Insipid

Inception  OO 1/2
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout.

I took a rare trip to the multiplex this week and saw Inception. I walked away thinking that there was much less there than met the eye. Oh, yes, there was plenty of fancy CGI footwork going on, creating fantastic images that were truly amazing for their realism. It is in the realism that lies the problem. Dreams don’t make sense, and too much of this film made perfect sense to me. The dreams seemed too concrete sequential in there organization and layout. For all the money and technology obviously put into making this movie, there was terribly little imagination. I know that there are many people debating about what parts of the film were dreams and what parts were reality, but I never really questioned it while watching the movie because there was never any sense of doubt put into my mind by the film makers as to what I was watching. Plus, I never understood why I should care to know the difference to begin with. The entire premise served as nothing more than an elaborate excuse to make a shoot'em up action picture while feigning art.

Without going into too much of the plot, Leonardo DiCaprio and his intrepid band of dream crashers set about to plant an idea in someone’s mind instead of taking information out, which is their usual job. This is supposed to be impossible. Why it is such is never explained to my satisfaction, but I quibble. This plot devise is really a classic McGuffin (I defy those who saw the film to remember a week after seeing it what this “idea” was). What becomes the more dominant theme is the internal emotional conflict within the DiCaprio character’s mind.

Before I go into what I found wanting in the film, I will say, I was entertained. I had mixed feelings about seeing this thing knowing that it was two and a half hours long, and it did begin to drag a bit at the end. That said, it moved for the most part and didn’t leave me bored.

Where the film broke down for me was on the level of how the dreams worked. Real dreams function on a surrealist level. People, places, things, even the dreamer’s own identity can shift, morph, drop in or out of the mental picture without any rhyme or reason. Sometimes we figure out why things went the way they did, many times we don’t, that is if we can even remember the dream to begin with. Here, it’s all very planned out. The “architect” creates a maze like cityscape or building for the action to take place in and the only danger comes from mental projections that serve as defenders of the host’s subconscious. Things are predictable and incredibly safe. At least in The Matrix if something went wrong death was a possibility. Here the worse thing that can happen is a person stays in a perpetual dream state that really didn’t look half bad.

I guess that was the greatest problem for me; there was no risk involved. No risk to the characters and no risk for the viewer. The one time there was any sense of true menace was when a freight train came barreling out of nowhere (and even this ended up having a logical explanation). DiCaprio freaks out on poor Juno, I mean Ellen Page (the architect), because this wasn’t supposed to happen since this detail wasn’t in the design. All I could think of was, “well Leo, it’s a dream, of course stuff comes flying out of nowhere. Suck it up, you wus.”

There is no risk for the audience because nothing is really left dangling. Everything is served up on a silver platter. There is no ambiguity, no consequences, nothing is real and nothing to get hung about. And no, I don’t consider the ending all that suspenseful or clever. Since how one progresses through the various dream levels was clearly delineated, I never had a problem, outside of the opening sequence, and then only slightly, figuring out when they were dreaming and when they were awake. So the film’s own internal logic told me the story was resolved in the “real” world. That this little twist was added at the end did nothing to alter that conclusion. And even so, by the end I really didn’t care all that much.

This gets me back to where I started. The film fails because it is far too logical. It is a standard action/ heist movie masquerading as something more. Is it a bad movie? No. Like I said, I was entertained. I am and always will be a sucker for a well crafted summer blockbuster. But please, don’t tell me it was more than that. It just wouldn’t be logical.