Been There, Done That; A Second Look at Christopher Nolan’s Inception

I've been waiting for Inception for a long time—ever since I saw the previews, ever since I saw Dark Knight, ever since I read that Christopher Nolan had been crafting the script for some ten years. Inception was marketed as that 2010 summer movie that would add narrative depth and cinematic awe to all the meaningless, mediocre scifi regurgitations and reboots that plagued 2009 (GI Joe, Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, Transformers 2, to name a few).

So my problem is first and foremost coming to terms with my disappointment after seeing Inception, and second figuring out why the movie failed to do something truly great. In Andrew O'Hehir's review of Inception at Salon, the subhead reads "Christopher Nolan's much-hyped thriller is a joyless, awkwardly constructed mess," and I unfortunately have to agree.

There's no doubt that Inception is visually spectacular. The architecture of each setting (with the exception of the third level of the dreamscape) and the costume design give off that out-of-time noir I loved in Dark City, and the dream physics in Nolan's interior worlds are as much a marvel as the postmodern martial arts were in The Matrix. And of course Inception has the same incredible soundscape that we experienced in Dark Knight.

Despite all these achievements, Inception's narrative flaws keep it from leaving a permanent impression on my brain, like Dark City and The Matrix have. I've noticed that a lot of people who love this film are prone to lashing out at critics because they believe the critics don't understand what's going on. But the reality isn't that we don't "get it" so much as we just don't care: without a powerful conflict and powerful characters to drive a movie, it doesn't matter how "layered" or "complex" the details of the plot are.

Cobb/Mal's "totem"

For one, Inception has no central antagonist, and so it's not clear what counts as the central conflict until almost the very end. Of course, this isn't a plea to plant a mustachioed villain into Inception so that we can have someone to blame for all the evil in its world (if there is any to begin with). I like my antihero as much as you like yours, but why should we root for a gang of dream-diving criminals who are struggling to prevent one corporation from creating a monopoly so that some other corporation can go on with business as usual? Should the posse get a pat on the back for brainwashing an otherwise…

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