the relationships that formed the core of two films to which Inception is frequently compared, Lynch’s Mullholland Drive and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, the Cobb/Mal (I looked it up) amour fou wants for intimacy, heat, and in the end, genuine, frightening grief and loss. Other than DiCaprio’s cry for his suicided wife, the only emotional beat I really bought, ironically enough, was Cillian Murphy’s wide-eyed, wordless reaction to his fake father’s fake last words.
And then there are the usual Nolanisms: gaping plot holes (Fisher, who we learn has been trained to guard against Extraction and thus surely must be on the lookout for suspicious stuff, didn’t notice that his company’s chief competitor was flying in the same first-class cabin he’d be napping in for hours at a time on the way to his magnate father’s funeral?), hugely predictable “revelations” (the second Cobb told Saito he’d done Inception before, I knew whom he’d done it to), softball-hanging-over-the-plate “thought-provoking” stuff (wAs It aLL a DrEaM???). And of course it’s another movie about angry men in suits that only passes the Bechdel Test if you’re grading on a serious curve.
But it’s also stylish, fun, pretty to look at, crisply plotted, generally exciting. The entirety of the film gives you less to think about than the Winkie’s dream sequence in Mulholland Drive alone, but whaddayagonnado? I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do: I’m going to be happy to have enjoyed myself and call it a night. One of the great things about being a grown-up is that you don’t need Inception to decide to approach a given work of art precisely the way you want.
–just one more delight to be found in this treasure of a book.
right now, with each of the individual volumes going for either $3.99 or $4.49. 
