Inception would have worked in a groovy kind of Tim Burton type movie in my opinion instead of a high action Hollywood movie.
Inception could have worked as anything other than what it was. Or, hell, if it had just
known what it was.
It was a pretty-looking grunt action movie half the time. The other half, it expected me to care deeply about the melancholy of its cardboard-cutout characters. And the entire time, it's too complicated for its own good. Not that it's hard to follow (I've seen some people say this; that's ridiculous), but there are ways to write around the characters making up new dream rules every fifteen minutes. "Now we'll be trapped in level three forever, because it's Tuesday. You didn't know that?"
It also operates on this weird pretension (especially in its I-could-see-this-from-a-mile-away ending sequence) that it's addressing heavy philosophical issues. Although, if that's true, I must have missed the part where it probed at anything deeper than "Lol what is reality?" which I guess seems deep if you're, like, in tenth grade. Even at its clumsiest,
The Matrix trilogy is a better philosophy/action mix than this. And it's about a hundred times more subtle, which says a lot of unfortunate things about
Inception.
Finally, I'm not hep on its particular on-screen interpretation of the dream world. I've only seen a few movies which I felt accurately captured the feeling of a dream and dream logic. Most of them are pretty horrifying for it. Nolan's version is just way, way too clean.
Oh well. Its trailer is still really good.