Not Half As Smart As It Thinks It Is (?)

Rating: 5/10 (21 August 2014)

Wow! Talk about a multi-layered muddle of a potentially fascinating idea... Like, who was controlling whose dream here?
First off, there seems to be some real confusion with Inception about what a dream is and what a hallucination is (especially as massive one).
And, yes, I know that the meaning of these two words (that's "dream" & "hallucination") do overlap one another and depending on the context in which these words are used they actually might be regarded as synonyms of each other.... (Hey! Am I splitting hairs here?)
But, with that said, I personally regard what the characters in this film witnessed (while in an apparent subconscious state) were strictly hallucinations and not dreams (at least not dreams in the strictest sense of the word).
Uh.... Are you confused yet? - Well, I am! And, sorry, but that's all that Inception succeeded in doing - Causing major, or should I say, "massive" confusion.
The way I see it (confused as I am), just because Inception's story dealt with so-called dreams and the deeper levels of the subconscious mind, that didn't automatically make it an intelligent story aimed at an actual thinking person.
But, hey, maybe (just maybe) I somehow completely missed Inception's intellectual cleverness altogether, because, due to this film's unforgivable 2.5-hour running time, I found myself being repeatedly distracted by really trivial things outside the realm of paying attention to what was taking place on the picture screen.
From my frustrated and disappointed perspective of Inception I'd say that I could easily sum up its story in 3 very simple words - And those 3 little words are - Blah! Blah! Blah!
Believe me, I was hoping for so much more from this movie, but, time and again, it fell mighty short of its potential and its expectations.
Anyways - Not only did I find Leonardo DiCaprio to be an incredibly insincere and drab actor who scrapes the absolute bottom of the barrel with the likes of that doofus Ryan Gosling.....
And, not only did I find, to my sheer annoyance, that every interior scene was shot, for some inexplicable reason, in low-wattage lighting where infuriating shadows literally washed everything worth seeing out of view.....
But, Cobb's utterly ridiculous and demented obsession with his dead wife, Mal, and her repeatedly showing up in one dream/hallucination after another (ho-hum!), bogged Inception's already floundering story down like an incredibly heavy, lead weight had been tied around its neck to the point of causing near-suffocation, followed by the total strangulation of any free-thinking ideas and concepts.
And, finally - Here's my brief take on director, Christopher Nolan - This guy is a real master of confusion. With each new movie that he directs the plots have become noticeably more and more incoherent, haywire and disjointed. And, with that, his characters have become less and less likable.
P.S. - What really shocked, amazed and puzzled me the most about Inception was that it didn't deliver the much-anticipated surprise/twist ending that I was expecting as its way of rounding off all of the confusion that prevailed. This film's finale was so frickin' limp-wristed that all it did was suck to the 10th power.
SO, WAKE UP, EVERYONE, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE TO WAKE UP AT ALL!!