Wannabe sharp but without soul

Rating: 2/10 (29 August 2010)

We had high expectations when we arrived at this movie. 9+ on IMDb should mean that the movie was great.
I expected the movie to be hard to follow, intelligent twists and deep interesting scenes. Now, the movie has some amazing visual effects sometimes similar to those in "2012". Unfortunately the soul of Inception is not much deeper than the one in "2012". At least that movie was funny.
*WARNING THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS* :-) The main character has lost his family and prefers to live in a dream. This concept feels *very* similar to that in "Vanilla Sky" and "The Matrix" just to name two. The movie doesn't add anything new to this concept. The director obviously wants us to get a feeling of losing contact with reality and to get sucked into the multiple levels of dreams. Memento was a much greater success in this as it also gave us a reason to laugh and be surprised with many amazing twists.
There was no moral of this movie. OR perhaps: "If you want to play around with drugs and dream levels using a machine with a button, don't bring your wife, because 'the only thing that can get really stuck is an idea' so she might end up wanting to get to a better reality than the the real world and end up suicide to see the children again, which only existed in the dream and suicide only works to wake up from a dream, unless you're on heavy drugs, because then you'll get stuck in 'limbo'." So a tad silly plot and moral.
The couple had already grown old together in a deep level dream and experienced a long dream life. Each dream level gives a time multiplier and thus longer content.
But the dream never was as good as the real life. But the greed for love made the main character want to stay in the dream. He was even fighting hard for a guy who wanted him to implant an idea (inception) into a guy's head so that he split his father's enterprise to save the world from global domination. Wow, how important is that? And how was he gonna be able to see his children again? He was just given a promise but never wanted to care if the promise could be realized.
Basically the movie is about the love of children, dream levels, reality vs dream, how details in dreams can be created by yourself but it feels like someone else made it all up. This subconscious world is in itself interesting, but unfortunately this movie doesn't use that potential to give a deeper mark. This movie is unfortunately not as good as we hoped and expected. It's a wanna be intelligent with alternative worlds and lots of special-fx rubbish.
The movie was worth watching, but I had hoped to get sucked into a great amazing movie, where I forgot the real world, and that just never happened.
Sincerely Jan