Inception: missed conception?

I wrote the following to a fellow movie lover friend when I got back from the theater on Saturday. I'm posting it here for posterity.


Nathan, Wendy and I saw "Inception" at the Air & Space Museum last night. It was an experience. Neither good nor bad. I kept thinking about Memento and how when watching that I was on the edge of my season trying to figure everything out - and, if I recall correctly, ultimately it was a neatly incapsulated small world. With Inception I felt that it was a much bigger and complicated, messier issue of how multiple subconsciouses building worlds within each other. There a sort of time travel element that wasn't fleshed out nearly enough. I think the IMAX screen helped it a little. Overall, it was biting off more than it could chew. For what it was it should have been shorter. The ski bound shootout was overkill. That 20 minutes or so should have been used to better explain why there needed to be so many layers of dreaming or better fleshing out the role of the architect. Or just cut out. Ellen Page's "training" was too short.  For me, that mindbending sequence was the most interesting part of the concept visually and intellectually. I was much more interested in learning each team member's role in the process than I was the violence and chase that was forced by Fischer's subconscious. That violence, etc...felt like a cop out. Christopher Nolan injected that tension which forced the team to abandon what was apparently a meticulously detail plan and it became more or less an action movie when I think it would have been more interesting to continue exploring the "heist" within the dreams on an intellectual level.