Inception: Has Christopher Nolan forgotten how to dream?

Jim, I think there are two reasons the dreams in Inception are un-dreamlike to us, the audience. First, because in this future point where shared dreaming is possible, it's also clearly possible to train someone to create lucid dreams with a fixed architecture. It's already possible for people to control their dreams to a degree, I see no reason not to buy into the movie's conceit that there are people trained to do this, you know, well.

The second is that what the audience is seeing is probably not what is literally happening at any given moment--it can't be. As Cobb says at one point, when you're dreaming, you don't notice there's anything wrong. It's only afterwards you realize something was strange. Nolan made the choice to give the Inception dreams the eight and physical presence of reality in order to give the audience the sensation that these events were real, the way the characters experience them in the dreams. If the dream worlds were as amorphous, illogical, and lacking in detail as true dreams, the audience would have a very hard time empathizing with the characters' inability to tell dream from reality.

This is spot on and matches my sentiments exactly. This is easily the most literal-minded movie ever made about dreams. I laughed out loud at the elevator that descends into Cobb's unconscious mind. Wow.

However, I think I was more annoyed by how much talking, and talking, and talking, and more talking all the characters do about what they are going to do. I wouldn't have been shocked if characters whipped out flowcharts and powerpoints and directly address the audience.

The premise of the film was promising but I was fairly underwhelmed yet again by Nolan's effort here. You are right, its not very "dreamlike", it's more like the Matrix except the fight choreography is not as compellingly watchable. I do like the idea of the cognitive heist idea however. I don't know about you but I found it odd that the character's were working through their issues while inside a dream, on a time limited mission. Nolan's skills are not up to his ambitions.

Well, you're definitely not wrong. There is nothing at stake in this movie at all. And other than Nolan doing his usual Hitchcock thing (obsessing on the topic of obsession), it's not even really about anything.

That being said, let me say 4 positive things about it:

1) I actually thought the increasing rate at which time slowed down as they went into deeper levels was pretty smart. I mean, it's undeniable that when we dream it feels like more time elapses than is actually elapsing in real life. I thought it was somewhat inventive to combine that with the dream within a dream conceit to give the characters as much time as possible to do whatever they needed to do. (I just wish what they needed to do had mattered. At all.)

2) Credit where credit is due, he also got right the idea that you just find yourself at a given location in a dream w/o knowing how you got there. That felt true to me. (Of course, it's also unintentionally hilarious because it makes me think that maybe we're supposed to retroactively read The Dark Knight as taking place entirely in a dream state.)

3) The stuff with Joseph G-L's character floating around trying to work out a way to make the other characters fall in a zero gravity environment worked well. And JGL conveyed the difficulty of the task nicely, no small feat in a movie where everybody can pretty much do whatever is required at all times.

4) The only sequence of the movie that worked on any level other than pure entertainment was the scene where Ellen Page followed Leo into his dream and got a sense of the depth of his obsession with his late wife. This was effective I thought, but ultimately wasted as the movie then veered off in a painfully literal direction.

By and large, my complaints are the same as yours. It's not about anything, and every frame of Mulholland Dr. feels like a more accurate (and far more menacing) depiction of what it's like to be walking around inside a dream. Your own, somebody else's, whatever.

I just don't know what we're supposed to be caring about in this movie? Whether or not Leo gets to go home? Why would we care about that when we never experienced his character being home in the first place? We haven't lost anything because of his exile. The only conflict that matters from a character standpoint is whether or not Leo can make peace with himself over the death of his wife. Is that enough to justify this story when we are exposed to essentially nothing of their "real" life together?

What are the motivations of the rest of Leo's team by the way? Money, presumably, but we never hear any numbers thrown around. Why would Ellen Page's character agree to participate in this? And did I hear correctly that Michael Caine at some point taught Leo's character how to do all this dream infiltration stuff? How is 2.5 hours not enough time to explore THAT situation at all?

