Deception

Rating: 1/10 (26 July 2010)

I went to see this film with very high expectations due to raving reviews (Roger Ebert a.o.), but unfortunately it turned out to be nothing more than an action flick with too much action and overdone special effects. The story is about dream tapping, whereby people are able to step into and figure in other people's dreams. That is about as "deep" as the film gets, no double layers (other than tapping into a dream within a dream), no philosophical double doors or anything else that could be slightly intellectually challenging for an educated viewer. With the budget that was made available for this film (USD 160m) they should at least have hired a couple of professional writers to make it work. Dialogues are very poor. At one point the girl, his own apprentice, explains Leonardo DiCaprio in a panicky situation that "it's a projection, remember", as if Leo's character wouldn't know that. And why would a normal person's (not a Navy Seal's) subconscious (in this case Robert Fischer's) bring in dozens of guys with uzi's etc from all corners when under stress? It makes no sense at all. Without all the special effects it could have been a much more powerful film, despite the poor storyline. By far it does not stand up to a film like The Sixth Sense (much less special effects, much more thrilling), or even A Single Man with Colin Firth which I saw this same weekend. We know that everybody dreams while sleeping, but the mystery of dreaming has nothing to do with special effects or spectacular shootouts. When we dream we touch on the unknown, and that is what creates the suspense and mystery after we wake up. That Christopher Nolan, who apparently is mesmerized by dreams or why else would he have written this nonsense, did not touch on this but on the contrary just threw money at ridiculous visual effects and bullet holes, is anybody's guess. To me this film is a demonstration of this director's pretentiousness and his creativity that only goes so far as blowing up stuff. I don't understand how some writers in serious newspapers can compare Christopher Nolan to Stanley Kubrick. The score is 0 - 15. Luckily Nolan is not 40 yet, so hopefully he will come back with something more stimulating out of the money he will make from Inception.