Mind Boggling.

Rating: 2/10 (18 June 2011)

Around 750, the renowned poet of the Tang dynasty, Li Po, is supposed to have asked, "Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. Today, am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?" Marcus Aurelius, the late Roman emperor and philosopher, wrote, "Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most." Freud concluded that dreams were the fulfillment of unconscious wishes that had managed to sneak past the dozing censor. Aboriginal Australians believed in a real parallel universe called The Dream Time in which everything and everyone who ever existed, still existed, and anybody could enter this place during sleep.
Modern psychology believes that dreams are nothing more than random cortical bombardment caused by a lot of activity in sub-cortical structures associated with the filing of memories, and the cortex goes into overdrive trying to make narrative sense of them.
Sex dreams are pleasant enough except when the furry little animals show up, but statistics demonstrate that the majority of dreams are truly lousy, the kind we can easily live without. Don't you get tired of running in slow motion through a swamp while being chased by an ogre?
Does all this sound like pointless rambling to you? Well, then you're not going to enjoy "Inception" because it meanders at lightning speed all over the place and lives by no rules that human beings have ever known.
On the other hand, if you find these adventitious allusions in some way interesting, then you should see this dark and muddled movie. You get a bonus too, because in its style it closely resembles an action movie from the 1980s. Everything is happening all at once -- or maybe not all at once. Who cares? The point is that people get shot in the forehead and buildings comes toppling down for no reason and slow-motion explosions take place at irregular but short intervals.
I'm getting pretty tired of seeing films that use some bewildering metaphysical scheme as an excuse to show off still more CGIs. I couldn't watch this thing through.