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The quibble I increasingly have with Nolan is that his movies are so often held up as being hyper realistic, when they so often are not. Also, their plots often make little sense, he's just great at rushing you through them so quick you don't have time to realize "Wait, this doesn't make sense."
Nolan works in powerful scenes that make sense when viewed linearly. That's his No. 1 priority and trick. Everything else is secondary.
See, I feel like Nolan is hyper-realistic, but only within the confines of the movie universe he's created. There's nothing about Inception that's realistic unless you accept the rules by which he defines the universe he's created in which Inception takes place. Once he defines the parameters, he's incredibly adept and showing them in a realistic way.
One example is the manner in which Inception was shot, and the techniques he had to create so that the scenes would be realistic.
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An example from the science front would be the ice clouds. That had nothing to do with anything. It was comical when it happened. It was never again referenced in any way. Someone just said "wouldn't it be cool if the planet had ice clouds? Have the ship clip one, but don't damage the ship or ever reference it again. I just really want ice clouds."
Initially I thought it was odd as well. But after contemplating on it, I have a hard time taking too much issue in the sense that this was a planet in another galaxy on the other side of the universe. Certainly, we're to subscribe to the notion that the universe's laws are in place here, as relativity is still an issue on that side. However, I found myself able to accept this license and chalk it up to the we really don't know what other planets are like in the sense that we base our observations on what they must be like on our on experience from our own solar system.
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Another example is the time loss on the water planet. Nolan desperately wanted that emotional "I missed my kids' childhood!" scene so badly he decided to have all the characters forget to run the math on how long the pod had been on the planets surface, something that is totally out of touch with his characters, but delivers a great scene he wanted to hit on.
No good example here, other than the fact that they made an oversight. It's thin, but not destructive to the file, at least not for me.
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On the plot/character front, why does Michael Caine tell murph his greatest fear is that the team will return and find out he hasn't solved gravity, when he'd given up on the equation before the earliest missions had even been launched? It's pure manipulation of the audience to make us feel a certain emotion at a certain time because Nolan wanted a certain scene to exist, even if that scene makes zero sense in the context of what we later know.
I think it's pure manipulation of the audience and the characters on the screen. Caine told that to Murph because he'd basically raised her in science following the scene wherein Caine tells Lithgow that Murph needs a spark and that he can provide it. When he's making his deathbed confessional to her, it's clear that he was pained about lying to the little girl he didn't want to doom to death or to the reality that her father was never coming back, but he couldn't die with it on his conscience. It's manipulative of the audience because it's manipulative of Murph and Coop.
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Nolan tried to pull this same stunt with the Damon sequence, but didn't do it nearly so deftly as folks can hardly agree on what Damon's motives were. Character and motives don't matter to Nolan. He assembles movies by coming up with a number of great, well-crafted, often emotional scenes that are superb on their own and after the movie we remember those scenes as being individually great, but he manipulates the crap out of his audience by having characters act in ways that retroactively make no sense.
This is a valid argument to be sure. That being said, I never had any questions about Damon's motives, other than to ask why he'd fake a beacon to bring the team out there to force Plan B on another planet when he could have just sent a truthful beacon out that would have let Plan B take place on Edward's planet. Then again, Nolan showed us how lonely Damon was through the exposition of his comments while Coop was dying, and how starved he had become for human interaction. Perhaps Damon wanted to bring people to his planet to pick him up so that he could then go with them to start Plan B on another planet with people, but realized when he was found out that the wouldn't trust him and bring him along.
Moreover, it was necessary for the movie to have a 3rd act. In act one, you determine how bad life is on Earth and why it must leave. In act two, you get the crew travelling across the galaxy and finally making it to the habitable planet. You get to act three because through Damon, Coop and Co. find out about the lie and realize Plan A is a fraud. That compels them to resolve the move in the 3rd act by escaping from Damon's planet, sending someone to Edward to facilitate Plan B, and then the ultimate story of the movie to tie back in to the Coop and Murph and the ghost in the bookcase.
