Jonah Weiner at Slate Magazine has a great review of Inception (How to make sense of all those dreams-within-dreams in Inception) that does a great job of tackling some of the criticisms of the film. If you’ve seen the film, and then read the reviews, I recommend you read his review. He nicely takes them to task.
And then there is this smart comment of his:
If there’s an element in Inception that mitigates the bleakness, it’s the giddy way in which Nolan pilfers from cinema history. The alpine showdown and Mombassa street chase are straight out of James Bond and Jason Bourne. The deathbed set in Robert Fischer’s unconscious recalls the Star Trek holodeck. The zero-gravity fight scenes evoke both The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The spectral wife, Mal, haunts our hero like Hari in Solaris. Added up, Inception is something of a love letter to some of Nolan’s favorite films, and his extracting, forging, architecting heroes are not simply culture-bludgeoned victims, but emblems of that liberated Postmodern figure, the remixer, who bends and subverts mass culture to his will.
The more I think about the film, the more I am starting to think that it is a masterpiece that will be talked about and analyzed for time to come.
Smart People I Know 