I'm not even going to get into the final shot. Didn't David Chase put this topic to bed once and for all 3 years ago with The Sopranos finale? Nothing happens after the story ends. We got it.

Jim,

It's like you reached right into my mind and extracted my thoughts.

Seriously, though, your comments play eerily like an echo of some of the e-mail rants,er, discussions I've been having with friends about the film.

If these are dreams, they are the most logical, mundane, coherent dreams ever presented (odd considering how incoherent Nolan's arrangement of "real" space in action sequences usually is). I'm not saying that such a prosaic approach to creating an alleged dreamscape, one completely devoid anything that could remotely be termed "associative," can't work. It's certainly different, and it avoids some of the forced attempts other filmmakers have undertaken to make their dream sequences look dreamy (i.e. randomly weird), but I don't see the appeal of it.

With the attempt to evoke dream imagery a complete failure, what you're left with is a basic heist film with the requisite exposition (amplified to yet-unseen levels) and a straightforward presentation, designed at every point to avoid disorientation, of the operation itself. Explain everything you're going to do, then take pleasure in watching the characters pull it off with panache (as well as working around the inevitable complications in their perfect plan). It's a formula that was worked time and again in films as diverse as Rififi and Ocean's 11, but the problem is there's no pleasure here.

The heist sequences are joyless, and I think the problem (for those who consider this a heist film that doesn't work) is the decision to structure the narrative around a trauma. Just as Nolan's mechanistic sensibility doesn't seem well suited to a (purported) dream story, a deeply (and unconvincingly) traumatized character doesn't seem like an apt choice to lead a heist caper. It's a painfully obvious joke, but I can't resist asking "Why so serious?"

But then again we all have a different dream experience. Werner Herzog says (probably tongue in cheek, but who knows) that he only dreams about boring things like eating a ham sandwich. Maybe Nolan only dreams about reading technical manuals.

As some people commenting on the movie elsewhere point out, everybody has different experiences with dreams. There might be recognizable patterns to them but they never amount to the same individual experience or feeling. In the movie, a universal set of rules (shall we call them Nolan rules) apply to the whole human experience with dreams. I would have expected to see more variety in different people’s experiences while they sleep.
Also, wouldn’t it be cooler to explore how our dreams and how we perceive them change as we age? The whole premise of the movie is so frustratingly simplistic.

Even if we are willing to look pass the arbitrariness of these rules and the unrealistic linear time schemes within dreams, it is impossible to get over the fact that in Nolan’s vision, dreams serve as just another dimension where the latest CGI and unending chase and action sequences with no real stakes are staged. Dreams themselves have no other function.

Rules are obsessively spelled out only to further the one-note, unoriginal plot which I suspect Nolan did not want viewers to interpret or imagine for themselves.

Wish the plot was at least an entertaining one. There is nothing interesting or deep about the story and the characters. In fact, there is no character development at all. We don’t have any idea about their personalities. The whole movie is cold, unengaging and dare I say boring.

For me, the most interesting scene came towards the end when C. Murphy’s character had an emotional exchange with his father in his deathbed. Everything else felt so hollow.

And, don’t even get me started with the maddening score.

I might not have been so worked up over this movie had it not been hailed as a near masterpiece. Please, in your dreams…

I once saw a great film about sleep-travel and memories and obsession and tragic romance and even, prominently, a beach. It was called Je t'aime, je t'aime.

That said, I enjoyed the few unforced light moments in this self-serious mess. I'm thinking specifically of Joseph Gordon-Levitt floating around the hotel trying to jimmy a new kick.

Also, explosions are boring as fuck. Though I did enjoy some spectacle (the wide shot of that fortress, that gorgeous gold leaf Japanese room from the beginning).

I once saw a great film about sleep-travel and memories and obsession and tragic romance and even, prominently, a beach. It was called Je t'aime, je t'aime.

