A dream within a dream within a long movie

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Christopher Nolan is a genius when it comes to directing and screenwriting, especially when these pertain to movie structure.

Memento rocked. The Prestige rocked. Batman Begins rocked. Each one played with time and messed with your mind, all the while telling stories that kept your attention from start to finish.

I know I’m probably going out on a long limb here but Inception is just not as good as everyone says it is. Sure, it has some wicked awesome special effects like the famous street bending scene from the trailer. There were other parts that even affected my equilibrium just as I was sitting in my seat. Either Joseph Gordon-Levitt is becoming a great wire fu fighter or Nolan has discovered a way to turn gravity off. The sets were excellent and the sound design had its moments but overall, something important was missing — a point. Unfortunately what replaced it was way too much of nothing at all.

Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is a skilled extractor, the kind of psychology major who is too good at what he does. He can enter your mind through his subconscious and steal your secrets for whoever wants them. He’s a thief for hire but now someone wants him to do the opposite. A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants him to plant an idea into the mind of a business rival.

That’s really all that this movie is about, except that Cobb has a somewhat troubled past. This job is his redemption but his memories keep filtering into the dreamscapes and coming after him, making this a kind of psychological cat and mouse game except that there’s a fox coming after the cat at the same time. Nolan makes this a little bit more complex than necessary by layering dreams within dreams until it’s all just one beautiful but muddled contrivance. It’s a colossal bore, the kind of movie that has invented so much of its own universe that every unique detail has to be explained at great length so that the audience will understand. This makes for too much talking, not enough acting.

Honestly, what acting that there was, left much to be desired. The script, apart from the central concept, was an exercise in tedium. It was so easy to see where entire scenes could have been cut out because they were so completely pointless. It was unnecessarily complex and barely even scraped a unique narrative structure like Nolan’s other masterpieces. It’s two-and-a-half hours of self-indulgent wonder that would have made an excellent and much better novel. As a film, it strives hard to be as fantastic visually like Tarsem Singh’s The Cell with elements of The Matrix and other sci-fi think pieces thrown in. Ultimately, it is a big star vehicle for DiCaprio and little else. Pretty but not mind-blowing. Give me Blade Runner any day because Inception just doesn’t have the same stamina.