Dreams within dreams within nonsense

Rating: 6/10 (26 July 2010)

I went to see Inception in the theater, and for the second time in my life experienced the feeling of desperately wanting to get up and walk out so as to salvage at least part of the evening. Had I been sitting on the aisle I certainly would have. As it was, there was no choice but to sit through the whole excruciating thing, hoping beyond hope that it would end and put me out of my misery.
I know others have rated the movie highly, and I respect their opinions. At the end of the screening I went to, many of the folks leaving seemed to have really enjoyed it. Personally, though, I think it was just awful, for three reasons: the stakes, the villains, and the writing.
Comparison with The Matrix series is inevitable, because here - like in The Matrix- we have action taking place in the "real" world and a "dream" world. Inception takes the Matrix-like concept and adds to it with multiple dream worlds, and dream worlds within dream worlds. That idea has the potential to be interesting, so due credit there. The first problem, though, is that the stakes in Inception are too low. In The Matrix, success in the dream world means saving all of humanity from enslavement. OK, that's a goal I can get invested in. Here, success in the dream world means two things: a) the Leo DiCaprio character gets to see his kids, and b) one big energy corporation gets an advantage in the market over another big energy corporation. Ho hum. (Now, don't get me wrong - it's possible to make a movie where the audience gets invested in a father-child relationship, and an emotional journey comes to have high stakes. To do that, though, the movie has to work to develop the emotional elements of the characters and the story, which Inception doesn't do. There's so much sci-fi gimmickry, action, and special effects that there's no room left to develop a human story worth caring about.)
Well, if it's not a success as a deep character study, at least it can be a good sci-fi action thriller, right? Well, there's more hope here, but still it didn't work for me. Here the problem is the villains. There aren't any. Yes, Our Heroes do a lot of fighting, but it's against random faceless gunmen who pop up and get shot down like in a video game. Again, compare to The Matrix: the scenes with Agent Smith talking to Morpheus, and later to Neo, give us a bad guy we can really root against, which makes the good guy more fun to root for. Or in Die Hard, when Hans Gruber kills the smarmy guy without qualm, it makes Hans more evil and makes it more cathartic when he loses at the end. There isn't even a betrayal twist where one of our favorite characters turns out to be the bad guy. Of course, the conflict here is not man-vs-man or man- vs-nature, it is man-vs-himself; but as already noted above, that takes attention to character that wasn't paid here.