Does “Inception” live up to expectations?
Could any movie hit a bar this high?
Christopher Nolan’s cerebral thriller has long been the most eagerly-awaited film of the summer, a new outing from the director who created a classic mind-puzzle in “Memento” and made a superhero film into a critical and commercial sensation with “The Dark Knight.”
In a summer of disappointing sequels and stinkers ravaged by the critics, his film – largely kept under wraps during production, with only teasing glimpses offered into its world of industrial spies operating inside people’s dreams -- was going to be something different.
Fans hoped that Nolan would come through with another smart blockbuster. That it’d be an awards film brightening a dismal landscape of dumb action flicks. That “Inception” would be an original movie at the height of an unoriginal season.
Those are awfully high expectations to put on any movie. But now that Warner Bros. has now quietly started to screen “Inception,” and lifted the embargo on reviews a week-and-a-half before its July 16 release, we can try to answer a few of the burning questions surrounding the summer’s biggest question mark.
Is it the first great movie of the summer?
No. “Toy Story 3” is. But “Inception” is probably the second great movie of the summer.
Understand, a single viewing is hardly enough to come to terms with the film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy as a crack team that invades Cillian Murphy’s dreams and find unimaginable perils in the subconscious.
But that first viewing is enough to realize that “Inception” is a dense, stylish, thorny, dazzling film that delivers as a thrill ride but gives viewers lots to chew on and puzzle through.
It is not a typical summer movie, but it’s bold and imaginative in the vein of the best summer movies; it’s way too big and spectacular to be an art film, but it can leave you scratching your head in a good way.
It's not perfect – thinking about it afterwards, you may find yourself suddenly stumbling on inconsistencies that didn't bother you in the heat of the moment – but it's damn good: challenging and stimulating and, in the end, surprisingly emotional.
And a couple of sequences – particularly a lengthy tour-de-force that shifts between four different dream states, each with its own rules and its own sense of time – are as dazzling as anything since “Avatar,” without the one-dimensional script that undercut that film’s visual pleasures in my book.
Is it comprehensible?
Wellll … Yes. But the bigger point might be that it’s enjoyable even if you don’t comprehend the whole thing.
The film is certainly dense, and complicated, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the rules of the dream world through which Leo and crew navigate.
Death, limbo, gravity, time … They’re all subject to change, and viewers can be forgiven for occasionally wondering, Whose dream is this, anyway?
But the fact is, “Inception” is a pretty terrific roller coaster even if you don’t have it all figured out.
