So, first things first, I think it must be said how strange it is that this movie came out and it seems like most people I've talked to barely heard about it- and almost no one has seen it. In pre-plague times, a big, dramatic Christopher Nolan blockbuster featuring a star-studded cast like this would have been one of THE Cultural Events of the Summer. Now? Barely a drop in the bucket. Apparently, Gen Z had better things to do than watch Inception. Good for you, Gen Z! There's a million better things to do.
And Inception is a good point to start with my tearing apart of this film, because it's probably the worst offender of something I feel pretty strongly almost all Christopher Nolan movies suffer from- The assumption that "because the plot is complex, confusing and opaque, the film must inherently be deep, intellectual, and thought-provoking." No. Stop that. Complex, confusing and opaque make a movie none of those things. Everyone involved in this movie needs to go look up what Chekhov's Gun" is and start applying it to their professional body of work immediately. Complex, confusing and opaque leave your audiences bored, because it says to us that you don't care enough about the story you're telling to flesh it out and bring us into the story. Really though, underneath what it conveys is a lack of confidence in your narrative structure, the characters we're following, or the world they're inhabiting. And if the people writing the story don't have confidence in those things, why should we?
On the flipside, the main character of this movie is a boring douche who has waaay, way, way too much confidence in himself, despite the fact that he kinda constantly makes shit worse for everyone around him. The female lead is married to an Eastern European arms dealer who she's spent years trying to get away from. There are literally three separate points in the movie where she almost gets away from this asshole, only to have our lead swoop in and fuck things up for her. She literally tells him on three separate occasions how he's ruining her life and she doesn't want him around, and every time he just ignores her so he can fuck things up even worse. I honestly don't know why she didn't just have her husband kill him and use that as a distraction so she could escape. Her whole subplot was way more interesting than anything in the incoherent main storyline.
And on that same note, nothing about the plot is ever really coherent. The plot involves the lead tracking down an arms dealer who is supplying someone who is attacking us from the future (Who the "Us" is is never really specified, or why the lead specifically is set on tracking them down. Or maybe it was and I just wasn't paying attention. This movie throws a whole lot at you while also being really boring. Not a good combination.) for reasons they never really bother to explain.
Speaking of "Never really bother to explain:" When you're telling a time travel story, you need to have straightforward, clear-cut rules that you follow to a T. Any deviation and the audience will get lost. Time travel is really not a genre of story you should set out to do unless you have a clear and cohesive vision of a plot and it absolutely must involve time travel as a plot device. Even the best time travel stories tend to get messy, aimless and confusing towards the end, and it really lends itself to the whole "complex = deep" assumption I previously mentioned. There's one part where he goes into a space where time flows backwards, and apparently because it's reverse radiation that enables you to go backwards (actually the one cool concept in this movie) if you touch fire, you freeze? It kind of felt like they were just making up rules for no reason other than to distract from how bad the plot sucked at that point.
Speaking of things to distract you from how bad the plot sucked, they use a LOT of time having the arms dealer beat the shit out of the female lead. It kinda loses its shock value after the first time, and after that point, it's kind of like the whole "complex = deep" thing- you're not shocking or tantalizing the audience by defying norms, you've just gotten them to the point where they start tuning you out because you're more annoying noise in the same way as your weird grandfather's political posts on Facebook. I don't know why they had to linger on her getting hurt so much. We already know that a fucking arms dealer is not a good dude. You don't have to spend 20-30 minutes of screen time telling me that at her expense. To be honest with you, it really feels like her whole role in this movie is just to be absolutely treated like shit by men. She comes across like she has a rich, vivid life outside of this shitty movie, but we'll never get to see any of that story because Christopher Nolan, in his infinite foolishness, decided it would be better if we got a movie about the two dudes that are actively trying to ruin her life and paint one of these fucking clods as the hero.
The actor who plays the male lead doesn't really do a good job of the role. And to be honest with you, I kind of think it's because he's a pretty decent human being when he's off camera, and the lead in this movie is just the biggest douche on planet Earth. He sits down for a meeting with Michael Caine and tells his liaison to go get the waiter and order for him like it's some kind of flex. (As someone who's worked in a restaurant before, lemme assure you- this is not a flex, this is a way to ensure the cook spits in your dish.) He's written as this cheesy, over-the-top, cigar-chomping 80s movie bad ass. But the actor playing him is not that typa guy. And this is not that typa movie. It feels so forced and incongruous with how everything else in this movie is trying as hard as possible to be cerebral and thought-provoking. (And miserably failing, I might add.)
People keep wondering "why doesn't anyone go to the movies anymore?" And let me tell ya- This movie right here, this is the answer. It's lazy, incomprehensible slop that assumes because it can fling fifteen dollar words at you a million miles an hour that it's a cinematic masterpiece with a lot to say. Nobody wants to pay twenty bucks to go sit in a theater with a bunch of noisy strangers while you watch this wannabe A24 nonsense! This is just as bad as the Marvel movies. In a way, I do suppose it did its job as a piece of entertainment, because while I was watching, I did have my mind taken off any of my troubles because all I could think about was how fucking terrible this movie was. But as a story with a plot, characters, beginning, middle and end? Complete and utter failure. Absolute atrocity. And with that, I think it's time to end this review. But before I go, some food for thought...
Have you ever watched The Dark Knight as a fully grown adult? The whole plot of the movie is literally "creepy orwellian mass surveillance that violates our human rights is a good thing" and any part where Joker or Two-Face isn't on screen is boring as fuck. Up next... Christoph tears another so-called "classic" into shreds!
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TECHNO WILL HEAL THIS BROKEN WORLD
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