Movie about dream invasion proves nightmare.

Rating: 1/10 (10 August 2010)

Inception: the story of corporate agents who trap their mark in an engineered "dream world" that's oddly dreary yet deafening, populated with nasty soulless projections, in which minutes seem like hours or decades, all just to rob the mark - and just when it feels the nightmare's about to end, you just find yourself in a nightmare within the nightmare. This pretty much sums up the audience experience.
I found Inception uninteresting, too long, and absolute work to watch. While the premise was great, and the plot at least interesting, the writing, plot sequence, and execution were poor. And even the cinematography was greatly disappointing. You'd think a deliberately constructed dream world would be fantastic - it was merely drear, deafeningly loud, bland, stark, and depressing - even when it was monumental, it had a decidedly Stalinist architectural quality. I realize that people (supposedly) dream in black-n-white ... but did they have to make almost everything grey and dingy? Virtually all of the "fantastic" clips shown in the trailers happen in the first 30 minutes. In the great (70+ minute) finale the only visually interesting and original bit is the 0-gravity fight-scene as the hall tumbles around them.
The climax seemed interminable, but ceased to be suspenseful about 10 minutes in. All the supporting cast - with the arguable exception of Caine - were complete ciphers, mere 2-dimensional shadows you couldn't give a damn about. The descent into dream Limbo to rescue their employer made no sense given what was explained about the nature of dream invasions: just whose dream were they entering? It was not DiCaprio's character's, so why are they stuck in his deep subconscious? ... unless of course it was all really just his nightmare to begin with.
In the end, the whole movie only makes sense if it really is all the main-character's unending nightmare. Unfortunately, it proved a nightmare for me. I know thousands of brain-dead, hype-fed, viewers who imagine themselves intelligent and deep, felt differently. But my actual nightmares are more interesting, less painful to endure, and considerably cheaper.