Not a masterpiece

Rating: 2/10 (24 January 2012)

A shame that this movie is rated so highly on IMDb. Let me tell you this, this movie is NOT a masterpiece and doesn't even deserved to be among the top 250 of the best movie of all time. A true masterpiece has to be flawless and this movie is worth at most 5.8, no more. The neuro-nonsense that follow suit from a scientific and a philosophical point of view, Inception doesn't make any sense at all...Inception must start with a self-consistent theory of how the human brain works. What is a memory? What is a dream? Because most of us human beings walk around with only very fuzzy answers to these questions, filmmakers are able to take rather outlandish positions on them without arousing any hackles.In the case of Inception, the unstated premise of dreaming is that one one is asleep, one is inhabiting what essentially amounts to a parallel reality external to the mental state of the dreamer. This premise makes for an admittedly entertaining film, but it is preposterous. Dreaming is an entirely subjective experience; everything is an illusion generated and perceived by the brain itself. You can no more "enter" someone else's dream than you can enter into a movie that's playing on the multiplex screen.If you "wake up" from a dream and realize that you're still dreaming, you haven't entered a different level of some dream-reality continuum -- you've just experienced another illusory sensation. Contrary to the premise of the film, there is no "architecture" of a dream. We may feel like we're inhabiting an elaborate, detailed and consistent landscape, but that's just part of the illusion. There are some ideas about dreaming in the film that are actually accurate. For instance, it's true that they are powerfully influenced by emotion and subconscious cognition. And we often do wake ourselves with a powerful muscle spasm, which sleep researchers call a "hypnic jerk." But the movie also trades in ideas that amount to little more than folklore. It toys with the old idea that if you die in your dream, you will also die in real life.In the movie, if you die in your dream, you will enter a kind of coma. For obvious reasons, there is no evidence for bangungut-like phenomena, or rather any evidence has gone with the dreamers to their graves.What about the idea that time slows down within a dream, that an elaborate sequence of events in dream-space can take place in a few seconds of real time? As it happens, this claim has been investigated by researchers exploring lucid dreaming, and the results indicate that if there is any such effect, it is fairly small. Okay, but does any of this matter? Scientific error is rife in popular entertainment.I'm prepared to argue that Inception's misconceptions are both symptomatic and enabling of a damaging confusion that is rife in American society: namely, that between the internal subjective reality within our minds and the external, universally accessible reality of the "real world." It is this confusion that give rise to magical thinking and its myriad manifestations, from prayer-healing to "The Gift" and mystical notions about near-death experiences.Confusion about the boundary between dream and reality is particularly endemic among the religiously inclined, who often perceive dreams as the source of real-world information. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Israel, for instance, is located on a spot identified in a dream by the Emperor Constantine's mother, Helena.
The perfect metaphor of this movie would be like this:"I liked it,""I didn't really understand what was going on, but I liked it."
A tad overrated movie that need to be drop out of the top 250 movies list of all time. I'll give him 2 stars for the CGI effects who were indeed well done. That is all.