Movie Review: Inception

I had heard good things about this movie. I wanted to like it, but in the end, it just didn't do much for me.

It's not that it was a bad movie. It just seemed a little overblown, overcomplicated, and overdramatic for what was actually going on.

You know the plot. Good ol' Leo enters people's minds, sneaks around there, and steals (or perhaps plants) information. Sounds like a decent enough sci-fi yarn, doesn't it? I love themes like that, in themselves. Sort of a Dreamscape meets The Matrix, all focusing on the question: "What is real?"

But the movie bogs down. Mainly it gets so caught up in "rules" that it loses itself. For example:

1. You need an "architect" to create the dream.

2. Subconscious people will try to kill you.

3. Time flows slower the deeper you go, /10, /100, /1000.

4. The feeling of falling is one of the few things that will wake you up.

5. Getting killed while in a regular dream will wake you up, UNLESS...

6. You are killed while sedated, in which case you will go into "Limbo".

7. And etc, etc, etc... until you don't even care anymore.

I mean really. I understand the need to have some consistency in a made-up movie universe. But since when do dreams follow ANY rules? The obsession the film creators had here in sticking to a bunch of arbitrary "rules" bordered on OCD.

And apparently you can't just wake up from a dream. You have to be "kicked". And if you are having a dream within a dream, you have to wake up in the deeper dream before you will wake up in the upper dream. Or else you may fall into a deeper dream and from which you cannot wake up, and- uh... something. Sorry, lost track there. If any of that seems overly complicated to you, let's just say that you are far more intelligent than the all-too-clever people who produced this movie. That or you and are both too dumb to "appreciate" it, fanboys will charge, no doubt.

And that's another gripe I have about this movie. The subject – dreams. It lends itself to such awesome writing, really limited only by the imagination. But the dreams in this movie were so unimaginative. They were flat, boring, downright lifeless! How could that be? Why should dreams be limited only to city streets and urban apartments? I guess by those standards, the snow base is considered imaginative. How about a city in the sky, instead? And I think my subconscious would be defended by dragons and monsters, not chicago-esque gangsters with machine guns, thank you very much! Really, for a movie about dreams, what you see here is completely underwhelming.

I also disliked the special effects thrown in for no reason. Wow. A city block exploding in slow motion. And this is profound? Why? I kept getting the feeling the filmmakers were trying to plant their own idea in my head. "Be impressed! Be very impressed NOW!" Only I wasn't. If I wanted to watch random stuff being blown up for no reason, I'd watch something by Michael Bay. (I'm talking to YOU, Transformers!)

The movie also featured a bunch of action sequences I didn't much care about. Where the Matrix was stylish and cool in this regard, Inception takes the route of "gritty realism", and falls completely flat. Gritty realism in a dream? Why? Of course, it never made any sense to me why so many people were required to be in the dream in the first place, so I never really cared one way or another when any of them were in danger.

The action is nonstop, but ultimately "much ado about nothing". We cut back and forth between dreams, with non-existent drama in each one. (I mean, repeated slow motion scenes of people falling a van? Really?) It seems silly to me the way the movie tried to get you to care what happens in one of the upper dreams, when you already know good and well that it won't have any impact whatsoever until they finish doing what they came to do in the lower dreams.

And I really wanted to care about the characters too, but they just seemed kind of soulless. Just gun-wielding morons, really. As an actor I especially like Tom Hardy, bless him. But there just wasn't much for him to do here except shoot a bunch of people. Leo gets most of the character building. And that's okay; he does a convincing enough job. It just left me wanting more. I think the movie would have done a lot better with 75% less characters and 75% less gunfights.

Something else that was really irritating was the ridiculous, overdramatic music. Music in movies is essential. But this just kept droning on and on. The seriousness just never let up! After a while, the dramatic music just starts weighing on you. By the end, I just felt like saying, "Enough already! Sheesh!"

There are two things I didn't get. ***SPOILERS AHEAD***

So if you spin a top in the dream world, it spins forever. But if you spin it in the real world, it falls down. This is how you know you are in the real world or not. But what about if you dream that it falls down? I mean, why couldn't you? For a movie that cares so much about logic, they sure skipped over that one.

I didn't understand the ending with the father on the deathbed. So he opens the safe, and finds the pinwheel. And his father says some kind words. Only in real life, he never really opened anything, did he? And his father didn't say anything nice. And above all that, who actually did any "Incepting"? I thought Leo was supposed to put the idea in the guy's head. Only he did that stuff on his own, apparently. So the whole idea of the movie crumbles and falls flat right there! I thought the point was for the guy to get an idea. Not for him to hallucinate events that completely did not happen at all. It just didn't make any sense.

"Inception". They kept repeating the word throughout, as if it carried profound meaning. Well, how about we look that up in a dictionary? It just means "beginning". That's it. Any meaning beyond that is just invented by this movie. And that's about as deep a thought as this movie will bring you, unfortunately.

Rating: 2 out of 5 "Whatevers". Meh.