That said, I enjoyed the few unforced light moments in this self-serious mess. I'm thinking specifically of Joseph Gordon-Levitt floating around the hotel trying to jimmy a new kick.

Also, explosions are boring as fuck. Though I did enjoy some spectacle (the wide shot of that fortress, that gorgeous gold leaf Japanese room from the beginning).

It's not really fair to lump Nolan in with the "Usual Suspects" school of wants-to-be-clever-but-is-actually-dumb. MEMENTO is a great movie; he'll never make a better one, but it's a great movie nonetheless, with lots to say about memory and a formally radical way of saying it (no, it's not a gimmick; look up any of Mike D'Angelo's writings on the film for a more cogent refutation of this BS claim than any I could whip up here). The problem with post-Batman Nolan is that he's decided he wants to be a blockbuster action filmmaker, and as you know better than anyone, he's just not any good at that. For all of INCEPTION's heady conceits about dream-levels and limbo states, it's really just a studio-bland action flick: a car chase in a dream-within-a-dream is still a car chase, after all. I think if Nolan sharpened his focus and went back to doing what he did so brilliantly in MEMENTO, he could be an important director. But probably the only way for that to happen is if he makes a huge box office flop, and he's not going to do that if he keeps churning out studio-friendly action movies. So it is, as Leo says in the film, a closed loop.

As I said on my twitter tonight: If you only see one movie this year about Leo DiCaprio stepping into elaborate fantasy worlds to grieve for a tragic loss...see the other one. SHUTTER ISLAND is a better film in literally every way.

While I see your point, I'm leaning towards the first poster. We, the audience, is obviously awake, and therefore, we'd think it ridiculous that the characters wouldn't know what was a dream and what wasn't. By going a very literal route, we'd be able to understand why they were so confused. And, besides, you don't know what kind of jacked-up shit was going on elsewhere in the dream. The crew could be showing up right before the dreamer hailed the Catbus.

Or not. Because the movie involves the Architect, Ellen Page's character (and briefly Lukas Haas, seriously, what did they do with him?), designing the dream, that is, projecting her plans for it when she enters. Her plans were coherent enough that they could be manipulated by her and co., and at the same time real enough that they wouldn't collide with the surreal bits that might've shown up had they not been manipulating it.

One thing I don't get (if you've seen it): If the totum could only be touched by the owner, why was Cobb using his wife's?

Anyway, I thought the action scenes, especially the within-a-dream-to-the-fourth ones, to be kind of brilliant. That's just my opinion, though.

Nice write-up, then. Interesting.

But this is, above all, a summer movie, and abstract dreaming wouldn't make for much of a plot.

Thanks Jim, your review is a tonic. I saw the same movie you did, and I'd like to see the movie so many other critics did. For a movie that's about dream states the movie is remarkably un-absorbing. The dialogue is flat out terrible, and Nolan demonstrates again, after The Dark Knight, that he's an incoherent action director. What's the point of the endless, endless shoot em' up scenes? They might have been tolerable if Nolan had came up with ideas on how to use the dream state to choreograph action other than "zero gravity" and collapsing structures (all done before and better). It's like he hadn't seen The Matrix, The Cell, Dark City, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I could get carried away here, but I think even Back to the Future part II did a better job of telling a complex Sci-Fi story with interconnecting layers of alternate reality.

Well exactly just what I didn't want to hear. But not surprising. And I guess science fiction movies are hard to make too cause that genre sucks. I mean I LOVE good sci-fi but it is rare.
And so the summer of 2010 will go down as a terrible dud for the movies.

I'm shocked, shocked, that you didn't like this movie.
I disagree a lot, especially in that I found it authentically thrilling, and thought the tiered time was ingenious in the good and bad sense of the word but all-around excellently executed.
I thought the sense of space and continuity was well-preserved in the action sequences (watching for it because you'd pounded into my head that this was a Nolan weakness).

