movie review - Inception
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Once in a while a movie comes along with a big splash and everybody raves about it, but it's actually crap. "Inception" was that for 2010. It hinges on the ability to travel within yourself to a level of abstraction that supposedly represents your dream state. The crew assembled for the job in this movie is used to doing so for the purposes of theft - they go inside someone's head to steal things. But now they're meant to implant a thought.
This is all pretty dumb, in the same way that time travel is dumb; it pre-supposes the problem space ("If you die in the dream, you die in real life!") while at the same time making incredibly difficult to tell a story without it becoming stilted on silly explanations that fall apart the second you take your eyes off it. For instance, someone came up with the idea of a mechanism for determining whether you're in the dream state or not: you spin a top. If the top spins, you're safe. Or the reverse, I don't care - because it doesn't prove a thing.
Of course the plot immediately goes in the direction of taking it to the second level of abstraction: OK, we're in the dream, but now we have to go into the dreamer's dream! Miiiind blooowwwn. Just as with time-travel movies that attempt to depict the complexities, doing so while remaining engaging seems to be beyond Hollywood.
I lost interest in this thing around the 2/3 mark. It was fun to watch all the mind-bending shifts in perception -- usually expressed as the scenery morphing around the characters; but sometimes as a large vehicle plowing through, depending on the rule of cool. But it became increasingly annoying right down to the final goddamn frame with a top spinning meaninglessly but with oh so much gravitas.
Not recommended.