Saw it a couple of weeks ago and it left me unmoved, and more to the point impressed at the budget and stunning FX and depressed to see them wasted on such pretentious twaddle (just like Avatar). Read a few reviews since. Guardian, Kermode.
Yes, lots of unresolved uncertainty, dreams within dreams leaving disjoints in time and in between dream and reality. Clearly not meant to be easy to follow, getting lost is deliberate – OK, no problem with films that take several close viewings to get the whole story – Fight Club say. But why the mix of drivel script – as if we needed a running commentary of what was going on – with the zap-pow action-movie for what is obviously a psychological plot. The recurring wife and kids guilt trip just deepened the tendency to gag on the formulaic hollywood elements.
Also saw Inception recently and had three main points:
1) The disjoint that you are meant to ‘miss’ in order to need the explaining is so heavily flagged up in the preceding three scenes AND if you spot that there are none of the clever lines that can make sense both ways.
2) They have the freedom in this film to construct the subconciouses of more than one person. How tame were they? Complete free reign to build any universe with any way of represtentation, it turns out Nolan’s imagines that thoughts are copies of the realities they contain, even in Di Caprio’s warped (if not damaged) mind.
3) Christopher Nolan can direct, but please please please find a scriptwriter. As a story-board or plot outline this is a pretty good idea for a thriller/twist typ film, but the script is so full of tripe, so very full of benal tripe. That “riddle” (which I would expect to be the most throughouly written, re-thought, refined) sounded like a teenager.
Yet an enjoyable film none the less.
Yep, everything except a script with imagination or characters with any depth. Great idea, great production. Exactly like Avatar in that respect.
PS Psybertron Junior 😉