I thought it was ace, saw it at the cinema and when it comes down in price I'll be getting the DVD. The twist with what lead to his wife's demise was well thought-out and I was gripped throughout.

On the other hand, I didn't like The Matrix at first, it seemed to lose it's way when all the guns came out and the massive anti-climax of Neo just diving into Agent Smith at the end. However, I warmed to it much more after I watched the sequels, which I felt improved on the original.

I won't try and convince you though, that's just my preferences.

I watched that overlong pile of drivel last night and it left me completely baffled.

I saw Inception in the summer and can't all believe the hype and praise it has received. The most boring film I've seen all year, I was nearly falling asleep and the guy next to me was!

Fell asleep. The FPO enjoyed it though. Mind you, io didn't like the Matrix either.

that make you sleepy. I had the same problem watching Nightmare on Elm Street 1&2 last night - must be some psychological trigger.

Oh and Inception was brilliant - like a dream itself, don't analyse it and go with the flow and its a great experience.

Utter rubbish.

who stuck it out for the first 15 mins then declared it as "a load of old bollocks" and went off to do some ironing.
I however stuck with it til the end before concurring with her view.
A poor man's Matrix in my opinion (without the plot or great cinema tricks)...and what was not to understand in the Inception plot??? Are people truly that thick these days that they could not follow it!! I am not a brain surgeon but most of the film was blooming obvious to me.
This was nowhere near a good film, let alone great, imho.

I felt the same way about it. I thought it was overly complicated. For example, I still don't understand why the weightlessness didn't extend to all the levels and no one who has tried to explain it to me has made any sense as far as I'm concerned. The amount of car chasing, gun/fist fighting etc etc was way over the top for my taste. I was really bored toward the end. And the bottom line was I didn't really care about the characters or how their story lines turned out.

On the other hand I loved The Matrix. One of my all time favorites. And I was immediately struck by the similarities between the two films. I kept telling people that if they didn't love The Matrix they didn't have a chance of liking Inception because it was much more complicated and harder to wrap your mind around.

Every Christopher Nolan film is worse - sometimes only slightly worse, sometimes much worse, but always worse - than its predecessor. And Inception was his Last Airbender.

After 'The Dark Knight', Nolan has now made 2 consecutive films that are tedious, too long, and totally uninvolving.

I didn't dislike 'Inception' as much as 'The Dark Knight' (a terrible film propped up by a great performance).

I quite like the fact that it stimulated heated conversation about whether the plot's internal logic stood up - Hollywood should make more films that get an emotional reaction like that rather than the bland, forgettable pap which counts for the vast majority of its output nowadays.

However, any warm feelings I had toward Inception were fatally undermined by the closing shot which annoyed me beyond belief. It didn't intrigue me. It didn't make me want to think more deeply about the movie. It made me want to call up Chris Nolan and shout 'You're a smart alec wanker' down the phone.

Pseudo intellectual bullcrap smuggled into a popcorn movie.
I prefer a film that engages me emotionally like say Toy Story 3.
That's all.

..but that didn't stop it being one of the greatest films ever made, and that too polarised opinion.
Many people wrongly found that dull an'áll.

I would agree with my friend who said something along the lines of 'it will appear great if you are the sort of person who doesn't watch challenging films very often.'

I can forgive Empire for wetting their pants over it, it's my own fault for still reading it but I expect more from Kermode.

I didn't think it was awful like some of you, but certainly nowhere near the fim of the year.

"Social Network" is (and I speak as someone who thinks that Facebook is beyond a waste of time..almost as mind numbingly uninteresting as Twitter)

LOOK AT ME!!

and it does it very well indeed. Like AVATAR before it, isn't that enough some times? There's nothing wrong with having The Ramones in your record collection, so what's wrong with having films that pretty much the same thing.

.."Inception" is a popcorn film, and after some of the teeth-grindingly awful crap Hollywood has served up in recent years, seemingly aimed at 12 year old boys, I found it refreshingly smart.
I don't think its central conceit held water, but if you want to point fingers at over-hyped rubbish, you only have to look at "Avatar" which was basically 2 and a half hours sitting inside a Yes cover.

