WARNING: INCEPTION IS A BIG, UNWIELDLY PIECE OF CRAP

July 19, 2010 at 4:45 pm (Christopher Nolan, Inception, Luther Blissett, Ron Silliman)

Don’t see this movie.  It’s 148 minutes long and threatens to be enjoyable for about 12 of those minutes.  Don’t waste your time.

Ron Silliman, who tends to go ga-ga over dreck-poetry, loved this movie.   What is it about ’found poem’ LANGUAGE poetry, modernist, post-avants which makes them pee their pants over homages? 

Found Poem, Homage, Homage, Found Poem.     Gee, I wonder?

Here’s Ron:

“These levels of complexity are layered even further with homages – blatant ones – to a slew of other films. The fight sans gravity may remind you of The Matrix not because the antagonists are bouncing off the walls, but because Joseph Gordon-Levitt is wearing the same clothes as Hugo Weaving in that earlier movie (lacking only the mirror shades). Marion Cotillard, who won her Oscar for portraying Edith Piaf…” 

Thanks, Ron.

(By the way, did anyone see that Edith Piaf film? It was awful.)

Luther Blissett (writing on Silliman’s blog) nails it:

“Really? The movie I saw built up for nearly an hour what seemed like it was going to be a psychedelic dream sequence, full of non-Euclidian geometry and Borgesian labyrinths.

Instead, what we got was a pastiche of bad adventure movies — but without the wit of classic Bond or *Ocean’s Eleven*. Even the adventure sequences themselves played more like video games than imaginatively choreographed struggles.

Not a single character had the motivation to make me care about his or her journey. Ariadne seems instantly addicted to the infinite possibilities of dream architecture — except that the dreams fail to display any imagination. And even as she’s aware that DiCaptrio is a selfish sociopath, she tries to help him. Cobb’s journey lacks anything like the emotional weight of Odysseus’ nostos; he was a self-obsessed husband and father, and there’s no sign by the end that he’ll be any better. And the tycoon’s daddy issues are like a silly re-write of *Citizen Kane*. Never mind that these issues are manufactured by others — his father really *was* disappointed in him, and his future actions are simply brainwashed determinism.

I sort of admire the sheer audacity of pastiching this many films in one. It’s like *Fantastic Voyage* without any sense that the author understands neuroscience or cognitive psychology. It’s like *Superfly* or any other “last big score” film that tries to justify sociopathic behavior as a means to an end equation: I will kill you all just to get home.

All of which would have been all right if it was at all a visually stimulating movie. It’s about dreams, for crying out loud, and as Salon’s movie critic wrote, it seems as if Nolan’s dreams are scripted by Michael Bay.”

Yea, this is definitely not an ‘actor’s movie,’ and the story is predictable as hell.  

Don’t expect another Memento. 

As another reviewer (Telegraph, U.K.) put it:

“It’s like watching a Bond film in which you know that Bond’s life is never at risk. Actually make that two Bond films because Inception’s running time is an agonising 148 minutes. That’s 148 minutes in which nothing is ever at stake.”