Perhaps you've heard of confirmation bias. Put simply, it's the tendency to seek out information that corroborates what we already know or believe. No doubt it was terribly important to human survival back in caveman days, when it wasn't wise to seek out "both sides" of the sabretooth tiger issue. And as recently as the 1910's, confirmation bias probably served humanity well in its dealings with the Kingdom of Fae. Faeries are fuckers, they've always been fuckers, there's no need to "see things their way."
But these days, confirmation bias is famous for nothing so much as being the reason people disagree with me on the internet. Not everyone has the good sense to get their news from the same source I do (namely, a transcript of Glenn Beck's radio show run through Translation Party), but even I fall victim to confirmation bias. Actively seeking out challenges to your preconceptions is hard work, and not always rewarding.
There's one area, however, in which I gleefully seek out opposing viewpoints, albeit purely in order to strengthen my existing opinion: movie reviews. When I see a really good movie, I immediately head to rottentomatoes and pore over all the negative reviews. Inception was no exce...
Ugh.
It wasn't a deviation from the norm.
Inception is a heist movie that takes place primarily in the realm of dreams. The first half of the movie begins in traditional heist movie fashion; we assemble the team of six, we learn their motivations (exoneration, money, money, curiosity, money, and money), and we see them plot their heist, laying out the dangers, the architecture, and the plan that will ultimately go wrong.
Inception's distinction is that the heist occurs inside the subconscious of the target. Also, it's not that the team is stealing an idea from the target's mind, it's that they're planting an idea. This requires them not just to enter a dream, but a dream within a dream within a dream. Why? Well...
There's a lot of rules in Inception, and I have to concur with the reviewers who have pointed out that most of the lines in the movie are dedicated to explaining how the dream world works. But that's not the weakness some reviewers seem to think it is; for one thing, plenty of traditional heist movies, or any movie centering around a complex plan, devote a great deal of screen time to explaining what they're about to do, what they're doing, and what they just did. The only difference is that Inception makes up its own rules. And I love that.
I'm a huge fan of any work of fiction that props up its fantastical elements with a coherent and consistent set of rules. Inception does this brilliantly, building its mythology on precepts that anchor each subsequent revelation to the overall narrative. That I managed to find the conclusion of this film - in which people plunge into concentric levels of the dreamscape - a wee bit predictable is a testament to how much sense it all makes.
Inception's detractors are a fairly diverse lot; of course, there's the people who say they didn't get it, didn't follow the twists of the narrative, the complex rules of the dream world. Well, sucks to be you. I paid attention and I understood the damn movie.
Admittedly, we all bring our intellectual biases to the movies; no doubt there are people who thought Primer was simplistic and over-explained. I'd engage them in a debate about that, but given their prodigious intelligence they'd probably win, or, failing that, kill me with their minds. The point is, I found Inception to be right at the sweet spot - mentally challenging, but not overwhelming - because I have experience absorbing that kind of fiction and because I was paying attention. Other people would find it too simple, others too complex. The preponderance of positive reviews, and the box office take, suggest that Christopher Nolan made the film smart enough, and no smarter.
Of course, not every negative review attests to losing track of the plot. Some claim to have merely been jerked around by it, arguing that Inception tries to keep the audience guessing as to whether what they're seeing is a dream or not. But it really, really doesn't. There's basically two sequences wherein the audience is meant to be surprised that they're in a dream, and both sequences are illustrative of the dream-delving experience we are meant to understand. And in any case, come on: you should come to a movie like Inception prepared to question whether each scene is really a dream, or the entire movie is a dream, or the entire movie theater you're sitting in is a murder/sex dream and the bodily fluids are about to start flying.
And at least one review pointed to gaps in the film's logic, arguing that they threatened the integrity of the film's logical architecture. Well you know what, negative reviews? There's gaps in regular architecture too.
They're called windows. CHECKMATE.
Actually, in spite of my best efforts I think that's a workable analogy. There's gaps, sure, but they don't compromise the portion of the logical framework that's responsible for holding up the story. Not to mention, filling them in would have taken more screen time and contributed nothing to the actual story. For example: one protagonist, in a dream, is ineffectually firing a gun at an adversary. Another protagonist steps up with a grenade launcher, dispatches the enemy, and chides his compatriot for not "dreaming up" better weaponry. So why not dream up even better equipment? Well, the short answer is that this is not a movie about people charging around in mech suits with death rays and impenetrable force fields, which would be the only realistic outcome of giving characters any equipment they wanted. Trust me on this one; I've run D&D sessions.
There's more, and probably better, arguments against Inception than what I've listed here. Probably the best is the accusation that the film lacks a strong emotional thread; personally, I found the internal struggle of the main character, and in particular that starkly literal way it was portrayed, to be extremely resonant. Even if you disagree, I'd say Inception is worth seeing just to see how all the pieces fit together.
