Make me care.
If a movie wants to connect with an audience, it has to draw viewers into a story and invest them in what is happening to its major characters.
This is the essence of a great popular movie, one that will stand the test of time. Think of Scarlett and Rhett in “Gone With the Wind,” Rick and Ilsa in “Casablanca.” Think of Neo in the first “Matrix.”
You can have all the visual razzle-dazzle you want, Nobel Prize-worthy intellectual fireworks, and expensive, noisy shoot-outs and car chases galore, but if at least one major character doesn’t reach out and grab you, it means nothing.
And that’s exactly where “Inception” falls short.
The ambitious, phantasmagorical thriller from writer-director Christopher Nolan (“Dark Knight”) proves more engaging to the mind and eyes than to the heart.
There’s no real emotional payoff and, call me old-fashioned, but that’s what I’m looking for in a movie. No matter how low the budget or how drab the look, give me a plot and characters that pack a wallop -- and not just with their fists -- I’m there.
Consider “Frozen River,” “The Hurt Locker” and the current “The Kids are All Right.” Together, all three recent movies probably cost less to make than a quarter of “Inception’s” total budget of $160 million. And yet their characters are so much more vivid and specific than those in the Nolan film. They linger with you for days, even months.
A day after seeing “Inception,” the dazzling visuals haunt you, playing at the edges of your mind, but not one of the characters.
It’s not as if Nolan hasn’t made movies with compelling characters before. “Memento,” the 2000 indie psychological thriller that was his breakout film, dazzled because it managed to make its protagonist, a man suffering from memory loss who was trying to track down his wife’s killer, such a fascinating figure even as he tried to work his way through a dizzying maze of a plot.
In reviving the Batman franchise in 2005 with “Batman Begins,” he made Bruce Wayne a believably conflicted superhero. And in Nolan’s “Dark Knight,” the tortured soul that was the Joker (helped by a brilliant, twisted performance by Heath Ledger) kept viewers riveted.
There’s no single character in “Inception” who grabs you that way. The two who are meant to, and come closest, are Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who is seen in flashbacks and in dream sequences.
Cobb is an Extractor, the best that there is. This means that, per the movie’s self-referential mythology, he specializes in entering other people’s brains when they are dreaming and extracts their secrets.
He is hired by a corporate mogul (Ken Watanabe) to attempt to do the reverse: to put an idea into the head of a corporate rival (Cillian Murphy).
