A cure for insomnia, even without earplugs ( which would help)

Rating: 3/10 (26 August 2010)

My wife and I fell for all the hype and went to this monstrosity of a film. I tried very hard to "get it," but my wife just fell asleep. I appreciate the objective of venturing into the wonders of Dreamland, but I've gone nighty-night every night for nearly 63 years without ANYTHING remotely resembling any level of any of the dreams portrayed. My first problem with the film was the basic technical premise of one person being able to get inside another person's dreams. OK, I was willing to accept the concept on faith, but here you have a bunch of supposedly brilliant characters explaining it to each other, and their explanations lurched between "sophomoric" and "incoherent." Then, accepting the dubious premises of the story, you have this idea that the dream compresses time as compared to reality, so the dream within the dream compresses time even further, and so forth. OK, I'll buy that, but the EFFECT of this is that when we're two HOURS into the movie, suddenly everything is going VERY slowly. We watch that van falling imperceptibly toward the water, and although there's a lot of hyperkinetic action going on at the other levels, my wife is sound asleep and I'm asking myself whether it will take all night for that damn van to hit the water so we can all go home. And while all this is going on, who within the story do we really care about? The dead wife? The cute chick who was supposed to be so smart, but just kind of sits there and doesn't do much as the plot unfolds? The rich guy whose brains are being used as an Interstate Freeway and shooting gallery for some other rich guy's advantage? Leonardo? Forget it. He's like Captain Ahab chasing the whale, but at least Ahab had the good grace to go down to his death with the whale. The only ones I could empathize with were the two little kids, and they've turned their back on their father. I don't blame them.