mackknopf | Why I didn't like "Inception"

I avoid giving away the plot twists as much as possible, but I do discuss anything shown in the preview, and I do tell what the basic premise is. If spoilers show up, I'll use a "cut" so you have to deliberately click to see more. Now allow me to preface with a quote from Chuang Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher and Taoist: "I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?"

If this mystery interests you, then you will probably like Christopher Nolan's movie "Inception". For my part, I was mostly bored and waiting for it to end. Movies, in my opinion, should not go on for three hours unless they are (say) on par with "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Lord of the Rings". What we have here is ostensibly a treatise on dreams, and your tolerance for that will depend on how much you are fascinated by them. I take that back. While I loved Neil Gaiman's work on "The Sandman" comic, and symbols and meanings of dreams always interest me, this movie is just not bizarre enough to feel like it truly is about dreams.

It would be more accurate to say that "Inception" is a virtual-reality heist movie about a bunch of criminals led by Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Cobb. They're trying to change the mind of a businessman by going into his dream. That's not exactly the stuff of heroism, just as the setup of the Star Wars sequels about the trade alliance did not make for the most engaging drama, at least to me. My dreams are not often as pedestrian as that of the characters in Nolan's movie. According to the rules, events that strain a person's awareness of mundane reality -- such as the great preview shot of a city street bent upon itself -- attract "antibodies" who seek to destroy the invading dreamers, tossing them out of the original dream.

Perhaps some people have dreams that recycle their waking experiences. My own dreaming tends to be full of the trappings of superheroes, monsters, and the complete breaking of the laws of physics, which I blame on all the comics and fantasy books that I have read (so in a way, it is recycling my experiences). The main exception there is my being late to class or realizing I don't really understand a school subject, scars from my time in the academic Ivory Tower.

Nolan does have the constant fighting that shows up in my dreams (maybe I'm just conflicted about a lot of things, dunno), but where is the sex? For a show about what goes on in our personal late-night movies, there is surprisingly little sexual tension. Probably the characters are too busy trying to expostulate on the rules of dream architecture, which constantly get broken, and bringing the audience up to speed on the world. For the first 30 minutes, I had no idea what was going on, and felt terribly stupid. Then I figured out what was happening and started to get irritated.

Where "Inception" shines is its ideas and how it develops the conceit of a machine that lets one interface with dreams, on a singular or multiple level. Secondary characters are weak and poorly developed. One is named "Ariadne," which is a clue referencing the ancient Greek story of Theseus and the minotaur in the maze. There, the princess Ariadne gave the hero Theseus a ball of string to find his way back after slaying the monster. Leonardo DiCaprio's main character is not particularly heroic, though he used to be better, and there is some interesting ambiguity about whether or not the whole caper is really an attempt to extricate him from his own deep, unrealized dreaming. Does he truly find his way out of the dreams? Is he stuck on some level or other? The ending leaves it up to the viewer to decide. Some will love this. Others (like me) will not.