Shutter Island: Inception Reviewed

Like the rest of the natural world — or the natural world that cares about filmmaking — I saw Inception this weekend (in gloriously stupid big IMAX). And, spoiler: I didn't love it. Of course, I didn't dislike it either — there just wasn't enough of an emotional attachment to anything happening on screen to make feel too strongly about Inception one way or another. Beyond the visuals, which are some of the best ever put to celluloid. Anyway, why did I feel like this? What are Inception's secrets? Click ahead...if you dare.

Still here? OK! To catch you up: Inception is Christopher Nolan's follow-up to The Dark Knight and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and a cast of dozens in an elaborate "dream heist" film that combines elements of Vertigo, The Matrix, Heat, Ocean's 11 and Memento into one big stew of IMAXian proportions. And yet...

Look, I don't need to be fooled — and maybe I misunderstood Inception, in which case I'm not as smart as I think — but there was only one moment in the entire film which I thought was legitimately "reality." Everything else was a dream. Or a "dream within a dream within a dream within another dream" to be more precise. And since that's how I felt, nothing mattered.

This is where it gets tricky for me: Clearly the ending (which I'll get to) is not real — of course it's not. but I don't even think those first and second acts are real. When DiCaprio's Dom Cobb is recruiting Eames (Tom Hardy, getting to portray the only character with a pulse) and those faceless baddies are chasing him like some B-rate Bourne movie, did you actually think that was happening? Legitimate question. Because during those scenes I was like: "Oh, well, we're in a dream again." And then when Ken Watanabe's mumble-mouthed Saito showed up, like a Mercedes driving deus ex machina, I definitely thought we were in a dream.

Same goes for how easily Cobb found Ellen Page's Ariande and how she just stumbled back — and how they found Dileep Rao's Yusuf doing some crazy chemistry bullshit with tiny jars. None of that felt real to me. And maybe it was supposed to be real, but then Nolan needed to do a better job of placing that stuff inside a "real world." Even The Matrix has that "human farm" shot that gives it all some context. This was just dream into dream into dream with no stakes and no characters. Even if the supporting players were all just creations of Cobb's subconscious — debatable — they could have had personality. I just sat there wishing this cast was in something much better and similarly themed. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Maybe Nolan just needed a script written by Charlie Kaufman to pull this off.

I have a feeling he didn't add any patch over "reality" scenes, though, because he wanted the audience to question the entire movie. As characters said numerous times, you never know how you get into a dream, and even the "reality" portions were cut that way — jumping into the middle of scenes, moments, venue changes. The entire movie is one big sleight of hand, meant to force you to question what exactly it is you're watching.

Not surprisingly, a good comp for Inception is Shutter Island, which suffered from many of the same problems as Nolan's film, but was more tragic, more heartbreaking, more cogent and more human. Say what you will about Martin Scorsese — though bite your tongue around me — but he understands human emotions in a way Christopher Nolan only dreams.

What did feel "real" to me then? The flashbacks to the relationship between Cobb and his wife Mal (played by the beautiful Marion Cotillard) and what led to her ultimate demise: That Cobb was guilty of poisoning her mind, that she killed herself because she thought "it was all a dream," and that he left his children an accused murderer. Unfortunately, none of that was as heart-wrenching as Shutter Island, because when we finally see what happened in Shutter Island, my stomach was literally turning. Here, I was surprised and thought it was a good, dark twist, but it didn't give me any sort of reaction because I didn't really care. Yes, Cobb, in theory, goes on living in his fake reality forever, his mind turned to mush — but since he was never a character, it didn't have any impact. Not to go back on Shutter Island, but: when Leo turned to Mark Ruffalo at the end of that movie and was still "trapped," my heart broke. When he left the spinning top on the table, not caring whether it kept spinning or fell, it didn't. Nolan never made me care. Couple that with a grand plot itself devoid of tension and that's a problem.

Here's what I mean about that last point: I love "one last heist" movies, but Inception didn't even succeed on its very basic ambitions. The MacGuffin was total crap — of course — but this seemed egregious. Cillian Murphy as some second-rate Charles Foster Kane with a pinwheel instead of Rosebud? That was tedious, never fully explained and needed to be either more vague or more focused. Either way. And while in Ocean's 11 you got to marvel along at the absurdity of the plot and then watch with awe as Steven Soderbergh revealed how it all went down, here you got confusing psychobabble and no real grasp on what the science was, how it was working or even how they did it. It just happened, and so you're left to go, "Cool," without having anything else to fill in underneath that statement. Hell, even The Prestige — which is a load of crap — wound up explaining its trick.

I do like Nolan: He's ambitious, smart and visually unmatched. As in: How did they do the zero gravity scenes with Joseph Gordon-Levitt? (Seriously: How? It was some of the most breathtaking stuff I've seen on film.) It's just maybe he doesn't need to be as ambitious. The Dark Knight was Heat with Batman and The Joker. Simple. I just felt like "Inception" got entirely too cluttered with entirely too many ideas. And as a result, it didn't work like he had intended. Nolan deserves kudos for trying to elevate the blockbuster game, but elevation doesn't equate to success.