I don’t really understand what everyone likes so much about this movie. I thought it was fine and all, but there wasn’t a lot of there there. Spoilers, I guess.

I mean, the fundamental “is it real or a dream?” thing is a total cliche at this point, with both Dark City and The Matrix having handled it really well like a decade ago. So that by itself isn’t going to be interesting, you need to do something with it. And what Nolan did with it was… a Hollywood action movie?

Car chases, explosions, corporate espionage, gunfights, and even a James Bondian ski resort shooty explodey thing. And the problem is, that doesn’t really work, because I just can’t really give a shit about dream gunfights and dream explodey things and dream car chases because they’re not real, even in the context of the fiction. And yeah, Nolan tried to provide the tension of “If you die here, you go insane” so that it would work, but it really didn’t for me.

So take a cliched theme, marry it to tension-less action, add on a head-thumpingly unsubtle ending, and what you’ve got is really just a pretty mediocre movie.

Great production values, superb cast (particularly Juno and 500 Days), a few moments of visual interest (mostly when Ellen Page was Dark Citying in the early part)… but all in the service of a movie that didn’t have much to say. If I don’t remind myself that Nolan made the superb Prestige, I have to think he’s the most overrated filmmaker of the modern era. Even with that reminder, I’m not sure it’s not true.