Per Chance, To Dream: The "Inception" Review

If there was a summer movie I had high hopes for, it was this one. A movie about stealing from dreams sounds interesting enough, but when you have Christopher Nolan on helm, especially after The Dark Knight, things can't look better. Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio is the lead in it, but if anything, Shutter Island proved he could act. Well, so did What's Eating Gilbert Grape? but I digress.

So, how does Inception fair in these high hopes? Not well. What starts as an interesting concept ends up being a predictable, hackneyed mess of the "dream within a dream" plot. I will give Mr. Nolan credit, though: I only thought it was predictable because I've studied psychology (and dreams) in both high school and college (had to do two psychology projects for two different classes, both of which stunned the psychology professor), and I remember that "mal" means "bad" in French. That last one's only important due to the fact that one of the characters is a French woman named "Mal." Even Al Pacino's character in The Devil's Advocate wasn't named something like Bob L. ZeBub or something equally ridiculous. I can imagine the French audience watching this movie, and going, "'Mal?' Is he out of his mind? He told us what's going to happen!" What's sad is that that is very true.

In a related event, the plot has more holes than Swiss Cheese. One of which is the totems that the people use to ground themselves in the dream. Joseph Gordon Levitt mentions that if anyone else touches someone's totem, it loses its effectiveness because you'll dream about them with out them being there. He then mentions that DiCaprio's totem (Cobb's), a top, was actually Mal's totem. Anyone with two brain cells can figure this out. If you are thinking what I was at this point, the ending shot confirms it, and renders the movie entirely pointless.

The big draw about the movie is that it's completely ("almost completely") in a dream. That, too, falls on its face. See, in order to get into someone's dream, they need an "architect" to build the dream, but make it as close to the subject's real dreams as possible (while also making it different enough for the group to control). When the subject goes to sleep, he dreams, but the architect creates the dream. And yet, according to the movie, its still his dream. No. No, it's not. It's the architect's dream. The architect is creating everything for the subject to respond to. If the dreamer isn't in any semblance of control of the dream, it is not their dream! It only gets more abstract when it becomes a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. See, when you have a multilayered dream, it usually gets more and more abstract. The deeper you are into the dream, conversely, the more you don't realize you're dreaming, but the more bizarre the dream is. This is coming from a guy who has Iraq kickbacks that are absolutely bizarre, but feel real.

By this movie's logic, though, when you go deeper into REM, the more realistic the dream becomes, and the more you can control it willingly. If anything, they team shouldn't have been able to control the dreams late in the movie at all. It's merely out of plot convenience that they can, but that would spoil too much. Also, I want to know the logic behind going from one person's dream to another person's to save someone who died in the first person's dream. That didn't make a single bit of sense of how they came up with it.

I can give it this, the characters were portrayed well... most of the time. Ellen Page couldn't really act in this movie if you told her too, sadly. I mean, I didn't take her "evil killer" part seriously in Hard Candy, but she isn't a bad actress. It's a little hard to take her seriously when she's constantly starry-eyed every time Levitt or DiCaprio are in a scene. I think she didn't gawk in one scene... mainly because they weren't in it. The only passable scene she did was when Levitt told her to kiss him to throw off the subjects subconscious. It didn't work, and I have no idea why that was in there in the first place.

Several times in the movie two characters' names change pronunciation. "Saito" (SIE-to)is constantly interchanged with "Sato" (SAE-to), and "Ariadne" is pronounced so many different ways that I couldn't tell you if anyone other than Michael Caine pronounced it right. But, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt are actually fun to watch, mainly because they play off each other well. You get the sense that one of them is a cynical joker and the other is a pompous straightman.

If I could sum up Inception in a sentence, it'd be this: Inception is a movie that doesn't live up to the hype, and is barricaded by it's own sense of logic where none shouldn't exist. To sum it up in one word? Disappointing.

I give it 2.5 out of 6 Bickering Freudians.