Inception is dumb junk

By Nick Possum

Margaret’s dreaming, David’s lost the plot and Paul lives in a teenage fantasy

I have hated more movies on Margaret Pomeranz’s recommendation than I care to remember, but it’s not often the rectitudinous David Stratton has let me down. Alas, in a rare show of solidarity they both gave Christopher Nolan’s Inception four and a half stars.

I let my guard down when the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Byrne gave this lightweight guff four stars. Come in sucker. Not since Baz Luhrmann’s Australia has a sillier, more hyped, less satisfying, confection been foisted on an unsuspecting public. Unless you’re a teenage boy with a serious computer game problem, this one has fleas. It scratches with its hind foot. It’s a dish licker, a poo shooter, a leg humper … in short, a dog.

The giveaway was “In cinemas everywhere”, but I missed it. Those words signal a marketing strategy used on dog blockbusters: If it’s going to pall really quickly, you force it up big, simultaneously, on as many screens as possible.

The Herald headlined Byrne’s review “Dream weaver casts a mesmerising spell”. He called it “intellectually tantalising … an action adventure for the brain as well as the eyes”, which says more about Paul’s concept of “intellectual” and “brain” than anything else.

The cutting edge intellectual subtlety they’re all raving about is risibly blunt. First, there’s a McGuffin – a nifty bit of technology in a suitcase that enables several people to dream a common dream and interact within it – thus equipped, the group can enter a dream and then a dream within the dream and even a dream within the other dreams. Challenging stuff, huh.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s character , Dom Cobb, is an industrial espionage mercenary whose team specialises in stealing secrets locked in the brains of their targets. But can he do something more difficult – plant an idea is somebody’s brain? Well, duh, of course he can. And you’re certain, right from the get go, that he and the team are going to pull it off. And of course, he’s got a guilty secret involving luuurve.

Actually the premise and the plot are just an excuse for an avalanche of car chases, glitzy sci-fi special effects and loud gunplay in a variety of exotic locales. And speaking of avalanches, there’s one of those as well. As always, the bad guys are hopeless shots. So in essence this is a carefully constructed formula movie designed to appeal to small boys aged from 13 to 30. Far from being challenging or intellectual the whole shebang appears to be the product of a marketing focus group. The Inception computer game cannot be far behind.

Okay, perhaps the focus group was just ‘projections’ of Nolan’s subconscious, but you don’t need to be in a dreamlike state to imagine them sitting around workshopping it:

“Now, we got a shootout in a Japanese temple thingy, we got a shootout in a Moroccan Bazaar, we got a shootout in the snow …”

“Chris, the kids expect car chases too, but we gotta have some new angle. How about a car chase and then a diesel locomotive comes down the street and smashes into everything? I mean it’s a dream movie, right, so we can do anything.”

In the result, Inception (like so many other recent action adventure flicks) is also a sad reflection on the generations for which it’s been lovingly crafted. It’s a movie for kiddies who think avatars are really cool and sophisticated and whose idea of glamour is a five star hotel room or a symmetrical city of glass façade office towers. It’s for generations who’ve never handled an actual firearm of any sort and whose concept of war and violence comes from computer games. There is, for example, an interminably long battle scene in a snow-covered mountinous landscape featuring a huge industrial facility. It brought to mind the WWII commando classic, The Heroes of Telemark. About a million rounds are fired off in unconvincing heroics but I couldn’t help remaining completely detached and remembering that in the actual Telemark operation they blew up the objective and escaped without firing a shot.

Long ago, I noticed an interesting thing. Film critics tend to be kind to new releases. It’s something to do with not being a grinch. I mean, if they were honest, they’d pan at least half of all new releases. So almost everything gets more stars than it will ten years down the track when it’s on late night TV and Doug Anderson (bless his soul) is the sober voice of history.

Time winnows out the chaff. I remember seeing, as a young possum, Barbarella, and thinking it was very hip, but when it came up on late night TV thirty years later I was embarrassed. It was truly ghastly. I’d just been in lust with Jane Fonda.

Allow me a brave prediction. In 2020, Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature, Franklyn, which played last year on just a few art-house screens, will scrub up well as a mind-games mystery thriller while Inception will be remembered as dumb junk. It cost just $9m (against Inception’s $180m budget), but was all the better for that.

Perhaps I’m wrong about Inception. Perhaps you can plant an idea in somebody’s unreceptive mind. Perhaps that’s the kindest way to explain that three grown adult reviewers have actually endorsed this crap.