To defend the film critic regurgitation a bit, I don't think characters have to have emotional depth or development, but it's typically a good thing when you care about them and their problems.

As for the exposition point, I think something can be said in defense of the story in the link.

(Spoilers follow.)

Re: emotional attachment. One of the things that annoyed me about Inception was that the big reveal of what happened to Marion Cotillard is totally internal to the weird mechanics of the world. She got driven crazy because she had to be manipulated into giving up the dream world. Erm, okay. To me the main plot with Cillian Murphy had a more interesting core: a guy's self-understanding in relation to his inheritance and successful father. Both are shallow and not "deep", both "develop" in the movie, but the second has some meaning to me and the first doesn't, and it seems to me to be a real advantage.

Re: exposition. I agree that one can get overly concerned with this. But I think it's annoying when exposition goes on during the entire movie, so that rules are introduced in order to explain something going on right that second. For example, all of a sudden it matters whether or not you die in the dream world, and it has to be explained why. Or the elaborate and (to me) cool idea of worming one's way through someone's subconscious by constructing labyrinths and stuff is suddenly thrown out in favor of action sequences involving a "militarized" subconscious. It makes the movie feel more ad hoc and random.

If the movie is going to just be about the mechanics of a world with weird rules, then fine. It's not favorite cup of tea, but I can definitely appreciate it. But there are better and worse constructions and presentations of artificial mechanics, and more and less involving plot vehicles for exploring it. Though some of Kirk Hamilton's particular complaints strike me as silly, I overall agree with him that Inception was inferior to the Matrix in this regard. If anything I think the right analogy with Inception is the second Matrix movie.

----SPOILER----

Absolutely agree regarding throwing out the labyrinth in favor of a fight scene. Throughout the entire movie prior to the snow-dream I had really been looking forward to, what I hoped would be, a thought-provoking or mind-bending maze through the world of dreams and subconsciousness. To have that pushed aside in favor of gunfights was incredibly shallow and disappointing.

> If anything I think the right analogy with Inception is the second Matrix movie.

I too prefer to think Inception as a spiritual successor to Matrix. It explores the idea of layers of constructed reality in a recursive fashion that I hoped Matrix sequels would reveal.

Also, I suspect Matrix world would seem less weird to computer geeks than the world of Inception. The opposite is also true. Inception appeals even to a non sci-fi buff. That is a remarkable achievement for such a complex movie.

There are a lot of questions towards the end, but they make you think much beyond the canvas of the movie. That is truly a rewarding experience.

With regard to your point on exposition on and the question "says who?"

Well David Mamet for one:

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.

Any time any character is saying to another "as you know", that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.

http://ezinearticles.com/?David-Mamets-Rules-For-Writers---W...

Not having seen inception, I can't judge if the exposition somehow avoids this problem, but in general I feel like Mamet is as good an authority as any to appeal to :)

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.

--------------SPOILER ALERT--------------------

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-----------------

---spoiler----- I think you're partly correct. His wife was not a real character but a projection of his subconscious, hence the impression that one of the main characters was 'underdeveloped' - she was supposed to be. I don't think the other characters were underdeveloped, they were just minor characters anyway. If his wife was a normal character, then it would seem like a normal film in terms of character development.

How do I know this? Well, what was the climax of the whole drama? When he confronts his wife's projection in the skyscraper near the end. That's when the most important/meaningful lines of the film are delivered, which are to the effect that dreamed characters/projections can never compare to the real thing, even in a very powerful imagination. That's why the film ends with him back with his kids and why we know he's not dreaming. He no longer wants his wife because she's a projection, but he wants his kids because they're real. He knows the difference.

Nolan cuts just after the top wobbles because he wants us to search for real meaning in the film, rather than have things settled by the director's arbitrary power.

I haven't heard anyone posit that the end is actually supposed to be real. I'd concluded, just like the parent commenter, that the whole thing -supporting characters and all- was a dream to let himself off the hook and move on.

---Spoiler--- You could equally make the argument that he planted the original inception into his wife's mind in that nether-world level of dream depth (you know what I'm talking about I assume - don't want to spoil too much), meaning that it would be necessary for him to go that deep to plant the idea that he didn't have to feel guilty about his wife.

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.

"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 don't doubt there's some truth to these ideas but when I read people apply them it seems like they can't see the wood for the trees.

For instance, one might feel that the architecture student's character is under-developed. If the film wasn't already 2.5 hours, I imagine they would have given this likeable character more scenes. But essentially they did show you everything you need to know about this character, because her fingerprints were all over the set design of the rest of the film. Can't get much more visual-medium than that.

And then people say emotion draws you in deeper than ideas, but here we are days after watching the film avidly discussing its ideas (the layers of dreaming and how they worked). Meanwhile a film like The Matrix which does have 'stronger' individual characters to generate emotion, was compromised by a terrible oversight in the ideas department (ie. the whole concept of humans as batteries/generators is ridiculous). A film doesn't need to engage every level equally or in the standard way to be one of the best, IMO.

You mentioned flashback, well 90% of Inception after the first scene was a flashback, except in this case for once it wasn't at all contrived, because it represented the two characters (protagonist and Japanese dude) de-orphaning their current dream-state by reforming connections to previous layers (remembering the other dreams) and then they could snap back out of all the recursions. In other words, I think the storytelling was masterful.

And what's more, the film was deeply involved in character development and human/emotional themes, because most of it was essentially exploring peoples' subconscious minds and relating that to real life matters. The anchoring struggle was the protagonist 'coming back to reality' in the sense of someone gripped by guilt/regret and being lost in their own imagination at the expense of real relationships/progress (similar to the Solaris remake in this way). Sure, maybe people think this side of the film was poor, but if they'd at least acknowledge/mention it I wouldn't accuse them of missing the wood for the trees or regurgitating standard criticisms without thinking them through.

Note: I have not seen Inception, and I plan to see it, so I am not reading your reply too closely. Nolan, on the basis of past work, is an excellent filmmaker, so I'm sure he isn't guilty of the things I talked about, certainly not blatantly. And I agree that you can't apply criticisms without properly understanding the concepts behind them, and the reason they work the way they do. I grew up in an artistic family. My mother was a theatre actress and director, and my father a songwriter and playwright, so I've been steeped in these mechanics in the practical sense, not just the academic, for a long time.

On the point about flashbacks, probably my favourite film, Once Upon A Time In America, is arguably formed out of flashbacks, or possibly even "flashforwards". The effect, especially after multiple viewings, is something like In Search Of Lost Time in they way it creates a sense of nostalgia, in its case for poorly made life choices, unrequited love, and more. So I certainly wouldn't make the accusation that flashbacks are in principle bad, or necessarily cheap, just often so, in average movies.

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.