Inception: Substance over Style

Nolan’s filmography: when an industry’s best collaborate in a singular glorious enterprise. Innovation beyond precedent; redefining the craft’s high water mark. Each an engaging and immersive experience.

Except for Inception.

Understand how the storyteller works. It’s not finding interesting ideas—it’s finding those worthy of feature length treatment.

Gravity-free action. A freight train plows down a crowded city street. A decrepit metropolis slides into the ocean like a dying glacier. A suburban landscape folds over itself. All novel ideas, none of which stand alone.

Stanley Kubrick (unlike Nolan) starts with a cohesive story and layers in groundbreaking scenes. Nolan (unlike Kubrick) grabs duct tape and pours his leftovers all over the kitchen table.

How to bind this narrative mess together? Simple: dreams. Done.

Nolan is cheating here.

Visualize Inception with another Director. Without Michael Caine and Leonardo DiCaprio, who can carry any story; even one this abhorred.

The best table scraps from the best filmmaker do not combine to make a meal.

We are left with all style, and—ultimately—no substance. This results in a film so confusing, three quarters of its run length are spent in exposition explaining what you’ll see in the final act, which begins long after the viewer quits trying (or cares) to understand the disaster unfolding before them.

This is a bad movie. This is bad storytelling, poorly told. Remove the film’s contributors and look at the story itself—a pointless, failed concept resulting in a pointless, failed film.

The leadership lesson is this.

Grand Strategy:

“A comprehensive, long-term plan of essential actions by which a firm plans to achieve its major objectives. Key factors of this strategy may include market, product, and/or organizational development through acquisitions, divestiture, diversification, joint ventures, or strategic alliances”.

Start with a master vision.

Then work backwards, identifying necessary essential actions.

These actions form your Grand Strategy.

You cannot combine favorite—even effective—essential actions and “see how it goes”. You will not stumble into brilliance. You will never achieve an undefined goal.

Begin at the end. Then—and only then—build the blueprint to get there.

Mark Joseph Huckabee