Good idea lost in the noise

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2010)

The central idea of "Inception" is an interesting one: technology exists to enter other people's dreams in order to steal their most private secrets or to implant new ideas. With Christopher Nolan of "Memento" fame as writer and director, this should have been a smart, compelling movie. Unfortunately, "Inception" is a bloated failure.
The root problem is that Nolan replaces the fascinating surrealism of dream worlds with lengthy outtakes from James Bond movies. For example, early in the film, when Cobb and Ariadne are sitting at a café in a dream world, Cobb tells Ariadne to stay calm. What's going to happen? Is the waiter going to bring her a glass full of wriggling eyeballs? Is she going to turn around and see her best friend from high school having sex with Abraham Lincoln? No. THINGS START EXPLODING. And that's the whole movie in a nutshell: gaudy special effects and endless fight scenes as a poor substitute for imaginative ideas.
The matryoshka-doll plot of dreams within dreams isn't nearly as hard to follow as one might imagine. This is largely because nothing of consequence happens at higher levels once our heroes have moved on to deeper levels. The higher-level supporting actors just fight off bad guys -- and overblown special effects -- until it's time to bring back their colleagues from the depths.
Nolan should sit back, watch a few of the best movies by Luis Bunuel and David Lynch, and try again with one-tenth the budget and ten times the imagination. (Okay, that's never gonna happen, but it's *my* dream.)