Inception... what did you think?

[littleidiot]

I thought the music was really cheesy and intrusive

How very dare you!

[miskatonic]

I liked it, but am not in love with it. Visually it was super interesting, but a little too action-heavy for my taste.

[gaylord500]

How did Leonardo's character figure out the Japanese guy died?

[Saif]

I think the achievement of this film was that it was comprehensible. All the complaints that it was too easy to get belie the number of confused people walking out of this - if everything wasn't structured and explained, this film would fall into David Lynch territory where a few die-hards would regard it well and the general audience would reject it. The budget ($260 million including marketing, it sounds like) demanded a film that was accessible and available to the general audience without loosing the core.

It achieved that goal. This is the kind of summer film I want to see - primarily entertaining, but with a dash of the experimental and accessible to the general audience. If it provokes them maybe to dig deeper and find more meaningful content then fine, otherwise it was at least different enough from standard fare to be intellectually engaging and required a bit of work to unravel.

All that said - I was shocked that I actually like the performances of some of the actors - Leo and Cillian were great as usual, Ken Watanabe's dialog was a little slurred but otherwise great, and I was surprised I liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt - he's surprisingly good as an action character. It was great to see Marion Cotillard so beautiful and at the same time so full of venom. Ellen Page wasn't as offensive as I expected and her peculiar diction that throws me off sometimes work really well in this role - she sounded like a nerd. My Escher fetishist loved the impossible staircases and the Limbo sequences were beautifully realized. The least interesting level was the snow.

The complaints about the lack of surreality don't make very much sense to me - this was a heist film and it focused on the heist to give the story all of the momentum it needed. If the film took on a surreal bent then it would loose the focus it had. That's what I like about Nolan - he chooses a focus and he buries his film into it, which is great. It's extremely thin and hyper-inflates that one thing to exponential levels while brutally curbing all other things that would be just as interesting but leaves them to stand in the wings. I think it's the right choice here - if the heist wasn't as focused the structure wouldn't hold.

That said, the triple sequence of trips was awesome in execution, and the very simple way in which he projects the next scene is a wonderful (if simple) way to keep the audience one step ahead of the film - if they want to be there.

Good film. I'd like to watch it in IMax again, to see certain scenes in a grand scale. And the music was lovely - I love epic orchestral scores and that was huge.

For the record, I'm a fan of 13th Floor, Vanilla Sky, Dark City, and I didn't mind The Matrix.

[Tekatana]

ha ha funny inception parody with many spoilers.

[BaronHelix]

I want to add myself to the list of fanboys for the zero-G fighting. Those shots coming at the same time as the snow battles made me wish more action movies were that interesting. And the presence of Joseph Gordon-Levitt specifically made me wish GI Joe was more like this.

[Mk1]

Finally saw it yesterday - and in a strange turn, as I was leaving for the theater I got to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt shooting a movie outside my apartment building.

Loved the movie, I thought it was clever without trying too hard - you walk away with a lot of fairly interesting questions, and at least you know what they are, instead of wondering what the hell, if anything, the director might have meant by it all.