Inception

Inception. Pshhhhh. More like "Not-that-good-eption."
Suck on that, Cobra Commander Joseph Gordon-Levitt!

This review will not be up to my usual great movie review standards, but that's only because I can't remember too much about it. I thought visually, Inception was stunning. However, the great hype machine hyped it up so much, there was no way it could live up to all the...uhm...hype. As a general rule, I'm usually disappointed by movies the masses say are great, probably because I expect too much, and possibly because I just like being a contrarian. Everyone I knew was talking about how the movie really made you think and what a questionable ending it had, etc. Spoiler Alert: I'm about to bash the hell out of the ending. And the movie in general, probably.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally finds his children and he embraces them and sees their faces (which would suggest he's awake, not dreaming, fyi) after he spins his "totem," which is a top he sorta stole from his dead wife who's suicide he was sorta responsible for, on a table. If the totem falls, he knows it's real life, not a dream. After the reunion, the camera cuts back to the top, which has a mini-hiccup and then keeps spinning, and then fade to black. I felt like the director decided he needed to pound the audience over the head with that, and that really pissed me off. I also expected the movie to be darker, didn't understand why an "architect was needed," and didn't understand why they wasted time showing Ellen Page making her own totem that she never used. Pkilla and B-Rad had problems with the whole concept of "dream invasion" and how it was never fully explored, but I think it's ok for things like that to be glossed over and just accepted. I was happy to hear they didn't like the movie at all, because my opinion that is was only ok seemed to be in the minority of just myself.

I loved Tom Hardy in the movie, but for the most part found it tough to care about the characters. It's like alternate futures, parallel worlds, or dream states in comics; the characters can die all the writers want, but at the end of the day, the status quo is still there. If anyone "died" in the dream, they'd just wake up, which takes away a lot of the danger and made me care less. Lastly, on the subject of not caring about things, is the plot and "secrets" Leo was holding throughout. They kept revealing all these tiny secrets throughout the movie, but it never felt like a big reveal or anything I cared about. Even the creepy hotel scene with his wife in the basement of the elevator in Leo's mind made me say "meh." First, we find his wife is sabotaging his dream invasions, then we find out she's dead, then we find out she committed suicide, which we then find out was partly Leo's fault because he drove her crazy by trying inception on her...WHO CARES!! Sorry Christopher Nolan. I love all your other movies that I've seen, and I'm so happy you're not shooting the next Batman in 3D, and again, this movie was visually stunning, but it wasn't the masterpiece or the mindfuck that people are claiming it is.