"The Summer's Best, Most Disappointing Blockbuster"

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Orr reviews Christopher Nolan's latest:

[I]n this end, it may be Inception's greatest strength, its precision engineering, that also proves its signal weakness. Nolan has always been a nimble, meticulous director, but his best work has exceeded such technical virtues. His first major film, Memento, may have taken the form of a gimmick movie, but it transcended its own structural ingenuity to become one of the most unique and resonant tragedies of the past 25 years. His last movie, The Dark Knight, was also his messiest, with flaws that included a collapsing final act. Yet it, too, perhaps in part thanks to that messiness, found unexpected grandeur and gravity in its subject.

For all its elegant construction, Inception is a film in which nothing feels comparably at stake. (In this it resembles Nolan's The Prestige, another admirably heady tale of perception and reality that never quite found a hearty emotional grip.)