More to the point, though, I thought this was a very interesting investigation of dreams. No, it definitely wasn't dreamlike in any way. You've got 5 or 6 people in the same unconscious space, created by an architect. Combined with the corporate infiltration angle, I thought this was a pretty harrowing idea in and of itself (though it wasn't explained by the characters, just demonstrated by the warp and woof of the film, so it might be missed) that the chaos and personal intimacy/madness of dreams could be as sterile as an old hotel for days, as consistent, as shared with others....
The idea of the buried mind turned into actual bodyguards, the weird malleability of time (the idea that experts could reduce it to abstract math, if you want anxiety on an at-work-in-underwear-level, there you go), the gross linearity of the city dude'd built in Limbo, the keen observation that the body is paralyzed during sleep, but for a who-knows-how-long moment you still jump yourself awake if you jump or fall in dreams.
I mean, in total, I think it's very clear that this was in no way meant to replicate a dream. I honestly can't understand anyone who has trouble "unraveling" the story, since it's very, very clearly delineated and explained. The fact that a movie about corporate co-opting of dreams can draw praise for being dreamy and scorn for making the dreams in the film seem too regulated, controlled, and sterile is baffling and, well...disappointing.
I wish you could have gone in and watched the movie, since viscerally it's the most exhilarating film I've seen in a long time, and I hope you can consider something beyond the bizarrely-drawn party lines (which I s'pose you have a stake in) in considering the movie. The dreams there are to dreams for us as food for us is to food for the folks of 300 years ago, I'd imagine.
This is certainly in the movie, and more. You just have to approach it as a work of art capable of revealing, rather than a bailiwick for two opposing sides to claim in unison.

The movie isn't really about 'dream-states' as most people experience them. It's about the specific practice of retaining consciousness in dream states (lucid dreaming), and how that can be manipulated very specifically for espionage in the unique "dream-share" technology they've created.

The dreams are so fixed and unshifting because they're the "dreams" of trained lucid dreamers. It's part of the espionage.

There's a reason the 'dreamhost' and the 'subject' are two different people. By having the dreamhost be a trained lucid dreamer, they can remain conscious during the dream and maintain a 'controlled stable' environment that they bring the 'subject/target' into. The subject/target isn't aware he or she isn't in their own dream, so they're mind projects/creates objects into it.

When cobb draws the circle in the beginning, he's showing that normally in dream-states a single person is both simultaneously creating the world and populating it. It's a circuit of form on one side and content on the other, with the mind constantly in a validation loop, checking "am I here", and then simultaneously creating it's own conditions to make sure the answer is a yes. Every night all of us fall into dream states, and whether we remember them or not populate a world that our mind simultaneously affirms as being real. (unless you're lucid, at which point the unconscious mind stops creating and the conscious one starts to)

Extraction cheats by making the "form" half of that circle come from a trained dreamhost and inviting the target into that dream space. Non-lucid targets don't have the capacity to retain their awareness in dreamspace, so the mind continues with it's "am i here" validation check and if yes populates the world with content/projections. The content/projections validation check manifests itself as the suspicious 'projection people', who when they feel "this isn't real" attack and kill foreign invaders, sort of like white blood cells.

So if I'm creating the form of your dream, and I "create" a safe with secret documents X in it in that dream, you're unconscious/non lucid mind isn't able to realize it didn't make that request (ie has "bought into the reality") and fills it with said secrets. Thus it's ALL about controlling the dreamstates and not letting them get out of hand.

Thus, things only get "dream like" and wonky in the dream world when the dreamhost begins to wake up/is impacted by the outside world or loses lucidity and forgets it's a dream.

In the end it's not that Nolan got "dreaming" wrong, it's just that he's focused on a very specific type of dreaming (conscious/lucid).

Lynch's work is more representative of another type of dreaming: unconscious/free association (Mulholland, Inland Empire). his catching the big fish book is all about dipping into the subtle realms of dream states and plucking out the random stuff the mind creates unconsciously.

