A movie about holodecks, not dreams

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2010)

While just as silly and more or less pointless as his earlier flicks, Nolan has created in Inception a decent enough heist movie. Just think of it as a movie about a multi-layered holodeck program, however, designed by programmers familiar with Counter Strike, cinematography, and disaster movies, since the idea of dreams in this film is quite banal and undreamlike, really - they are capitalist espionage tools with all the subconscious removed, or rather, translated into what is familiar to Nolan - a kind of Michael Bay alternate reality. The story, touted as complex, is complex only on the level that it is a heist movie - a fairly straightforward and very linear heist movie. There's no psychology (one character's statement that "it's all about X" is the entire psychological content of the film - the oldest trope in the book becomes a single, meaningless line) philosophy, ethics, and certainly no spirituality involved. I've seen some making comparisons to Solaris, either Tarkovsky's or Soderburgh's, but these are specious comparisons, made in a desperate attempt to elevate Nolan's vacant shenanigans. Don't believe it. The film is a hoax. It's fun, but it's a hoax. Nolan's characters are all self-centered and only speak the technobabble or reductionist claptrap Nolan forces into their mouths, there's not a shred of intellect anywhere.
One step above a Michael Bay creation, and that's it.