Inception's Usability Problem

Different works of art engage the intellect at different levels, certainly. But the best work at multiple levels simultaneously. Sympathetic characters draw watchers deeper into the movie, at an emotional level, in a way that pure ideas cannot.

Similarly, as a visual medium, showing things happening rather than explaining them has much more impact. Using dialogue (or worse, monologues) to explain something is weak storytelling; it's not making full use of the medium, and won't have the same impact as it could otherwise have. Other exposition techniques, like flashbacks, are often cheap - they can appear to make things momentous not because they're part of a story, but because they have some convenient echo in something jammed in precisely to deliver the echo.

There's much more to good movie-making: lighting, cinematography, and especially the soundscape, as technical elements that both paint beautiful pictures, and draw the viewer into the "realism" of the scene portrayed, usually by subtly overemphasizing reality.

They're definitely not half-baked ideas.

Take Fight Club as a simple example. It's both about adrenaline-pumping aggression and destruction, and a critique of masculinity. If it was only the first, it would be mindless; if it was only the second, it would be dry and boring. By combining the two, you get both juicy entertainment, and food for thought for the masses. Making something properly entertaining - more entertaining for the average viewer than e.g. a philosophy textbook - needs more than just ideas.

Inception was boring. We all knew the basic setup before the movie, which is fine, but it spends ages explaining minor details like how balance/inner ear sensation is propagated down the levels, yet uses them inconsistently - they're not floating about the snow scene, for example. Yes, I realise these are Comic Book Guy criticisms.

But it wasn't engaging. The dialogue was clichéd, the characters bland, and for a summer action movie it lacked a "crowning moment of awesome".

More than anything though, it felt as if the writers took a good idea and tried to make it complicated (but not too complicated) without any real spark of inspiration. Apart from the reversal or deception going into the deepest level, they were just piling on the layers.

"Similarly, as a visual medium, showing things happening rather than explaining them has much more impact."

I agree, but here's one of Hamilton's complaints:

"I'd barely gotten my head around the fundamental framework of the host/architect/subject relationship before I was being told about "totems" that anchor dreamers to the real world and "kicks" that wake them up..."

Nolan showed some of these things visually in the opening sequence before explaining them explicitly when Page was introduced: an architect (Lukas Haas) had introduced himself; we were shown what an architect is supposed to do (the wrong carpet); and we were shown a "kick". I thought these things were fairly intuitive, but it's a good job his script exposited them explicitly, or apparently Hamilton would've been completely lost.

Perhaps sometimes a little weak storytelling is good for the audience.

I'd read a review that said the same thing complaining about lack of character development in the film, but it made sense based on how I interpreted the ending.

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I think the whole movie was DiCaprio's dream, something he constructed for himself to plant the idea that he didn't have to feel guilty about his wife. Then it would make sense for all the other characters to be shallow because they're just projections of his subconscious and for him to be the only person in the dreams to project their personal lives into the dream. Just my $.02.

----------------END SPOILER-----------------

If you expect an orange and get an apple, you're automatically not happy, no matter how tasty the apple is. That's where a lot of criticism comes from.

I found Inception to be a masterpiece. Yes, there was a lot of explanation to do, but it never felt unnatural and was necessary for the mind-blowing climax. Unlike Memento or Mulholland Drive, everything made sense to me right away. And ending the movie with the spinning top was just a genius move, especially since it was so carefully placed right after the intentionally dream-like airport scene. Never has such a static scene held so much tension.