Expensive drivel

Rating: 4/10 (26 January 2011)

As long as it remains possible to spend 100 million dollars on making drivel, setting aside 10 million towards advertising in order to tell people that it's great so that they've spent 200 million on tickets before they find out otherwise, there'll be no incentive for Hollywood movie-making ever to improve.
I've reviewed Angelina Jolie's latest farrago in very similar terms. While that movie bizarrely assumes that the Cold War still remains of interest to anyone (?), "Inception" insists basically that it's interesting to watch other people's dreams. Well, visually it can be - the "architecture-bending" style of "Inception" would have had great appeal, maybe in a 60-second advert for a credit card or mobile phone company.
But visual appeal aside, the "plot" of the movie is not so much multi-layered as multi- pointless. The old cliché that "if you die in dream you wake up" is hauled out here with monotonous regularity, but it's never applied consistently, and even if it were, who cares? If you MUST fire a machine gun at someone in a dream (and I can't think of any reason why you'd really need to), why would you ever run out of bullets? Wouldn't you just dream up some more? If you want to blow up a dream hotel, do you really NEED dream explosives? If the fuse goes out, is it safe to return, or should you always light the dreamy blue touchpaper and stand well back?
The movie's makers assume that multi-layering these various dream levels will be endlessly fascinating (as evidenced by the enormous running time), but anyone with an ounce of discernment will simply become less and less connected as the plot becomes "deeper".
We're in the same childish, ill-conceived territory here as many movies about existing in "virtual reality" or even "on the holodeck". Simulate as convincingly as you like, but you can't change the laws of physics in the real world, and if you're in a dream, then there's no real need to worry about being stabbed or shot, and neither should the viewer care whether the characters are, or aren't.
The urban myth being put about that "Inception" includes some sort of interesting or unexpected ending is no more than that.
For a witty, snappy meditation on alternative reality, try Cronenberg's "eXistenZ", and (despite the fact that, like, when you're dreaming you know, your life goes really slowly and, like, you can live a whole lifetime in the dreamy dream state, man) try to give this bloated waste of time a miss.