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The issue here isn’t spoilers. The issue is one of trust and here you just need to trust Chris Nolan.

The midnight showings of Inception in Burbank were sold out. Why? It’s not a Batman movie. Leonardo DiCaprio can’t open a huge film now, probably never could. The trailer is AT BEST confusing. So why were people packing the theaters?

There’s only one answer. They trust Chris Nolan. He’s earned it, I think we can agree. And for that reason, I entreat you not to read this review until after you’ve seen the film. I try my best below not to give anything away, but sometimes even knowing there’s something to give away gives something away. If you keep reading, then I warn you, you will lose some of the thrill of seeing the movie for the first time. 

Chris Nolan is a smart dude. He’s so smart, he invites you into this world he’s created–where not only can you not be sure what’s real and what’s a dream, if you could be certain it would ruin the movie–and dares you to figure out what’s really going on. And in the end, in the last shot of the film, when you’ve forgotten that you’re watching something HE MADE UP and are waiting for the final reveal, waiting for the reality you now believe in to expose itself to you, to test whether you are right or whether he’s smarter than you, he kicks you right in the nuts. It’s a complete gut-punch.

People will say it’s a movie filled with complex ideas. It’s not that the ideas in Inception are complex. It’s that there are so many of them. And each of these ideas must withstand a high degree of scrutiny. The success of the film is that it all works. It can be disorienting, it can be exhausting. But at the end of the film, twice in rapid succession, the entire audience gasped. Gasped and then SHOUTED. And this, I feel, is only possible if the audience first understand whats’ going on, and then believes in it.

One fantastic thing about the film is the fact that you don’t know what Inception is going into it. The trailers purposefully deceive you, reediting dialog so Inception means getting into someone’s dreams. It does not mean that. That’s not what Inception is. When you find out what Inception is, when you find out that the film is really a Heist movie, but one in which something is given, not stolen, it’s thrilling. I experienced a real shiver as I realized I was experiencing something completely new.

Part of that is the…I can’t say “originality,” entering people’s dreams is not an original idea, but the specific permutation Nolan gives to it, combined with the deliberate deception in the trailers meant that I, in the audience, could be thrilled to discover what the movie was really about. Maybe that’s not as hard as I thought. Maybe it’s easy, as long as you don’t give away your entire movie in the trailer. It’s so rare to go into a movie not knowing what it’s about, maybe we’d be thrilled more often were it so.

Is it real? Nolan knows you’re wondering that the entire time, and furthermore, he knows that he’s taken on a tough subject. If you warn your audience that anything they see on screen might be happening in a dream without the dreamers knowing it, you set yourself a very high bar for suspension of disbelief. Your audience is always going to be questioning everything they see and that makes it hard to gain their trust.

Are there clues? Probably. Hard to imagine that there exist people in the real world named “Ariadne,” much less real people in the real world named Ariadne who are also, in the real world a literal Mistress of the Labyrinth. But I don’t know. Is that a clue? Or just the writers being clever?

The acid test of all this is whether the audience first understands it, and then believes it, and based on my reaction and that of the audience I saw it with, it succeeds. It does require a lot of explanation though.

Holy shit is there a lot of explanation in this movie. Maybe the first two hours is explanation. Something has to give, you can’t spend that much time just getting the audience up to speed without jettisoning something. There’s a lot of action and drama and great character moments, and from the very first shot of the film, the plot is constantly moving forward in spite of all the exposition, but we could have used a little more humanity. That’s the missing element.

There’s some top notch acting in here, but not enough of the human moments. Whenever one character–typically Eames, played with great joy by Tom Hardy–says something natural and human and funny, it’s a huge relief and the audience loves it. But apart from these moments, too few, we get very little humanity. It’s a very dour film, filled with people fretting. Frowning. Fearful. Running, chasing, worrying. Fighting, fleeing, brooding. Could have used a few more laughs, a few more moments of people just being people.

Nolan knows what he’s doing as a filmmaker and so when he sets himself the task of nesting a world, within a world, within a world, he uses locations and camera angles and sound and even weather to make sure we know what’s going on. There are several moments, entire sequences, that only make sense, only have drama, if you understand the Matryoshka nature of the film’s reality. Action sequences cut together brilliantly so that not only does the action gain meaning from the nested nature of reality, it helps explicate that nature and for that, someone deserves an Academy Award. Alas, I’m not sure there is an award for “Most Clever Action Sequence That Relies On A Brilliant Editor.”

Sometimes it moves into parody. Once you’ve cut to the Van for the third or fourth time, the audience starts to laugh. “That’s ok,” the editor said, “once we’ve cut back to it 10 times they’ll stop laughing,” and indeed this is exactly what happened.

I’m avoiding the Book Report section of the review, wherein I explain the plot, because I can see no good way of doing so that wouldn’t give too much away. So Ima punt on that. Go see the movie.

It is a science fiction film, it is at its core a science fiction film. But I feel it lacks subtext. Ok, so you can hack into people’s dreams and do this and that. And where is the meaning? Children of Men first asked “What if this were the end of the world?” And then forwarded the astonishing viewpoint that we already act as though it is. Where is Inception’s point of view? What does its author think about human nature?

