Inception (2010) Review

Maybe I should have tried to go in without expectations because that's fair but I couldn't help it.  I don't see the greatness of this movie.  I don't even see the goodness of it. It's an extremely dim-witted movie that tries to disguise itself as intellectual profundity. As Forrest Gump said, "Stupid is as stupid does".
Dom Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) is able to use his unique skills to his advantage - he can enter people's minds through their dreams and thereby learn their secrets. He is a thief for hire but Japanese businessman Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) has a somewhat different proposition for him. He wants Cobb to enter the mind of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), who is about to inherit his father's massive business empire, to plant a simple notion: to break-up his father's conglomerate and sell it off. In return, Saito will make it possible for Cobb to freely return to the US where he is currently wanted by the police. Cobb accepts and assembles his team (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Brady etc.) with a plan to plant the idea deep in Fisher's mind by generating a series of dreams within dreams so that he eventually thinks he came up with the idea himself. As the intended deception grows ever more complex so does Cobb's own feelings of guilt which projects itself in all the dreams he is involved in.

The first hour of the movie is the slowest where director Christopher Nolan seems to have spent all his energy on loud noises and visual overloads (all of which you can see in the trailer) rather than getting the audience to care about the characters or the predicament which is to follow.  At the film's climax I didn't care whether anyone made it out of the dreams (aka levels) or not.  At a certain point Ellen Page's character (I don't even remember the character's name and am far too lazy to look it up) is trying to convince Dicaprio to not go after Watanabe who is stuck in limbo (That's where you go when you die in a "level" that low) and I found it difficult to believe that all of a sudden she is caring or motherly towards someone she sort of maybe knows.

One thing really, really, really bothered me the entire film and that was the laziness of Hans Zimmer in his scoring of the movie.  It's as if he took music rejected for "The Dark Knight" and placed it in "Inception".

Nolan, if you were trying to make an intelligent pile of drek, you only partially succeeded.

★1/2