I was Editor of Empire magazine issues 1-44.

Inception is officially rubbish.

There ya go.

Barney

I missed Inception at the cinema, but bought it when it came out on DVD. I’ve watched it three times and enjoyed it, albeit with some reservations. The film is criticised for lacking emotional depth. In fact it’s there in spades – the movie’s premise is based on Dom’s complicated relationship with his wife and his yearning to see his children again; without this the plot collapses. I thought the standoffishness of the characters can be accounted for by the fact that they live in a disassociated state where they never really know where they are, or whether what’s going on is real. It’s by no means clear at the end of the film whether Dom is still dreaming. All we know is that, wherever he is, he’s happy to accept that as his reality.

I wasn’t too keen on the way that the bespoke dreams often resembled generic, late 1990s videogame levels, in which hordes of enemies governed by poor AI throw themselves at you. In an unconscious world where anything is possible applying these restraints felt a bit counter-intuitive, although they were explained in the film:– The waves of attackers represent the immune system of the dreamer’s consciousness defending itself from interlopers, while the tailored dream’s are labyrinths designed to lead the dreamer in a particular direction while giving the illusion of free will. It mirrors the idea of a maze that isn’t really a maze which was explored by Jorge Luis Borges in his story - Death and the Compass. Here the protagonist tells the detective who has tracked him down: "The next time I kill you, I promise you that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing."

My problem is that I’ve played through countless, on-the-rails, first and third person shooters; often they’re so dull that if you dreamed anything like this, you would wake-up out of sheer boredom. The final dream – the one in the snow - bore some striking similarities to level four of a long forgotten game called: Second Sight which employed a similar mind-fuck plotline.

I thought about Inception a lot after I first saw it. Ideas and scenes went round and round in my head and I knew that I was going to watch it again. If a film achieves that, then it can’t be a bad thing. At the same time it’s tempting to imagine what might have been. Having come this far and spent so much money, I wish Nolan had gone a bit further with the concept. Like another of his epics - The Dark Knight - Inception felt like a 13 episode series squeezed into an afternoon’s worth of cinema.

especially about the dreams resembling levels of a video game. I've gotten used to this though - there were times watching people shoot zombies in "The Walking Dead" when it felt more like watching the X Box over my kid brother's shoulder than cutting edge tv drama - and I'm past being bothered by it.
But as you say yourself, the soul of the film is whether Leo gets back to his children "without this the plot collapses". So what does the director do? He decides at the death, to pull the rug out from the emotional heart of the film.
And, as Barry Norman might say, why not?
After all there is a long tradition in smart cinema of ambiguous or provocative movies, and Christopher Nolan is a serious director who has already pulled off a "big idea" film with the excellent "Memento".
Kubrick was mentioned by another poster, and there was a fellow more interested in the fine working parts of his construction than the feelings of his characters.
(I also think Michael Haneke's "Hidden" - loved by Cine-types, hated by the multitude - has a lot to answer for)
The problem as I see it is you either have a genuinely involving story about believable people wrapped inside the smoke and mirrors of a diverting "concept" or your radical idea is so well conceived and brilliantly executed that the players are of only secondary interest.
For me Inception falls well short of being the latter and perversely chooses to sabotage the possibility of the former just to score some "clever clever" points.
Having said all that, my OP was written in the cloud of disappointment following a first viewing of a film for which I had high hopes. Having had time to digest it, I feel kinder towards it and I take the points people have made about being engaged by the fate of Leo's wife and the fact that a hollywood blockbuster can be ambitious and have enough meat on it that we can even have a debate about it.

Inception is not a revolution in cinema. Nor is it a pile of shite. It's a superior piece of popcorn fluff to be watched and enjoyed once or twice.

Sadly it has a collection of extremely annoying fans who have been writing metaphorical cheques that the film cant quite cash. Films which attract the geeky fanboys are often never as good as the fanboys think.

Which may be why I haven't see Scott Pilgrim vs The World yet.

my head hurts, or does it...?