Is there anything revelatory within? I feel, no. What do we learn about the nature of Man? Nothing. It’s just neat. It’s just a thrilling heist movie set inside a science fiction idea. Like Moon, and unlike Children of Men, that idea does not then go on to assume any greater meaning. This is what stops Inception from being a great movie. It’s an astonishing film. It’s cinematic, it’s thrilling, it’s many things, all positive, but it lacks that center, that point of view, which leads to revelation. We walk out of the theater gasping, our breath taken away. Quite an accomplishment. We talk about the movie afterwards, another accomplishment. But do we learn more about ourselves?

That’s not a requirement for a good movie, but I feel is it one for a real work of art, I think that’s part of what makes something a work of art. It would be easy to say the movie is about the power our dreams hold over us, but I don’t think our dreams DO hold that kind of power over us. People in the real world tend not to avoid dreaming or remembering their dreams because of the heinous shit they have locked up therein. So while I believe Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Cobb has that stuff going on in his dreams, I don’t think we learn anything about ourselves watching him.

He’s pretty good in this, by the way, and he gets better as the movie goes. For about the first 90 minutes I kept thinking that Christian Bale would have been better, but while I think Bale is a brilliant actor rarely given anything to do, he couldn’t have done it anyway because in this movie, in that suit, everyone would have seen Bruce Wayne. But as the movie relies on Cobb’s inner turmoil to affect him and the people around him, DiCaprio’s strength as an actor comes to the fore. When he’s the haunted genius explaining things, I wanted Christian Bale. When he’s the haunted genius terrified his world is unraveling and about to destroy everyone he cares about, I was happy for Leonardo.

Nolan digs deep into his Repertory cast bringing out old workhorses like Michael Caine alongside Nolan favorites like Ken Watanabe and Cilian Murphy. Nolan likes thin white guys who look good in black suits, and so we get Joseph Gordon-Levitt who’s great as the icy operations specialist but I suspect could have done the DiCaprio role and is maybe ready to step up.

Ellen Page is maybe the weak link in an otherwise stellar cast. I see very little passion or wonder in her character and it seems like these are her character’s main functions. She’s the audience’s POV character and we’re meant to think how amazing this all is. See how amazing someone seeing the world inside the dream would find it. See this driving passion to create bring her back for more. But the character on screen seems vacuous. Like it’s all washing over her and nothing’s connecting. When she’s given the responsibility of being the one person in the film with perspective on how dangerous what they’re doing is–because she’s the one person who knows what’s going on in Cobb’s mind–I didn’t believe it. She doesn’t have the strength of character to furtively scold Leonardo DiCaprio. To take him to task, to hold his feet over the fire and force him to see what he needs to see. Nolan can’t cast women. There, I said it.

Marion Cotillard is fine, so maybe it’s not as hard and fast a rule as I make it out to be. And she certainly has a huge burden to bear in the film considering how emotionally critical everything she does is. We have to feel for her, fear her, and feel for Cobb because of her. All this from a character we never meet. That’s some acting.

Ken Watanabe is one of my favorite actors as has been ever since I saw him in The Last Samurai, which I loved. He is all over this fucking movie and that made me love it more. The moment where his character does the “I’m coming with you” scene, was maybe the moment I really fell in love with this movie, partly because of how happy I was that Ken was going to be in more of the movie, and partly because that’s when the movie flipped over from being a Hard-boiled action movie into a movie about camaraderie, and Getting The Team Together. My favorite!

There’s some more of what I call Comic Book Logic in this movie, I say “more” because I just saw some of it in Predators. I feel it’s time to explain what I mean there.

Superhero Comics, for reasons best explored elsewhere, take our world and shrink it down, make it very small. Everyone in a superhero comic knows everyone else. The world is so small, it’s possible for a hero in a comic book to know everything about several subjects. To be able to recognize any jungle on earth just by walking around for a few minutes. It’s a very simple world, simplistic, and that simplicity is its virtue. Readers like the idea that there are people who can pick up a phone and buy an airline, as Ken Watanabe does in Inception.

When Cobb says “this is going to be complex, we’ll need to pay off the pilot, and the stewardess and make sure the plane…,” and Saito says “I just bought the airline. Seemed simpler.” That’s comic book logic. That’s what Bruce Wayne would do. Probably he did do it in one of the movies and I forgot.

Because I am loathe to say more about the film, you may find my criticisms overwhelm the text and that perhaps I did not like it. Not true, I loved Inception. I’ll see it again. I’ll buy the DVD and watch the Making Of. It’s breathtaking. It’s audacious, not only in it’s ideas, but in that it imagines the audience will get it all! And then it seems they do! To believe in the audience is perhaps rthe most audacious element of this film.

I do wonder, thinking about the very end of the movie, if, in 20 years, we’ll see Nolan saying “I don’t know what I could have done to make it more obvious. If you don’t get it, you’re a moron,” the way Ridley Scott did with Blade Runner. Because, like Blade Runner, Inception is about raising questions, not answering them. And somewhere between filming the movie, and now, Ridley Scott forgot that and imagines there is an answer. After working his ass off to make sure no answer was possible.

The central question the movie raises is perhaps answerable. Maybe there are enough clues and if we think about it long enough it will become obvious. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to know. Or perhaps I’m content seeing what looks like the answer there ahead of me somewhere, but not going toward it. Believing that, should I think about it more, I would be able to talk myself into an answer is enough.

Actually doing so would lessen the impact of the film, I feel.

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