Inception: A Small Golden Nugget in a Mountain of Silver?

Spoiler Alert from Adam Quigley's /Film review of Inception:

Spoiling Inception is near impossible without writing out a manual to explain what those spoilers mean, but regardless, this review includes vague references to plot points that could be deemed spoilers by those who probably shouldn’t be reading reviews anyway if they really wanted to avoid finding out anything about the movie. You’ve been warned.

Oscar season is approaching and Christopher Nolan's film Inception has consistently made critics's top ten lists.  Inception was Mark Kermode's favourite film of 2010, and it featured prominently on lists of two of the three hosts of /Filmcast.  Indeed, /Film's Adam Quigley has provided the most reasoned and measured review of Inception.  

I don't doubt that Inception is one of the better films of last year, but at times I think it has been overrated, by Mark Kermode in particular and elsewhere within the cranes and scaffolding of the Internet geekdom.  It was finally a comment from my brother on Facebook on the hilarious a capella version of the Inception trailer that summed up best how I too felt about the film:

Meh not bad - I have to say the more I think about Inception the less impressed I am. It's just too up itself for its own good. But maybe I should watch it a second time to see if it gets any better. Also the plot was nowhere near as cerebral as everyone made out. 

Aside from the "up itself" part, I would have to agree with my brother.  Upon first seeing the film, many people thought, "I have to see that again," in order to see how everything fits together or to get even more out of it.  As a result, Inception has grossed $823,576,195 worldwide owing (like James Cameron's Avatar and Titanic) to repeat viewings. I doubt this was Director/Writer/Producer Christopher Nolan's intent, but it was probably icing on the cake for his producers.

I never got the desire to watch Inception again and again in theatres. Like many, many others, I watched Inception for the first time in July 2010, but since then have felt no need to return to it.  I could appreciate how intricate it is, how everything fits together, in one viewing.  If I couldn't appreciate it, or if it didn't fit together, it wouldn't make for a very good film.  

Two films similar to Inception that could be viewed over and over again are Fight Club and one of Nolan's earlier works, Memento.  Fight Club owes its repeat viewings to a twist at the end so effective that it completely changes aspects of the film.  One could watch Fight Club twice or more, and see certain scenes - or the whole film - in completely different lights. Memento, on the other hand, is worth its repeat viewings because of its complexity. In terms of narrative structure, Christopher Nolan's Memento is a far more ambitious film than Christopher Nolan's Inception, and the cerebral qualities that many critics have attributed to Inception are much more applicable to Memento.

The plot of Inception is actually relatively simple: thieves are hired by a Japanese businessman to do the opposite of what they usually do.  Instead of stealing something they must plant something.  That is the basic skeletal form of the story.  Where it gets a bit complicated is that it happens "inside the mind".  The thieves - or "extractors" - usually steal secrets from the minds of their marks.  This time, they have been hired to plant an idea, which we are told is something very hard to do, because they have to persuade the mark to "realise" the idea himself as opposed to just being told what to do.  The thieves must create the illusion of free will.  Otherwise, the plan won't work, apparently.  This is called "inception."

So basically its a heist movie, complete with the appropriate generic clichés: the point man (Leonardo DiCaprio), who's going to do just "one last job", the newbie (Ellen Page) who, for the benefit of the audience is there only to be on the receiving end of (endless amounts of) exposition, the morally ambiguous financial backer/employer (Ken Watanabe), who invites himself on the mission to oversee his investment only to see that working in the field is more difficult than he imagined, a femme fatale (Marion Cotillard), the mark (Cillian Murphy), and some sparse comic relief in the guise of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the straight man and Tom Hardy as the joker, both of whom also have specialist abilities (of course).  

This all seems so formulaic, and it would be, were the stars not as listed and the Director not Christopher Nolan.  Everyone and his mother wants to work with Nolan, and I can't blame them – Christopher Nolan has made very good (and high-grossing) films.  Almost everyone, from Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, down to the smallest part of Maurice Fischer, played by the late great Pete Postlethwaite, gives a fantastic performance.  Almost.

Ellen Page's character, Ariadne, either by design or performance, is one of the most annoying characters I had the displeasure to watch in 2010.  At this point it must be said that I harbour a really strong dislike for the film Juno, so maybe I wasn't as objective about her performance as I could have been.  However, here is an example of this character's lack of tact and likeability: at night, in the lab, she notices Cobb asleep by himself, hooked up to one of those "dream machines".  Instead of leaving it be, after no thought, she just hooks herself up and invades what unfolds to be the most intimate, personal memories of Cobb's life.  To make matters worse, when Cobb discovers her and inexplicably starts to explain the heartbreaking moment when he last saw his children, she sneaks off to see an even more personal aspect of him, which she had been specifically told not to do.  Then, to compound all of this – when they wake up after the personal violation that Ariadne commits, she is the one to get offended.

For the most part, it is a very strong script, fast and informative, but there are plot holes and internal logical inconsistencies: when it comes to Cobb's wife Mal (Cotillard), everyone in the film apart from Ariadne seems blissfully unaware as to how deeply troubled and fragile Cobb's emotional attachment really is.  Mal is embedded so deeply into Cobb's psyche that he can subconsciously make her appear in any of the missions as an uncontrollable saboteur.  Even Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), who she shot in the leg in the opening scene seems to just forget about her at the film moves on.  The relationship between Cobb and Mal is the film's big subplot, and I can't help but think that it's breezed over in relation to how it directly affects the other characters and the main plot line (aside from Ariadne's pointless complaining).

There also seems to be a lack of moral consideration when it comes to what the characters are doing. The plan is to instill Robert Fischer (Murphy) with a MacGuffin: the idea to split up his recently deceased father's business empire so that Saito (Watanabe) may reap the benefits.  Judging from appearances, they all seem to be good people apart from Saito, whose cunning behaviour denotes ambiguity.  When questioned by Cobb about the moral implications of the mission, Saito replies:

We're the last company standing between them and total energy dominance, and we can no longer compete. Soon, they'll control the energy supply of half the world. In effect, they become a new superpower. The world needs Robert Fischer to change his mind!

Boom!  Cobb - and therefore the audience - is placated.  End of story.  There is no further questioning that what they are doing may be wrong, or that Saito may be lying.  Even when they bring in the young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed student, Ariadne, moral implications are not considered at all.  Some elaboration on this element would have made the film more interesting.

Critic Mark Kermode gives a charitable reading: 

for a film to cost this much money to ask the audience to try THIS hard to keep up is really impressive.

This assessment relies on the fact that current blockbusters are just dumb with big explosions and gunfights, owing to executives' opinions that that's all viewers are willing to watch.  Inception is also lauded for its originality in a time of remakes and sequels.  Of the top ten highest grossing films in America in 2010, there are only three films that aren't sequels or remakes, with Inception being the highest grossing of those three.  The four films above Inception in box office sales are all sequels: Toy Story 3 admittedly is a brilliant film, but a sequel nonetheless; the 3-D blockbuster yet critically mediocre Alice in Wonderland is number two; Iron Man 2 served more as a stepping stone to the Avengers movie than anything else; and finally there is Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the third installment in the biggest teen romance story since Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski.

Although it is refreshing to see a film like Inception triumph in such an environment, it's clear the low expectations we now have for new films has heightened Inception's critical reception: either people only want to watch films that they are already familiar with from the outset or the Studios are only making "safe-bet" films.  I'm inclined to think it's more the latter.  This kind of context, however, should not colour one's opinion of Inception.  A film should not be assessed on the quality of its competition, but by its own merits. Good films are not like gold: scarcity does not increase their value.