More confusing than interesting

Rating: 5/10 (20 July 2010)

A blockbuster, star studded extravaganza with a somewhat imaginative yet an overwhelmingly more confusing and contrived premise. The audience is expected to enter this contrived sci-fi?, dream world where Juno is able to architect dreams (why her character I didn't pick up), and Leo's character can extract information or do the more complicated thing of putting an idea into someones mind "inception". Continuously saturated with fun, "A"list actors one after another; Leo, Michael Caine, Juno, Joseph Gordan-Levitt, Ken Watanabe these actors were used as mere tools to create a blockbuster and drive the movie forward. As we get more and more immersed in the world of inception we feel no interesting characterizations despite all this acting talent, everyone is one tone, which makes you care less whether or not Leo is still dreaming at the end or not. After this matrixy like premise is explained, we are transported into this world, of entering and altering people's subconscious in dreamland. It has similar overtones to the Matrix (of heavily explaining ulterior worlds within our own), but this premise was far less fascinating.
After the complicated premise is established the movie gets into the story. Leo has powers to extract information or alter someone's thinking by entering another individual's subconscious dreamworld. He gets an assignment from a powerful mogul to exploit and alter a competitor's mind through his dream. If Leo succeeds he gets to travel back to the states where he has been deported. The movie did not do a good job connecting the premise of how people enter dreams and plant ideas to the story. OK so this idea of conducting inception in dream world is established but does it have to get into 3-4 dream sequences? Its more complicated to do inception than steal info out of someones mind so something more has to be done than getting into people's minds on one level but confusingly layering dreams within dreams within dreams, confusing establishing various rules with this more complicated inception world (I barely understood the easier stealing info world), confusingly adding side stories of his wife he doesn't want to let go of and therefore retains in his personal dream and making confusing action and fighting (who they are fighting is also part of the puzzle) made it much too much. These things are actually explained but they are explained so briefly and rapidly along with many other "rules" we have to accept that it became a lot, easy to miss and not well put together.
More than imagination it was randomness....Why 3 levels why not 8 or 2 why does it have to be 3 levels (the movie I think explained this but what Im critical of is the imaginative part, it was just too random to get really into), if Juno can flip the grid of Paris why cant she do something to make it easy for them to accomplish their goal. The limitations or freedoms were not clear. What it utlimately came down to was an action movie. Definitely after a second viewing the pieces may more clearly fit, but for me at least, the puzzle will remain askew.