Nolan's Inception Steals Idea from Novelist

Rating: 1/10 (28 February 2011)

Inception no more explores dreams and the human mind than Star Wars explores outer space. Inception is a rip-off of the novel Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun (FSS), published in 2004 but preceded by a web site on dreams (2001-2009), the thrust of which is about how dream experiences are the source of ideas and other changes to waking life, including personality development. The broader point is that like his character Dom Cobb, Nolan himself steals the ideas he needs to create Inception from a novelist and life long dream researcher.
Chapter 7 titled "Journey by Deflection" occurs entirely in a shared dream in which 2 protagonists ascend / descend through "levels of dreaming" in action-oriented sequences and even a "dream within a dream," addressing how intermittent awareness of the dreams affects the dream. But Inception does not (a) intrigue / illuminate as to how these levels are distinct and yet intrinsically related or (b) draw from real dreams and real similarities to waking life. Inception is just an action film set in dream space that neglects the essence of dreaming in dream symbolism. The dream space featured in Inception is fictitious -- a contrivance of both Nolan and of the architect in Nolan's story.
Inception would have benefited by emulating FSS in the one way it did not emulate it. In FSS the characters trapped in the shared dream have to solve the dream's logic in order to wake up. This plot is much more conducive to an education of the language of dreams, which FSS author spent an entire lifetime understanding from the time he started a diary of his own dreams at age 13 to his doctoral dissertation at age 27 exploring the relationship between dream experiences, coping strategies, blood chemistry, and symptoms in terminally ill cancer patients. Like FSS however, and this is yet another coincidental similarity between the two works, in Inception the characters are thwarted by a dream that is plugged into their mental efforts to understand it. Also as in FSS, the dreamers have to deal with the denizens of a dream world that react to periodic episodes of lucid awareness of the dream. In FSS, the whole script, including objects and aspects of the environment, respond to the awareness, but in Inception we get the juvenile and scientifically ignorant development that other characters in the dream respond to Dom Cobb and his team like white blood cells to foreign pathogens. The bottom line is that FSS teaches us things about dreams and Inception will impress only the most psychologically unsophisticated among us or those who have never remembered a dream in their life.
Also like FSS, Inception makes the point that much of the bizarreness of dreams is attributable to a higher-order thinking. It does this using a statement very similar to one from the former FSS web site, which maintained that while dreaming is a whole brain activity, the conscious person uses only about 3-5% of his or her brain. FSS author remarks that experiencing and trying to make sense of a dream is like trying to fit 100% of something into 3-5% of itself -- there will be distortion!
The subject matter notwithstanding, Nolan's storytelling and direction are designed to give artificial weight to the real value of plot twists. In Nolan we have a director who conceals and compensates for second-rate thinking with CGI and high-octane action that detracts from the story without getting the blood flowing. The action in the film was supposed to create a sense of time-sensitive suspense, but came across more like the dull dishwater backing up in my sink than a raging river.
There are also inconsistencies in the film. Nolan wants us to invest in the idea that everything that happens in a dream has an effect on the waking life of the dreamer. It works -- until Dom Cobb dismisses out of hand his shooting of all these dream characters like they were throngs of disposable orcs or storm troopers, claiming its OK because they are "merely projections of the subconscious." Suddenly, what happens in dream Vegas stays in dream Vegas. And where did the idea of "limbo" come from -- introduced as a patchwork device for a poorly articulated plot.
And much of the film's premise is contradicted by real research which shows that the relationship between perceived and actual dream time is roughly 1:1.