Too-little or too-much editing, but solid solid contrasting of dream-relevance filtration with discarded-dream-content.

Rating: 7/10 (22 December 2019)

Although this film has quite a disjointed, distracting, difficult to follow start, and perhaps needed to leave the presumably theatrical-format lights-fading? was it?, in, OR, not have the same scene-transitions withOUT fading, which it did, or perhaps had a badly chosen choice of scenes to cram into a bizzare opening 5/15 minutes, which made the initial character introduction less progressive,..
...this film does do quite well in contrasting potentials of dreams current scenes in which you're in when you're aware of your surroundings in a dream, with the 'scenes' ahead, in terms of what/why/how the brain composes content ahead of your progression THROUGH it, at least in dream types that have you in regular human bodily-prescence, however then distorted, unlike ones where you can travel in time / astrally, etc.
However, it also has way too much time wasted on a ludicrous scene near the end where the disciplined professional, melts into a puddle of emotional vulnerability under his wife, after trying to kill her in a previous scene without much difficulty or thought, which was quite an unrealistic too-close-in-time totally different behaviour, unlike what might've been more realistic with more glammer in the illusion had it happened in some kind of scene of shock, or imagined physical stress or something but he's calmly walking around the corner per police-domestic operations inside houses room-to-room camerawork, and it reaaally didn't look right in terms of whether or not he's ready to blow the illusion of his wife away a 2nd time, which only moments before, was critical to how much time they had, but because of the drama between characters exploited in the production, was instead then spent upon to the tune of a good 10m of the movie, which tooootally interrupted the action and urgency, for the sake for a tragic sentimentality, WERE the other a human dreaming at the same time as he,.. but no, this EXPERIENCED dream-operative, somehow then forgets in a moment, withOUT, something like shock/stress, when he was going in there, KNOWING, that he'd have to kill her again, and wasn't disturbed / unwilling to / the acting of DiCarprio not really nervous / uncertain / unsettled, when it would've been, were he losing it during their mission.
so... sigh... yes, for some the in-a-dream desires, of existence IN dreams, might have shed a tear or two over not totally dissimilar experiences in their own dreams, but in terms of continuing the sci-fi / action-drama ... it really interrupted the resolution and took too much away from what was MEANT to be happening in their target's head...
...in a similar way, that during the convoluted planning and setting up of the planned indirect contributors to the target's future decision-making, far too much scene camerawork was focused on their control over someone else's dream, the person no doubt having to strain their normal levels of dream activity, to compensate for all the extra activity when handling so much more, from multiple people's input / synchronizations, etc.
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i had to take points off from 10, for the difficulty in following scenes that SEEM clean-cut enough, that you try to follow them in detail, when more blurring, focus-shifting, perspective elongating / optics-effects, etc. could have DRAGGED the audience along with looking-forwards in the direction of the characters own realizations about the progression of their plan a little like a 3rd person view in computer games perhaps,.. sometimes along floors, or camerawork like in thrillers or psychodelia types movies from the 60s-80s, to make it SEEM more like a dream.
Instead, a lot of the camera positioning and what's-in-shot scope-of-a-scene scene-setting, looks like a James Bond film, and i don't think it really captures what perhaps a theatrical low-light version of this, probably could do, with more slow, standing-still speaking roles and dream-scapes background-characters can do as being-passed-by non-characters, whereas the following-the-mission-members pursuing them military-squad goons, were meant to be a part of the target's creation and supposed to be saving him, but were his own brain composing scenes more, rather than being so passive, they would not've been so easily up-staged by DiCaprio and the other mission members,..
...so although there's dramatic-tension, the amount of passivity in the target is also far too easy, even though there's supposed to be a sense of fear, in him, even in the most un-creative minds, there's plenty of things to choose from, to make one's escape - superpowers, etc. The guy's supposed to've never seen a superhero movie? OK, yes, there's supposed to be something going on per the 'help' that the DiCaprio character gives him, were he to believe that his dream is abnormal, and being manipulated, however, he barely even strains a fascial muscle for the rest of the movie, after having trusted the DiCapro character, and then presumably forgotten about exactly what was supposed to be happening, and then just fought his way out, with his allies in the immanent-violence.
Although that's OK in terms of him potentially having become distracted, there is still far too much supposed control over what happens, from the combination of the 'structure', and what opportunities one might not have within one. While it's ok to argue that you would were you not able to get out of one,.. it's not really very believable that the target doesn't have any defense-mechanisms or escape mechanisms, in a similar way that all the main mission members have their tokens to test to see if they're in a dream still, etc.
The target just plods along, even tho in a non-creative dream, it would probably be likely that the person would do the equivalent of tuning-out to a movie format or plot-resolution that you've seen a hundred times before. In other words, he'd lose-INTEREST, in his assumed own-CHOICE, of dream.
Why would a huge-inheritance privileged inheritor, bother remembering anything, from a irrelevant dream, compared to what his brain might consider relevant to his situation, so soon after his father's death?
Upon waking, he'd probably just go... i must've seen some movie like that lately,.. and go back to thinking about all he's having to organize after inheriting so much, or thinking about his life with his father. to suggest that he'd not just dump everything from an action-hero dream like some kind of maturity test / demonstration of what to leave behind, perhaps,.. is just avoided entirely, in terms of whether or not the team would've made a new plan for their placement, rather than have thought it through and anticipated that he's not likely to be affected by action-movies-heroes/ines anymore.
??
So another point off for that as well as a few other minor things like that.
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some good actions-happening-at-the-same-time-simultaneously design and production editing and re-filming, etc, during the dream-within-a-dream photography, transitions in the story-boarding, and capturing of corresponding changes in one reality from actions in the other, to get the idea of the interpretation of things from the higher level of dreams in the lower. Does not deserve a low score, for at least that much, even if one couldn't follow it the plot / dynamics between characters.