Is 'Inception' Overrated?

Inception is boring with a premise based in nonsense. A persons mind is a abstract soup of thoughts that change in a nano second. The whole thing a dream or whatever, I fell asleep 20 minutes in and my dreams hold more creativity then this spew. People like to applaud themselves for setting thru this nonsense and say they are now the water cooler smarty pants club members, when the emperor has no clothes, this movie no substance and the Smurfs more challenging

I think that you make some great points here, but I don't think that you were entirely honest. There's definitely a little bit of pussification here. You did not like this movie at all and it's completely obvious. I have no shame in admitting that I did not enjoy a single moment of this movie. For myself, this is not some knee-jerk reaction based on disappointment. I never really bought in to the hype (I very rarely do) and I didn't really think that it looked all that great in the previews. So my level of expectation was somewhere around being slightly more than interested enough to pay to see the film on the silver screen. I have a very simple system for determining what makes a great film and that is to simply determine if it meets all of the criteria, or prerequisites, of what makes a great film... great. If it only meets three criteria, than it is a decent film; four and you have a good film; five and it's great and six or more and it's astonishing or it could even be a masterpiece. Anything below three is sub par or terrible. Inception had two and a half things going for it. I'll give it directing and special effects. It gets half credit for it's decent sci-fi concept (despite popular belief, the idea of infiltrating dreams is not that difficult to conceive and it has been used in many novels and a few movies, "Dreamscape" for example) but I can not give it a whole point there because it really wasn't handled very well, in fact I found the explanations and theory behind everything to be nonsensical and corny. I am one of those people that can recall dreams I had on most nights and often remember certain parts quite vividly. I've even experienced lucid dreaming numerous times. Believe me, you can have a dream within a dream, within a dream, within a dream on to infinity and you'll never reach limbo. In my opinion the film did a terrible job of making the dreams feel at least somewhat dreamlike. The dreams were just to pedestrian and mundane. This can't be blamed on the limitations of film. No it's a cut and dry case of lack of imagination. It feels almost like it's written by someone who does not recall dreams very often if ever, at all. Where as someone like Charlie Kaufman is obviously constructing dreamlike quality from a real place of knowing and understanding. He's clearly someone who has spent a lot of recollected time dreaming. Beyond that the entire movie was base and simplistic, despite the implications of the concept. It meets no other criteria beyond those two and a half mentioned. The writing was meager, the acting was watered down but that's probably because of the aforementioned "meager writing", the characters were weak and underdeveloped, the ambiguity was pretentious and contrived, the action was ridiculous and without consequence (A: for 3/4 of the movie they can't be hurt, B: I didn't care if anyone actually lived). In conclusion, this movie falls somewhere between sub-par and decent. This is only my indisputable opinion.

The problem with the movie is it doesn't give you any reason to be interested or care about the characters. Like a lot of modern day movies it doesn't take the time to build character development. Most overrated movie of the year isn't out of line when speaking of this film. It simply has no heart. The movie industry is in trouble if this movie is rated #6 on IMDB top 250. Not only that, but it makes me shake my head and wonder what is wrong with people.

Inception is a good movie but realy it is so overrated .Nolan i a great director and for example Memento (2000) is 10 times better in my opinion.

hey, i agree fully......the movie was not clever whatsoever.
cgi was the only interesting thing in this film, and im not a fan of cgi....
2010 has had very bad films, too many remakes, no originality.
tbh i thought shutter island was a way better film than inception, and im not a leo lover, he is ok but im not his biggest fan, i thought shutter island was fairly clever, but i worked out what was going on in shutter island at a certain point involving 2 jackets, i wont say what as i may do a spoiler!....
inception is a great film if you want to think you are more inteligent than you actually are, and you bought into it by going to see it......
i downloaded it so it cost me nothing but 2 and a half hours of time i will never get back.
someone make a film that hits you like the usual suspects, now we are talking!

i think only the people who were too dumb to figure the movie found it mind blowing. which is why they had to watch it more than once. it was good and even awesome, but to be counted as one of the greatest of all time is ridiculous. my brother and i could guess what would happen, before it happened. and i'm sure many others did as well. i felt that was the most disappointing aspect of the movie, "it was predictable". i wanted to see a movie where i couldn't guess what would happen. we could easily figure out things like the dead wife was alive in his dreams and the fact that the 1st scene would be the last scene where the old jap guy is caught in limbo. we were also skeptical that they should have gotten old in the dreams since the time ratio would make them 50 years older, but they revealed that in the end which was good. they didn't even stick to the time ratio, once it was 20:1 and then it varied. i haven't seen it again, so i can't discuss accurately about the time ratio and other irrelevant minute facts.

All in all good movie 3.5 or even 4 out of 5 but not one of the greatest of all time.

and as far as Christopher Nolan movies go both the Dark Knight and Prestige were way better. thats my opinion, reply if you give a damn and if you don't, just ignore it and don't reply with childish arguments.

I agree exactly with everything you said. Overrated, not that clever, not that interesting, miscast, but decent enough film :)

I think Inception is a great movie. And I actually understood it. Yay :D

May be you should ve watched only the half of the movie.. Not only this, i mean whenever you watch a movie you watch only half because only then you will not understand anything.. Dude, movie which explains nothing, which people can't understand wont work.. Maybe one or two.. But everybody needs explanation.. They cannot produce a movie only for you.. I agree this movie is not mind blowing but the fact which you are justifying is total crap..

I think that, for a lot of people, the "complexity" that people are detecting is based solely on the potential revelation in the final scene. It's perceived as one of those twists that makes you rethink everything you watched (a la "The Usual Suspects" or "The Sixth Sense"). The problem is, when you start to rethink all of it, you find that there isn't some alternate way to view the events of the film, nor is there an unreliable narrator who has lied to you for two and a half hours. It's very straightforward, and the ending, rather than presenting a "twist," actually is simply, and intentionally, ambiguous. Is Cobb's entire world dream upon dream upon dream? Maybe. Is Cobb really just a guy who's trying to get back to his kids with the help of his pals? Maybe.

In every conversation I've had about the film since it came out, people want to debate the meaning of the movie, or debate whose dream was whose, or whether or not the top ultimately fell. For a couple weeks, I couldn't understand why these conversations aggravated me, or why I wanted to reply with, "None of it really matters." I eventually realized that the problem is that the movie, and what the viewer takes from it, is centered around personal opinion and not any sort of fact that the movie posits. The movie is ridiculously entertaining, in ways that movies rarely are these days (which probably makes it appear better than it actually is), but at the end of the day the ending of the film wasn't revelatory--it was the ONLY way the movie could have ended satisfactorily. Did the top fall or didn't it? There aren't really any clues in the film that will jump out at you on repeat viewings, it all comes down to whether or not you're a "glass half full" or "glass half empty" type or what sort of mood you were in when you watched it.

So I agree. It's a really fantastic movie, with neat ideas applied in attractive ways, but it isn't the piece of rare cinematic gold everyone wants it to be.