'Inception'was loved before it was hated

It was one the greatest movies of all time, until it wasn't.

Several weeks before it appeared in theaters, Christopher Nolan's Inception picked up some of the most flowery hosannas bestowed on a film in many months. A select mix of critics, film awards columnists, and online movie bloggers who had seen advance screenings rained down unanimous compliments.

But as the film neared its public debut Friday, that unanimity crumbled. Several influential mainstream critics declared themselves less than enthralled.

Ambitious films - and as an original concept from the fertile mind of writer-director Nolan, Inception is indisputably ambitious - frequently divide critics. But the swing here was sharper than usual.

"There seems to be a tidal phenomenon going on - the wave went one way, and then it went another," says Salon critic Andrew O'Hehir, who with a lukewarm review was part of the second wave. "I almost want a social scientist to come in and analyze it."

The Inquirer's Steven Rea, in a 2 1/2-star review, called the film "epically silly, overwrought noir."

Anticipation for Inception had been building for months. It is Nolan's first feature since the hugely popular and critically lauded Batman film The Dark Knight in 2008, and in an era in which studio movies increasingly stick to familiar subject matter, here was a storyline - a tortured hero named Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads a team of dream invaders on a risky mission - that defied convention.

In that first wave of reviews, Kirk Honeycutt at the trade paper Hollywood Reporter said Inception puts Nolan "at the top of the heap of sci-fi all-stars." Online columnists were even more frothy, canonizing the film with the likes of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. A "Kubrickian masterpiece with heart," declared Anne Thompson at Indiewire.

But as critics from large consumer outlets began weighing in last week, the current shifted. Reviewers from the Wall Street Journal, Salon, and the New York Times all registered deep reservations, criticizing, among other things, the film's triumph of the technical and conceptual over the narrative and the emotional.

"For the most part, Inception is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth," wrote O'Hehir in Salon. "The emperor's new bed-clothes," declared the Journal's John Anderson.

There were also a number of mainstream critics who exalted the film, including the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan and the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert. Audiences also embraced Inception; the movie picked up $62.8 million over its opening weekend.

But overall, the film lost a good fraction of its cachet.

The polarity between the first and second group of reviews, experts say, may in part reflect the differences between Web and print culture. "There's a tendency in the blogosphere and maybe in American culture at large to take anything new and either detest or adore it," says Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips, who gave the movie a qualified three stars out of five. "What I think some of the critics are trying to do is bring an element of nuance."

"We live in an era when there's a tendency to overvalue anything that's even slightly good," says longtime Newsweek critic David Ansen, current artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival.