Most of the critical response is focused on the film's twisty, reality-bending plot, but I want to draw attention to Nolan's direction of the onscreen action. In interviews, Nolan has expressed some disdain with Hollywood's obsession with Hong Kong-style kung-fu fights for the past decade or so. Specifically, he has stated (on the "Batman Begins" DVD extras) that the excessive stylization has robbed a lot of onscreen violence of its threat, and presumably its dramatic weight. Coupled with a similar dislike for the overuse of CGI-based special effects, Nolan has aimed (specifically in the Batman movies) to keep the action stunt-based as often as possible, and utilize practical versus visual effects (A great example being the memorable Lower Wacker Drive car chase in "The Dark Knight," ending with the actual flipping of a real truck on downtown La Salle).
Nolan has maintained this approach with "Inception" and personally the results are fantastic. There's a short but very nice footchase towards the beginning of the film with armed corporate thugs chasing an unarmed Leonardo DiCaprio through the narrow streets of an African city. Whereas the Bourne movies have Matt Damon engaging in a lot of superhuman hand and foot work, as do anything starring Angelina Jolie these days, the entire sequence feels much less choreographed and far more messy. DiCaprio falls, trips, makes messy landings. His punches are portrayed as being delivered by someone with training (his character is a corporate spy) but there's a hasty, desperate pacing that reinforces the idea that he is a real person facing real dangers.
And then of course there's the zero-gravity hallway fight between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and another onscreen antagonist that's been popping up in the film's advertising. In many ways, the scene is an inversion of the approach used by the Wachowski brothers in their "Matrix" movies. Both "Inception" and "The Matrix" feature fights set in artificial worlds of the mind (a computer-generated illusion in the former, dreams in the latter) where real-world physics are thrown out the window. However, while "The Matrix" used this as an opportunity to have its characters engage in an orgy of wire-fu assisted by some (then) innovated CGI-enhanced camerawork, the hallway fight in "Inception" is rougher and more brutal. According to articles and interviews related to the movie, Nolan opted to film the sequence the old-fashioned way, constructing a giant rotating hallway set in which the actors were required to bounce around the walls and surfaces.
Nolan caught some flack from both critics and movie fans for the fight scenes in "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight." Namely his decision to deliberately keep things dark and murky, a creative choice made (according to Nolan himself) to convey how the criminal characters perceive Batman. (However, I disagree with the opinion held by many that this is as visually confusing as the approach of the Bourne movies, with their nonstop shaky-cam and closeups). There's none of this in "Inception" though. Nolan seems to have turned the clock back to a time before CGI, MTV and rapid-cutting, pulling the camera back and even slowing the pace down a bit. Nolan has stated that he is a big James Bond fan and his favorite film in the series is "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," a fact that becomes obvious during an attack on an icy mountaintop stronghold in "Inception" with strong similarities to the Bond film. Bodies are clearly visible, the audience never loses track of who is involved in the scene, and the geography of the battlefield is fully understood. Some slow-motion is used, but surprisingly not when shots are being fired, giving the gunfights a greater sense of immediacy.
Like most of those who enjoyed "Inception," I was definitely impressed by its originality. But what made its action scenes great was their almost old-fashion nature. There's something to be said about what's tried and true.
If you're interested in seeing how the hallway fight was filmed, there's a short article here:http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1643947/20100719/story.jhtml
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