This will be about my feelings about Inception and Predators. Its tough to avoid spoilers when talking about Inception, so if you haven't seen it yet, don't read this. For Predators, I'll only address things seen in the trailers, so it won't be as spoilery. Jadia, you get my first blog post based on a facebook comment...
So first, Inception. Everyone and I mean everyone who had seen it told me it was amazing, best movie ever, I'd love it, etc. So I had massive expectations going in... that were mostly met. I thought the last forty five minutes or so of Inception were absolutely flawless. Great acting, innovative action, clever writing... Visually, it was crisp, clean, and didn't have any glaring CGI goofyness (I want to know how they shot some of the "hotel scene"... had to be some crazy green screen sets). The cast was all around excellent, from the comic relief provided by Tom Hardy to the stoic Ken Watanabe to a surprisingly layered Cillian Murphy (his character's emotional payoff was surprisingly moving) and a welcome return to the big screen by Tom Berenger (his first movie in 9 years!).
So why wasn't it a 10 out of 10. For one thing, the inconsistent logic with the "dream worlds." There's a scene towards the beginning of the climax where Joe GL's character is shooting at some far away henchmen with an automatic rifle and then Tom Hardy's character says "dream a little bigger" and blows away the henchmen with a rocket launcher. Its a cute moment, but there are a lot of times throughout the climax when said rocket launcher would come in handy, but conveniently no one else "dreams of it." Also, its established that Ellen Page's character can create the dream levels, but it seems like the end "levels" are a lot tougher than they need to be (that snow fortress could have been a little easier to infiltrate). She also moves stuff around a ton early in the movie, but conveniently forgets to do that later on (I know they say that it would make it obvious to Fischer that they were dreaming and make his projections more aggressive, but literally wrapping the city on itself seems like a huge advantage).
More so than the above plot holes, how easily Ellen Page's character figures out DiCaprio's character's inner psyche and problems. It makes Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character seem really stupid and dense that he never figured it out in years of working with DiCaprio. Its also really dumb for DiCaprio to involve himself as much as he does (why not just have JGL, Yusef, Hardy, and Page's characters go deep into the dream and take Yusef's role in the first dream) considering how mentally damaged he is. A lot of the plot events seem to happen to create tension because the script says so and not for any real logical reason.
By comparison, Predators overachieved my expectations. The original Predator was one of my favorite movies and was followed by a goofy yet flawed sequel and then two terrible spinoffs. Even with Robert Rodriguez's involvement I was skeptical on the quality of another sequel, especially when the announced cast featured action luminaries Adrien Brody and Topher Grace.
Predators felt like the 80s sequel that the original deserved. Like the original, all of the characters are fairly simple, the plot is easy to understand, there are a lot of big guns, and a lot of stuff gets blown up real good. With the exception of the Predadogs sequence early on, there is no CGI... the Predators are once again dudes in suits and there's a lot of practical stuntwork.
The difference between Predator and s is that the original had a cohesive team of special ops badasses while the new one has a squabbling team of different types of killers. It's a little stereotypical as far as the characters go. We get the intense black guy (but not as intense as Bill Dukes/Mac from the first), the angry latino (an underused Danny Trejo), the stoic honorable asian, the hick (who I recognized as Billy "Downtown" Anderson from Major League 3), the Topher Grace (playing Topher Grace), and more. Brody pulls out a Christian Bale/Batman gravelly voice, I'm impressed how he got himself into amazing physical shape, and seems really believable as the extremely quick and cool under fire protagonist.
So why wasn't this a perfect 10? Lawrence Fishburne's character was really goofy and only there for exposition. A lot of the scenes straddled the line between homages (there's a moment similar to the full on badassery when the Indian dude takes off his shirt from the first) and ripping off the original (did we really need another impossibly far drop off a huge waterfall?). The scene from the previews where a ton of Predator laser sights zero in on Brody, well, that isn't even in the movie ( I hate when movies shoot scenes only for the trailer). For my liking, we see too much of the Predators. Part of what made the original so awesome was that we don't see the Predator full on until the end, and although the prosthestics/suits look amazing, its still a dude in a suit. Plus, the 'civil war' aspect is underdeveloped and fairly weak (if they wanted to go that route, I'd have liked the movie to focus more on that).
So both movies I liked, both have strength and weaknesses, I'd recommend both and I thought Inception was better overall... But only just a little.
That's all I have to say about that.
