When Memento came out in 2000, it was something of a sleeper hit and everyone had to see it. "You've got to see this," said my friends. It looked dumb to me. The premise was boring. Guy has amnesia and tries to find the person who killed his wife. Wow, what an original concept. Amnesia and wife killing? This must be the work of a cliché artist I thought to myself. I didn't see the film until five years later when I was looking for something to watch with my boyfriend. It was a bad movie. I wasn't disappointed and I wasn't surprised. The characters were one-dimensional, the plot and "twists" were predictable, the action scenes lacked finesse, and everything else about the poorly paced film was boring. I didn't care that his wife was killed and I didn't care that he had amnesia. This is what I like to call the Phantom Menace effect.
One of my primary gripes with Star Wars: Episode I, alongside the fact that its just plain terrible, is that I couldn't care less about any of the characters. Qui-gon Gin or whatever was just a dude and when Darth Maul stabbed him nobody cared. Darth Maul wasn't even cool because he just looked like a goth kid and had no history or motivation. The only reason we care at all about Obi-wan is that we've seen him for 5 seconds in a previous film. We're treated to many great special effects and lots of people we don't care about running around doing nothing. The "Phantom Menace" subtitle isn't describing Palpatine's plot to take over the galaxy, it's describing the feeling I get from all the characters: vague shadows of people cloaked and lurking around the set. It just gets worse with the next two prequels but we're not here for StarWars talk.
The one thing that was kind of novel about Memento was the play with time; how you simultaneously go forward and backward in time as whatever-the-main-character's-name-was is trying to find out what happened to him. But the effect was interesting for about the first 10 minutes of the 113 minute film, and was really nothing more than some art house shtick, which is probably exactly where our illustrious director lifted it from. The whole movie was basically a single gimmick that I could have understood in about a minute and been satisfied with.
When I first saw Batman Begins I was so thrilled that it wasn't a horrible and cartoony Tim Burton abortion that I failed to see Christopher Nolan's name and thought it was a good movie. After I saw The Dark Knight, however, I paused. Something was wrong here. How could The Dark Night be so terrible yet I loved Batman Begins? Well I re-watched it and it turns out Batman Begins was also a bad movie. I could go on with why exactly I feel this way about the Batman movies, but my following appraisal of Inception will work well for any Nolan film. In fact, one word describes how I feel about Christopher Nolan's movies: porridge.
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Sometimes he stirs the porridge and there are some scene changes. Sometimes he pours some syrup on the porridge and its a bit sweet, other times he goes for the cinnamon spice. But at the end of the day you have a bowl of processed grain in milk and no matter what you do to it, it's going to look the same, taste the same, and have the same gooey texture in your mouth. Christopher Nolan knows this and he also knows that the sheltered and philistine American audience loves porridge. Every few years he cooks up a big batch for everyone and dishes it out at Cinemark. He slops it into your tray for around $9. "Please, sir. I want some more!" shout the American audiences, all too eager to recruit their friends for indentured servitude under the MPAA. Thus a summer blockbuster is born.
Inception starts out innocently enough: a Bond-esque opener with asian dudes and some neat architecture. Oh but wait a minute, this is actually a dream. Ahh, the thread is unwound. But it's a dream within a dream! Oh my. Then some guy gets dragged off. And Leonardo (I honestly can't remember his character's name) is working for the asian guy or something. And he's the best. Maybe. There's lots of stuff happening but the pacing is such that Nolan hopes you won't notice how shoddy the scenes are. What's in the dream box? Why are they giving each other blood transfusions? Are we in the future or an alternate reality? Well I don't really care about any of that anyway so I will just keep watching.
Ok so he has to assemble a team so he can work for the asian dude but he's wanted for murder and stuff. Some cute indie college girl who is from France but speaks perfect English decides to follow Leo on his highly dangerous and illegal escapades for no reason at all. Michael Caine makes a cameo. Girl starts to learn about Leo's secret which is that he's a sparkly vampire and also feels responsible for his idiot wife's death and that interferes with his ability to work somehow. They go to Africa and there's a dude, then there's two dudes and a chase scene or two for some reason. Most of the one-liners that will be repeated ad nausem have been said at least once at this point. Gems like, "you see a train but you want to get on the train but you can't." Pseudo-intellectual stuff. (Nolan just added some apple slices to the porridge, hope you enjoy.)
Then more stuff happens and they have to abduct this guy so Leo can get home, whatever. They enter his dreams and about one hour into the movie, the actual movie that everyone came to see starts. So they're in his mind now and everything is paced oddly and doesn't make sense (and I don't mean the time-domain-multiplication effect or whatever nonsense) but that's because they're in a dream dummy! It's not lazy film-making! There some special effects and fight scenes (sugar & spice) and some pathetically visible twists and turns and eventually they get out of his mind maybe except the editor forgot to put in the part where they're all back on the plane. And then maybe we're still in Leo's dream? Wow what a cliffhanger, Nolan. I'm on the edge of my seat, except not because I almost fell asleep during this two-and-a-half-hour-long snooze fest.
Leo's character never changes. A bunch of people I don't care about run around doing nothing. Except this time they're dreaming. It was all a dream! The king of cliché has done it again. The only reason I'm bothering to review this movie is because I'm tired of movies like this. It's irritating. I saw it because everyone said it was great. Nolan fooled me once more into grasping the ladle and sucking down his broth, and of course it was once again a boring waste of time. I'm mad about it in the same way that one gets mad at a pro opponent in a video game. Nolan is a pro at churning out crap that anyone is apparently ready to lick from his asshole, and it makes me mad because I wish I was that good.