I can totally dig someone having a preference for that "style" of dreaming as it opens up the visual and imaginary realms more. But that's not what nolan was going for!

However, it would have been cool if he had taken it a bit farther to what some would say is the deepest and most mature form of lucid dreaming: remaining conscious in your dream WITHOUT trying to control it.

------------------

Other random thoughts:

Ari creates the self contained designs for the worlds, and then tells them to the dreamhost, who is the host for the dream they pull the subject/target into. In Dream #1, Yusaf is the dreamhost, #2 Arthur, #3 Eams, #4/Limbo is Cobb

Having the architect be separate from "dreamhost" helps ensure that they're not building the world from their own memories, making it harder for them to confuse dreamland with reality, and thus stay lucid and in control. "Never recreate from your memory. Always imagine new places."

When cobb and his wife got lost in limbo, it was because they kept going into deeper into her dream states and only used their memories and each other to build the world. Mal "forgets" she was dreaming, ie she was no longer lucid/conscious. Cobb did too, but eventually got back a glimmer of awareness, and became unsure, so he orchestrates the suicide, HOPING he's right. if he is, they wake up together. if he isn't, they're dead.

He believes enough to kill himself, but only if she does it with him (he still has a doubt). Had he just killed her, and been wrong, ie they're actually awake, he would have killed his wife and had to live with that. Thus the double suicide is his attempt to not 'get it wrong'.

I didn't mind the time-scaling aspects, with time at one level mapping to time at deeper levels. I thought it gave the audience something to hang on to. You've got to have rules and limitations in movies: if everything is possible, without limitation, then none of it is interesting.

Regarding the "elevator" metaphor: I took that to be representative of Cobb's character, the possibly "schizoid" way he compartmentalizes his memories and stuffs the worst ones in to the "basement". Only he has such a construct, none of the others - especially not Ariadne with her wild architectural speculations. Cobb is a severely injured individual, mentally, and I'm surprised to see comments like the above about lack of character development: Cobb is fighting to be the character he was before.

I was kind of disappointed that Nolan didn't add anything about sleep paralysis into the film.

Inception is that kind of clever Hollywood film that inspires (actually conspires) us to be dumb. It is the that most fantastic kind of Hollywood blockbuster, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, like Jaws like Star Wars, like Goldfinger, which treats an audience not like a set of individuals but as a singular entity. We might as well be robots. It sure might be a nice feat to accomplish, but I am not sure my movie watching necessarily seeks that.

We agree:

Inception is a huge let down. It ends up being a heist movie with characters that I don't care about. The characters are underdeveloped, and it ends up being a bunch of strung together action scenes that are boring and hard to decipher (gemoetrically). Nolan directs action scenes as if he's more interested in the thrill than the event. I'm interested in the event. Give me a 30 degree angle on the scene any day over close ups mashed with close ups.

The plot is also undereveloped. It came off as rather meaningless. I took nothing away from the movie I have spent time thinking about the movie, but I do that for many movies, good and bad alike. The only interesting factor while watching it was some of the CGI (which wasn't special. and just following what was going on (since you had to pay attention).

The movie would have been better had it focused more on some of the psychological aspects of dreaming, how dreams are manifested, how they play out, and how unpredictable they can be. But instead, it gets into some of the most basic and boring emotions (Daddy didn't love me!) as a major device.

The only character that ends up being developed to a point of feeling real, was Cobb. And even then, the story behind him becomes something that only partially worked for me. I wasn't engrossed nor overly sympathetic to his struggle. It's not till the later part of the movie that we are given a reason to really care about it (until then we only know he is struggling with something, but we don't understand why nor if we should symphasize with him or not). It would have worked better for me had his story been the focus, but no, kids need explosions, so the movie delivered that aplenty.

