This is full of spoilers, but I''m not going to black it out bcause it would hurt reading the whole thing inverted. So, if you haven't seen the movie yet, I urge you not to read this review.
I went and saw Inception today, and it was nice. The plot was good, and the pacing was great...until they started the actual "inception" part. From there, logic went out the window and the movie got too caught up in the spectacle of dreams and dreams-within-dreams-within dreams. It was all too drawn out; the scenes were interesting, but they just kept going to the point where all tension was lost. I know the falling car was slowed down to show that time was slower in a dream, but it just felt like the van would never hit the water, so why worry? Once Fisher got to his father and the idea was planted in his head, there was no big climax; it just happened, and life went on. Because of the twist ending, we never saw how the inception worked, or even if anything happened. The movie's called Inception, the buildup is centered around the inception,
so I want to see the inception, dagnabbit. Also, I would have liked to see the gravitaional changes affect the other dreamscapes.
Even the twist clifhanger wasn't very effective. Good twists are like those in, say, a Twilight Zone episode. The story is wrapped up neatly, but not in the way the audience expected. Clifhangers, too, need to be explained to work. In the movie Army of Darkness, for example,
In this, it seemed like they just ran out of film. Nothing was explained. I know that I'm in a distinct minority here, but I felt like it just made the entire movie pointless: If it was all a dream, leave subtle clues to indicate that before the last ten minutes. If it wasn't a dream, don't bother with the top.
The acting was suberp from everyone involved. If you told me when Titanic came out that in the future, Leonardo DiCaprio would be amazing in psychologically driven action movies, I would never have belived you. Ellen Page (who I love, despite not being a huge fan of her past movies as wholes) once again steals the show. I liked how she had fun and played around when she realized that she could edit the dream world, but when she had to get down to business, she did. Everyone else was good, but didn't stand out amoung the overall cast.
The effects were mindblowing; It all looked real! The sets were great, too. I'd love to stay in that hotel from the second level of the inception, and a movie needs to be made in that Japanese building. And that cafe that Leo and Ellen Page went to...did it make anyone think of another cafe on a corner with a red awning? One with a mysterious name change, perhaps?