I went to see Inception tonight, and given the amount of hype surrounding that film and my own fairly divergent experience, I feel compelled to write about it.
I won’t waste your time describing the concept of the film beyond the basics; You have likely already been informed in full. It’s not that the idea of a heist movie infused with dream logic is in any way bad, and indeed Inception is a very entertaining, expertly made film that offers some very cool moments.
The trouble is, for most of its 148 minutes, I was simply not drawn in. Characters are introduced quickly and we are asked to accept their presence and never question their motives, which I assume is money. They simply are there, doing What Their Character Does. Even the protagonist remains an emotional blank slate for all but a single moment (DiCaprio cries in anguish better than any actor I can think of), and I simply could not make myself care about him or his wishes. This problem applies to every other character, some of which are given moments in which to be human, but are promptly relegated back to their duties as plot devices. This dichotomy of human being/movie character is a real weakness of the script that it never really recovers from, and this missing core of humanity really hurt my investment in the story. Cartoon nonsense like naming its labyrinth maker Ariadne and the bad bits of the protagonist’s subconscious Mal further ruins any character investment.
The biggest issue with a film about dreams for me, and especially one attempting to rigorously quantify dreaming the way Inception does it, is that I am a pretty serious dreamer. I’ve been writing dream logs and trying to understand my dreams for over a decade, and when a film attempts to drag me into its idea of what dreams are and how they work, it’s set itself a mammoth task. I realize how subjective this is, and I can only really speak for myself. Dreams are as individual as fingerprints, and how we cope with them are hugely personal matters. With its humanity lost to a large cast I couldn’t really care about, Inception was relying on its high concept to pull me through, and in this regard, it simply didn’t work that well.
The dreams, the dreamers and the “dream ecosystem” of subconscious projections destroying intruders were altogether very silly to me. The dreams seemed incredibly mundane to me, and the way they were connected to the sleeping dreamer by trite mechanisms like shocks, splashes or water or whatever else seemed the path of least resistance. In one beautifully made scene, a character navigates a hotel in zero gravity, and even does combat in that state. The scene is impressively made and beautiful to look at, but the reasons for the lack of gravity are so mundane that it actually lessens the scene; If a person dreams in zero gravity, this apparently means she will be in dream zero gravity. It’s absolutely ludicrous.
The film attempts early on to create a cosmology for itself of history, rules, do’s and don’ts, and invents new whimsical rules as it’s needed to suit the plot. Early on, dream death is explained as a deus ex machina; an escape route. The film invents a ridiculous contrivance to release itself of this mechanism, I suppose to give dream death a sense of consequence, but uses this contrivance to further its plot, and as we are introduced to the workings of a sort of shared coma, all suspension of disbelief is lost to the winds.
As a sidenote, I have repeatedly shot myself in the head in dreams, and death in dreams does not have to be that catastrophic, more of a meaty physical thing. I also “lived” through an atomic bombing which literally turned me to shreds. I didn’t wake up. But I digress.
It’s a fine art, building a film on a ludicrous premise. Some action films are derided for their lack of brains, but their lack of brains is often what makes them tick. Predator, a real modern classic of stupidity, works because it doesn’t attempt to justify its existence. It survives to this day because its execution is front and center, and the reality it presents never attempts to explain itself. Inception spends over an hour setting up its own flawed internal logic, filled with Because I Said So’s, and then fails to take that logic anywhere interesting. As a result, it challenges us to keep up, but leaves us with a puzzle box where we can admire the clockwork, but there is nothing else to take from it. As a film about exploring dreams, I’m actually more inclined to recommend The Cell, and that feels ridiculous but it also feels true.
Technically the film is absolutely competent. It looks stunning. Until you remember you’re looking at dreams, and that this is not The Matrix. I was left struggling to reconcile my own dream experiences with the steely gray shooty-bang action film Inception repeatedly insisted was what people dreamt of. Paradoxically, the ordinariness of the dreams on display further dehumanized the characters; Who’d dream this boring nonsense? Even at my most mundane I’d experience more peril than a car chase. I mean come on. How boring are these people?
To sum it up though, Inception is in no way a bad film, but it asks a lot of faith from its viewer, faith that I couldn’t muster. When I left the theater, others were sat in groups as the credits rolled, discussing the intricacies of the plot and trying to make sense of it. To me, this just cemented the feeling that I had just seen another puzzle film. It’s an intricate, beautiful puzzle film, but it goes no further, and where it could have asked interesting questions about a fundamental part of our humanity, it is content to show faceless men shooting at each-other to do things that don’t really matter. I was disappointed.
But then plenty of modern movies suffer from the problem of empty and dull characters whom we can’t care less about. That’s why I prefer to watch Bladerunner for the 27s time instead of watching anything post-2k made.