Another frustration was the many plot holes, or areas of the plot that were included but not seeming consistent with other plot elements (ruels). Oh but it is a dream so anything is possible! And frankly I got no sense that it understood dreaming at all. I recognize that they were architecting the dreams, so they made them real (because he needed to be convinced that it was real, in order to be tricked into going to this second level), but I don't think it was a necessary. Personally, if I was going to have defenses, I wouldn't have the worst damn soldiers ever as them. And I'm not sure why these guys were able to be super soldiers when in the dream. That made no sense at all. If they had superpowers, why didn't they just do things in an easier fashion. Where there unexplained rules for what you could do within the dream to fight the 'antibodies' or? I think I've spent too much time thinking about it.

I haven't seen the movie, but I can give evidence that dreams can often have no point.

I was forced to be in a duet for West Side Story in a cafeteria. I did awful choreography and was nervous because I had no idea what I was doing. A boombox appeared from nowhere supplying the music and I ended up just doing the chorus without anyone telling me too.

The song we sang wasn't even in West Side Story. It was called Twenty Today, Twenty-one Tomorrow.

And that's not including the time I realized I was in a dream, just to wind up in another without noticing.

I think those dreams are more common then what it sounds Inception has. It would also make quite an interesting movie. If only we could bring camcorders into our dreams.

Jim:

One thing you (and others) are doing (frustratingly) is you're criticizing "Inception" by applying guidelines that have nothing whatsoever to do with the movie itself. You criticize the film's depiction of dreams for not having the surreal qualities that we typically experience in dreams, when that is completely beside the film. It's difficult to criticize the film for not doing something that it never SAID it was going to do, and never tried to do - and which, in this case, is exactly the opposite of the filmmaker's intentions. It's a non-argument - it exists in relation to nothing. It is, essentially, an Armond White argument. ("'The Aviator' is a terrible movie because it's not nearly as hilarious as 'Airplane!'")

(Or perhaps a better example would be to criticize a purposely - and necessarily - surreal, "dreamlike" film for not being realistic enough. An equally pointless argument.)

The dreams in "Inception" have literally been designed and manufactured - THAT's why they're so literal. They've been designed to be. The movie is about people whose entire vocation is controlling the subconscious - making it literal so that they can get in, get what they need, and get out. They operate in a purely functional capacity - nothing they do would have any use for the more intangible elements of the subconscious. The dreams in "Inception" MUST behave in a literal fashion - that is the entire point to their existence as far as these characters are concerned. A controlled environment is more essential than anything.

In fact, the very need for a definable, controllable, quantifiable, literal idea of the subconscious is what makes the very presence of anything else - even one thing (i.e. Mal, the train) that wasn't SUPPOSED to be there, wasn't DESIGNED to be there - so dangerous. Because things were put in place a specific way, a loose, persistent thought that happens to still be running around one of the shared dreamers' subconscious can undo a whole operation. An operation that was supposed to go off with as few variables as possible.

I understand this critique of the film but, and I'm being completely serious here, my impressions changed after watching the movie and literally dreaming up an interpretation about some of the scenes. Essentially, I hadn't thought much about Cobb using his dead wife's totem, something he tells Ellen Page not to do, until I fell asleep. I fact-checked some of the scenes with friends and it seemed in line with the film. Essentially, I was able to produce something logical in a dream, despite the commonly perceived notion of dreams as being illogical, driven by free-association, and shifting.

I wouldn't say all of my dreams are this productive, but they can be (particularly when I'm dreaming up strategies for a video game or a research paper), so I was willing to go with the film's representation from that standpoint.

Yes.

Dreams? No, an action movie within an action movie within an action movie with a pinwheel named Rosebud locked in Dr. No's -- wait, it might have been Blofeld's -- safe.

Nobody seems to really be defending this movie in these comments, so let me give it a try:

A pet peeve of mine is when film-watchers praise or criticize a movie for what it is not, rather than for what it is. Siskel and Ebert were guilty of this from time to time. See their review of Daran Arnofsky's Pi. Most of the review consisted of them praising the movie because it "wasn't a typical thriller" (no car chases, no explosions, etc), but there was shockingly little talk of what was actually in the movie that made it work.

