Short answer: Yes.
When you see an accomplished storyteller come down so far from his creative peak, you're forced to come to terms with where the cracks first started to show. Despite the merits of that piece, it's tainted by the artist's faults which would become more obvious in subsequent pieces, like a pretty woman who loses her mystique the more you get to know her.
For Christopher Nolan, that slide began with Inception.
Ten years ago you may have left the theater blown away by the thrilling visuals, the intertwining dream sequences, the booming Hans Zimmer score, and the subjectivism of reality (that Total Recall and The Matrix executed better). You may have thought it was one of the best movies you'd ever seen. I thought so.
We know now the emperor has no clothes. Nolan's first movie after Inception was The Dark Knight Rises, bloated, poorly paced, and scatterbrained. Then came Interstellar, whose plot in service of a theme of love completely falls apart in the second half. The final straw was Dunkirk, barely thrilling, deliberately confusing, and painful to the ears.
(Temper your expectations for Tenet accordingly.)
Nolan is a talented filmmaker, but his lack of restraint is his undoing. Inception tries to do too much. It's a bildungsroman set in an action movie set in a heist movie set in a sci-fi movie. Even if you execute all the individual elements perfectly, the balancing act is impossible. You risk giving the audience whiplash with all the abrupt narrative shifts. It's how a 2.5-hour movie can feel rushed. When the credits roll, I'm not sure what to feel. I'm just overwhelmed.
My biggest beef with Inception is the incessant expositional dialogue. Nolan said the decision to hit the heist movie tropes helped justify the large amount of exposition. The problem is there's more exposition needed to tell this story. It's not just that Cobb is trying to get home to see his kids. It's that he can't get home because his wife killed herself and framed him for her murder because he incepted the idea in her mind that her world isn't real. This exposition is needlessly drawn out over three scenes, two of which are momentum killers.
Another problem with Inception's exposition relates to the rules of shared dreaming: They keep being rewritten. One rule very clear from the start is that you wake up when you die in a dream. Not so in the Robert Fischer job because of the sedative they use. Useful information that Cobb should have shared with the team, yes? When Fischer dies, Cobb assumes the mission failed, but someone has the bright idea of recovering Fischer from limbo. Wait, you can just go into limbo and revive a dead guy one dream level up? This on-the-fly rule bending feels more like a convenience to the script than a natural outgrowth of the setting.
The fights in Inception are poorly shot and poorly choreographed. Let's take a scene in the beginning of the movie. Arthur is crouched next to a sleeping Saito while Nash is trying to wake Cobb who is in a chair on the edge of a bathtub. Arthur tells Nash to dunk Cobb in the tub. At the same time Saito wakes up and pulls a gun on Arthur. (Why is there a gun under Saito's pillow? Never mind.) Cobb falls in the water and wakes up. Saito walks past Arthur, takes Nash hostage, and points the gun at Arthur. Cobb knocks Saito down from behind. Nash elbows Saito in the face and knocks him out. The sequence is unrealistic and makes Arthur look feckless. It's unclear why this needed to happen and why it had to happen this way. A lot of the fight scenes are like this, the spinning hallway fight being a notable exception.
There are countless little oversights in Inception that bug me. Something as simple as how Cobb can't see his kids' faces resounds thematically for his tortured soul, but think about it. The kids' nanny can't email him a picture? Projections of Cobb's subconscious repeatedly interfere with the job, but no one else's projections interfere. Why not? Cobb, not the stewardess, slips the sedative in Fischer's drink on the plane. Why? I could go on.
All that being said, I don't dislike Inception. I like it for what it does well, namely its score in service of the tempo of different dream levels, stunning visual design, and how it shows the invasion of someone's mind and the planting of an idea.
The latter is of particular interest to me as a writer. Cobb's simple, well-meaning deception drove his wife to kill herself, an unrivaled setup for a tragic hero that should be front and center in the narrative, not diminished to a revelation after the 2-hour mark. Just as poignant is Fischer's reconciliation with the memory of his father. The finale in the vault just feels right as the culmination of the plot and character progression. My eyes still water when Fischer sees the pinwheel in the safe.
So, in all a good movie, but far from Nolan's best, and farther still from the best. Here's my ranking of his movies. (I haven't seen Following.)
- Memento
- The Dark Knight
- The Prestige
- Batman Begins
- Inception
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Insomnia
- Interstellar
- Dunkirk
As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.
If you're looking for something to read, you can read the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!
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