Inception - I Dreamed About Having a Dream About Dreaming That I Died!

Written by Rolf

Yes, I got it. No, it did not confuse me. You have to be mentally retarded to be confused by it. No offense. Maybe if it had not been hyped as the most important intelligent thriller so badly, it could have been somewhat entertaining.

I like Christopher Nolan's films. Memento was great and original. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were awesome. The Prestige was very entertaining, too. I didn't like Insomnia, though, too boring.

I also like Leonardo DiCaprio and the films he plays in. The Departed was very strong. Shutter Island was very good, even though I saw it coming after half an hour. I enjoyed Catch Me If You Can a lot. He was very convincing in Blood Diamond although I didn't care for the movie at all. His roles in Titanic, The Island and The Quick And The Dead were all solid.

So a title like Inception, directed by Nolan and starring DiCaprio should be a blueprint for success. Especially since it was supposed to be an intelligent thriller, recommended with only superlatives of how mindblowing it was. So clever it would leave you stunned. The most impressive film of the decade. Bring it on.

The idea of entering someone else's dream isn't new. In 1984 Dennis Quaid attempted to save the president's life in Dreamscape by infiltrating his dream and saving him there. The fundamental idea was that if you die in your dream, you die for real. I remember being very impressed with this movie, but I was very young when I saw it. Having said that, I doubt I will remember Inception fondly in 25 years.

A dream within a dream isn't new either. In fact, it was Edgar Allen Poe who wrote a 24-line poem with that title in 1849, although it was more abstract than a literal interpretation of the concept.

Overhyped

So what was so horrible about Inception? The fact that it was so overhyped, planted great expectations. Was that the movie's fault? Its marketing? Or the public that had already seen it? I am not sure. But even without the expectations I feel that I would have been annoyed watching the film. The special effects were awesome, but Nolan had a 160 million dollar budget so that's no surprise. But breathtaking effects don't always guarantee a good movie experience.

Good effects don't make a good film

Never did I come to care about the people in the movie, I couldn't care less about the lead character. I only remember the constant, numbing pursuit and checking their watches. I like the idea of entering someone else's dream a lot, but since Dreamscape already did that, every other movie seems like a copy, unless the story is a completely different one. And simply adding two extra layers of dreams doesn't make it stand out.

Let's make really really sure everyone understands the concept

Even so, it could have been acceptable, as long as they didn't keep hammering on how important this was, shoving the complexity of it all down your throat. And three layers of dreams isn't really complex. It's just three different stories, all of which happen to have the same actors in pursuit of each other.

From the moment they entered the second layer, I was waiting for them to be finished. Then they entered a third, because this was a very complicated case, where the goal was not to steal an idea, but to plant one. Like, wow! And if that wasn't enough, if you die in a dream, you end up in a fourth dream state, with the name Limbo! That's right, Limbo, a dimension where everyone that died comes together, regardless of whether they were in the same dream. But that's not all. If you die in Limbo, you're back in reality. This is mindblowing and not silly at all.

Powernap anyone?

I'll give Nolan a call about this idea I have for Inception II. It's a 17-layer dream structure where if you die on the 9th level, you skip down to the 15th layer. If you die there, you end up in the 17th layer, called Mambo. To escape Mambo, you need to die twice, which transports you to a parallel version of the 6th layer. To really wake up, you need to fall asleep, eat a fluffy bunny, dance the Samba with Rambo and pee into the wind at dawn. This will leave you in a wet spot with the feeling that you just woke up from a retarded dream.

Are you proud of yourself?

So why does the movie get such a high rating (8.9 on IMDb)? I think the rating is boosted by people who were very impressed with themselves. It required a lot of brainpower for them to figure it all out and misinterpreted keeping track of the dream levels and solving the puzzle with having watched a great film.

Maybe it's the same with solving a crossword puzzle. No one cares except you. Solving it was boring to observe and the solution isn't spectacular to look at either, but you have entertained yourself and are proud of your skills to solve puzzles.

Inception looks great and the acting is done well, but it is not a complex story, it's not mindblowing. It's boring and annoying. Silly and pretentious. But the majority of the public fell for it. Maybe that's what makes a film brilliant. Not how it really is, but how the majority perceives it.