I sense that a similar thing is going on here. It's true, this movie doesn't really give a realistic portraying of the experience of dreaming and having subconscious thoughts, but is it really trying to?

Let's adress this plot-wise first: what we are seeing are not typical dreams (obviously). They are shared mental constructs, which are created by an architect and one or more "populaters". The reason the dream worlds are these stable, architectural constructs is because they are consciously created to be that way. When the architects haven't really got a hang of this process yet, the reality of these constructions come undone and behave in a more conventional dream-like way, as seen in the scene when Ellen Pages' character folds the city over on itself into an MC Escher-esque metropolitan bizaro world. (I'm surprised this scene hasn't even been mentioned yet. Can we at least agree that this was a fantastic cinematic set-piece?)

So, the dream worlds we see are much more stable and unmorphing than the dreams we are used to. Fine. That is how Nolan decided his movie would work. But why did he do this? Because he isn't interested in representing the experience of human consciousness, he is interesting in making a mind bending thriller. I'm ok with that, because as a mind-bending thriller, this movie works very, very well.

Like Phillip K Dick at his best, Nolan gives you a basic framework that is already a cerebral head trip, and lets your imagine run wild at all the directions the story could go in- I know I wasn't the only one writing my own second-halfs to the movie as I was watching the first. (Spoilerish, but not really:) As for the ending, the ambiguous shot that leaves us questioning the very nature of reality itself left me with a big smile on my face. Nolan never leaves you on safe ground, even after the movie is over.

People here are claiming/implying that the movie doesn't challenge the viewer on an emotional level, which may be true, but it does challenge the viewer on a very basic intellectual level. It forces the viewer to try to grasp some very mind-bending concepts, and then apply them to what is going on on screen. This process, to me anyway, is a lot of fun.

Yes, have been more "realistic" portrayals of mental states in cinema; Mulholland Drive (mentioned in a previous comments) come to mind, as does Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the subconscious scene in Being John Malcovich, and some of the more, umm, surreal moments in Takashi Miike's Gozu. But to compare these movies to Inception is a categorical mistake. Inception is much more comprable to movies like Primer or Minority Report, or sci-fi stories like Dick's UBIK or Heinlein's All You Zombies; stories that present a puzzle to be solved, a labyrinth to be navigated, a ball of yarn to be untangled (you get the point).

The Hitchcock quote about movies being a slice of cake, not a slice of life, comes to mind. Inception definitely belongs in the slice of cake category, and that's quite all right with me.

My biggest problem was that he spent so much of the movie with exposition and then basically threw out everything he "taught" us in the barely-coherent final hour. It played more like a pitch for a movie than a movie...he just wanted to tell us how cool this premise was.

Can we also petition to have Nolan stop using the deep bass rumbles as a shortcut for invoking dread and suspense? I don't think he is a terrible director or a hack but when he keeps going back to that trick for movie after movie it starts to make me wonder.

Christopher Long said it best: why is a film about dreams so "prosaic" and linear. Nolan is just too damn SERIOUS for my tastes. There's no fun to be had here, and that's a shame when you're talking about a movie about dreams. It's THE MATRIX syndrome. That is why if I were to stick with any movie about "tapping into brains" I'll stick with STRANGE DAYS.

(Wow. Ignore the "Nobody seems to really be defending this movie" line in my comment. It was true at the time, but a lot of new comments got posted before mine. Just sayin).

I saw this movie last night, and was pretty much thrilled from beginning to end. I would insist that it's' definitely the kind of movie that requires multiple viewings in order to fully "get" what Nolan is trying to do, and the simplicity label that you seem to have placed on it I believe is unfair.

In one of the comments, you said the following, "Once again, it's all about making up rules so that the characters have arbitrary tasks to accomplish -- which doesn't make for particularly compelling storytelling."

