A nightmare.

Rating: 1/10 (24 July 2010)

This movie is a disaster on many levels, but where it fails most miserably is at attempting to put dreams on screen. This movie is the most un-dreamy movie ever made, and as critics have said since the beginning of moving pictures, watching a movie is like dreaming with your eyes open. Colin McGinn covers this in great depth in his book "The Power of Movies", in which he discusses the spatio-temporal discontinuity in films: the camera can record a given scene and then leap to another place and time entirely. This is what movies do! Nolan treats this heavy-handed hopping about as if he's discovered something. What he's lost is the mysterious, moody, enigmatic quality of dreams, the tremendous emotional wallop. "Inception" is so detailed, so measured, with constant explication, that nothing is left to the imagination. How ironic is that? And to fill a movie about dreams with carefully designed car chases, gun battles, and mayhem of all kind...it's anti-dreaming. I've never watched a film so awake, so aware of itself, so full of itself. A hundred years from now when cultural historians look at this era of Runaway Bigism - Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Bodies! - they can use over-blown and spiritually empty films like this (and "Dark Knight") as good examples of what ruined the country. Wretched excess.