Movie Review! Inception

So, I saw Inception over the weekend, and I gotta say, I was underwhelmed. If you want to see it and haven't, don't read the rest of this entry, because there are spoilers coming.






Ok. So. As always when I'm expressing my opinion, a little background about me is helpful. For those of you who don't know what this movie is about, IMDB it.

Done? Good. Back to me. When I was 15, I started taking Effexor, an anti-anxiety anti-depressive. The drug has about 30 side effects, the only remotely pleasant one being extremely vivid, occasionally lucid dreams. When I realized I was having lucid dreams, I started doing some research (See: Waking Life) on how to control my dreams and make them not suck, cause they were kind of horrible. To make a long story short, I can now control my dreams approximately 10% of the time, which is way better than I was doing before.

Now, to my problems with Inception. As a lucid dreamer, it's hard to watch someone try and explain it without calling it what it is. The Totems in the film that the characters use are totally unnecessary, albeit an interesting plot point (especially for the film's ending). They would have been better off using the fact that, in dreams, you cannot look at clocks. You can see them, but you can't make out the time. (Try it.) Dialing phones is also inexplicably difficult, as is turning on light switches, reading, or watching a movie or TV show. Basically, there are about 85 different things that can tell a lucid dreamer that they are, in fact, dreaming. (Or, that they're awake.) So, that's problem number one.

Problem number two is more specific and probably plays to my slight OCD. In the final dream sequence, when the car is falling off the bridge, the absence of gravity affects the hotel. It doesn't affect any other layers of the dream. This makes no sense. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief when watching a film only if the filmmaker follows the rules of the world of the film. If you start breaking your own rules, you lose the audience.

The final problem I had wasn't really illustrated until after I watched the movie and realized that the people I had seen it with (my parents and fiance) didn't get the ambiguity of the ending. It was obvious to me that we weren't supposed to know whether or not Leo was dreaming at the end, since the top was still spinning. My mother contested "but it was slowing down!" Yes, Mom, but it never actually stopped. The average filmgoer simply will not get that, if my parents and fiance, with about 7 professional and collegiate degrees between them, didn't see it. My interpretation of the movie was that the entire film might have been a dream, (why is his father teaching in Paris if he lives in Los Angelos? Why, at the end, are his children wearing the same clothing he always visualizes them in?) and Leo might still be in limbo. I hate that people need things totally spelled out for them until they see them.

OK, rant over.

All this being said, I would still recommend the movie, if only for the visual effects, and the fact that it will make you think a little bit, although I'm still underwhelmed by it as a whole.