Dream A Little Dream

I enjoyed Inception, and I'm glad to see Hollywood trying something a little different (though it took a major star and a top-grossing director to get the green light). So I hate to spend time criticizing it, but that's what I'm going to do. (Spoilers ahead.)

The main problem is the film's lack of emotional involvement. The only character with enough depth to create empathy is Cobb, but with all the twists and turns, it was hard for me to care that much about his journey to get back to his kids, or deal with his wife's death. The rest of the story is pretty much all action. The MacGuffin is so uninspiring--convincing a guy to break up a company so another company has a chance to compete--that they dispense with it quickly so no one has time to think about it. (I guess that's the point of the MacGuffin, but if what everyone's after seems silly, I think it can affect the quality of the action.)

But that's the danger of Christopher Nolan's approach. Big set pieces and multi-tiered plot can make for a smartly done movie, but if there's no human heart beating underneath, the experience doesn't register as strongly. And from Memento to The Prestige to Inception, with each step Nolan seems to get bigger but colder.

Some are saying the film will go over the heads of the general audience. I doubt it. They may not get every little point, but the general story is easy enough to follow. This is because the exposition comes out in huge dollops. It probably has to--the rules are arbitrary and so must be explained. People afraid the film is too smart have confused intricacy with depth.

Most of the rules I could go with. They don't really make much sense (a problem I also had with The Matrix) but I'll give them the basic premise that you can design and go inside dreams (and even that dreams look like what Nolan puts up on screen). But once they're in the dream, how can they use the same methods and apparatus to go inside another dream? They're no longer in the real world--physical methods should no longer apply, even if they "believe" in what they're doing. Much worse is how things speed up on each level. Once again, though it doesn't make too much sense, I'll accept that dream time is 20 times faster than real time. But why shoud this effect apply on each new level? All levels are still going on inside the same real-world brains--are we to believe that on the fourth level (limbo) people are imagining a world that operates 8000 times faster?

The climax works, but not as well as a more concentrated story might. Cutting back and forth between the different levels is intriguing, but the effect isn't quite cumulative. The first dream level isn't that much--it's necessary for the plot, but the chase is more irritating than exciting. The weightlessness on level two is fun, though I never felt that much was at stake--maybe because it was too far removed from the main action. (Maybe that's my fault, since this section seems to get near-universal approval.) The antics in the snow on the third level seemed like a second-rate action film for the most part. (And since Fischer is an undeveloped character, when he meets his dad the moment has little power.) In general, all the "bad guys" on these various levels (except for Mal) were faceless and unknown.

Then there's the ending. The final twist annoyed me. We're left in a limbo of our own, not sure if Cobb is in the real world or a dream world. There are clues that point either way, but the point is this final ambiguity adds nothing to the film. It would have been just as easy (and probably more satisyfing) for Nolan to have shown us the totem do one thing or another and settle the issue. Ambiguity for its own sake doesn't impress me.

I might add when I first heard about the film, it sounded like Dreamscape. But knowing how films are today (with excess twists as if that makes them better rather than ludicrous), I was afraid they'd go for the cliche and have a "surprise" ending where it's a dream. Or where there's always one more level up to go (e.g. ExistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor). But the ending where we have to wonder if the hero isn't dreaming has also been done (Total Recall, Minority Report). I suppose Nolan's film earns it, but would it have been so much to ask to see the totem drop? (Someone told me if the cinema is quiet, you can hear it drop after the cut to black, but I'm not ready to pay to see it again.)

PS On the radio I heard someone describe Inception's solid grosses by saying "the film is anything but a sleeper." I understand the pun they want, but "sleeper" should (or at least used to) mean a success that no one saw coming, which was not what they meant.