utenan,
I'd argue that the negative reviews don't point to anything specific either, other than that they didn't like the movie.
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"I'm trying very hard to be fair here. Given my high expectations and all the praise, it's hard not to bite back. So I'll temper my initial review ("Sitting through Inception was more disappointing and more frustrating than discovering my first girlfriend was cheating on me") with this one: "Inception buried everything that I might have loved about it 10 feet under things that were terrible."
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Says nothing about the movie apart from that this guy didn't like it, and he's probably a boring dude to begin with if he couldn't keep his girlfriend content enough not to cheat on him.
Quote:
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"This film is downright boring. I literally almost fell asleep at a noon showing. I also almost walked out 35 minutes before it ended; I simply did not care about any of these characters. The effects are neat, and look pretty great, but the story is so asinine that... wait, no, the story isn't asinine, its execution is."
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A little better, but still no specifics here. He expresses his opinion well enough but doesn't support it with anything.
Anyway, in general I hate reading reviews before a film because I prefer to go in without any expectations and form my own opinion. Inception really benefits from a blank slate more than any other recent release and in fact the only movie I can think of that would benefit more from a clean perspective is Memento from the same director.
With that said, I think a lot of the positive reviews for Inception are intentionally vague to avoid spoiling any details of the movie and taking away from someone's experience. I know that has been the case for me discussing it with people who haven't seen it. I can see however how it wouldn't be for everyone... it's a complex, non-conventional story that can be difficult to follow. Much like Memento you have to pay attention and keep track of the details as the plot progresses to see the whole picture when things come together (though Inception at least follows a linear timeline throughout the bulk of the film).
Another thing I'm picking up on from reading some of the negative reviews on IMDb is that it seems the reviewers just weren't interested in the subject matter. I've always been fascinated by dreams, consciousness and how the human mind perceives reality, so I found Inception to be a very interesting film. Someone who wasn't interested in those subjects would probably not pick up on or care about some of Inception's deeper themes and for them it would likely just be a thriller with cool effects that they would either enjoy or not enjoy depending probably more on their mood than anything else.
I guess as a conclusion then, if you didn't like Memento or if a thriller about dreams and human perception of reality sounds boring, don't go see it. Otherwise, go make up your own mind.