Unique Concept With Convoluted Plot

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2010)

Here lies a piece with a prestigious director and a hyper-inflated IMDb rating. This is a film more surreal than The Matrix, but fails to establish a reasonable explanation for this fictional universe. It is important that the audience can at least grasp the concept, too...
The concept, for all intents and purposes, is golden. There will rarely be a cooler premise than to enter the human subconsciousness. However, this movie does not deliver as well as Shutter Island did for the insanity (or perhaps faked insanity) of the protagonist. There also lies the slightly lacking quality of Inception's ending as opposed to Shutter Island. In fact, most of this film reminds me of Shutter Island...
There's this Molly character, which shouldn't have appeared at all. Too much action was instilled for there to be a fatal love affair popping in every so often. This is an action-packed blockbuster. Most audiences will agree that there was no feeling for the relationship between this couple. It was undermined by the intensity of everything else currently happening.
Rule sets are always fun and work best in these types of playground fictional worlds. Again, some are more surreal than others. This one ranks very high on that scale, however, that is what kills the plot. There are around 146,000 rules you have to remember and they are fed to you every five minutes of the movie. One is looking for a recap every five minutes let alone the 2 and a half hours of film. I am curious to wonder what they could have done with all the time they used to explain these rules and develop other scenes instead.
Overall, this film quite deservedly serves 3 out of 4 stars. It is a unique concept with convoluted ideas. One can't help but think back to Momemento with Guy Pierce and how that went. I would give that movie 3 1/2 compared to this. It was slightly convoluted but still kept in sync. This movie is unsynchronized and leaves its audience unsensitized (in a bad way).