I would venture to say that this is essentially what ALL movies do. Make up characters. Make up rules. Make up tasks. Mix well, bake at 400 degress, and serve. Your word choice here is also important I think: "arbitrary." How would you define it in the case of "Inception?"

Here's how I believe it avoids arbitrariness: the structural complexity of the plot, the way dreams work in the movie, the build-up and more traditional "heist" aspect of the movie, the whole thing between Fischer and his father, etc. etc. etc......they all work together to convey a message about dreams and reality, about images in our minds corresponding with real images, about our very perceptions of the world around us. It's no simple gimmick that by the end of the movie we can't be sure what in the film was a dream and wasn't a dream - it is VITAL that this is the case, otherwise the movie would be copping out on its own themes. This relates to your main complaint about the movie: the simplicity of dreams compared with our actual experience of them.

It's funny to me that Nolan came out with this movie this summer, because just this past year I was working on a novel about going into people's dreams, and I specifically wrote the novel to illustrate how strangely weird and wonderful dreams can get, and to do away with all that simplistic one-to-one comparison style that movies and books tend to do when it comes to dreams. (Dennis Quaid in Dreamscape, anyone??) And yet, Inception enthralled me. The entire movie I knew that the dreams the script showed me couldn't even come close to the complexity of a real human's dream, but I think that's OKAY.

What's important is not that Nolan create a believable cinematic interpretation of what dreaming is actually like, but instead build a whole nother world where dreams are merely a backdrop against which authorial intent can paint broad and intricate brustrokes investigating the power our illusions can hold over us, the other-reality of our own subconscious's ability to hold sway over even the most real things in the world, despite being but a mere "shade" of them, and a myriad of other themes that I'm only beginning to unpack after the showing last night. My point is that your main beef with Inception seems to be its "blah" view of how dream work, but I'd invite you to give the movie another chance and accept this movie's view of dreams as necessary in order to explore the complex psyche of its main character.

The complex psyche of the audience is also an important part of the viewing experience of Inception. Already the internet is abuzz with dozens upon dozens of different interpretations of what the ending means, whether or not the whole thing was just Cobb's dream, whether Mal really did go back to reality when she killed herself, etc....within the movie certain characters create their own reality, either by inception or accident or choice, and it directly affects how they go about perceiving the world around them, just as us viewer's interpretation of that final spinning top directly affects how we view the rest of the movie, and whether we feel it is a cop-out or a somber meditation on the seductive power of unreality. I would tend to side with the latter crowd, but you know, to each his own. ;-)

On a side note, and the whole idea of this taking place in the future: Throughout the movie, the only real evidence we have that this takes place in the future is the technology they use for traveling in dreams. Everything else: modes of transportation, type of weapons, buildings, etc...leads us to believe this takes place in present day. So perhaps that can be another explanation for how dreams work in the movie - this is a sort of alternate universe that is also in 2010 but with the added technology of dream machines. Although another explanation could be that the whole movie, from beginning credits to final spinning top, is Cobb's dream, and that neither his wife nor kids were real, but his subconscious created this whole idea of dream-diving itself. It's just another example of how the movie can work, coherently, on a dizzying number of levels.

I will agree with you on some aspects of the dream world. For example, when Tom Hardy pulls out a big-ass gun and tells JGL he "musn't be afraid to dream bigger," I wondered why in fact most of the characters didn't dream bigger and come better prepared so people wouldn't keep dying and getting stuck in limbo and kicked....etc. I suspect it was more of a throwaway line but I also think it's kinda like that final lobby shootout scene in the Matrix: entirely unnecessary: why didn't they just create a helicopter and fly directly up to Morpheus instead of shooting through dozens of innocent guards? Yet despite this and other plot quibbles the Matrix still stands today as one of the zippiest, most fun thrill sci-fi rides of all time.

I would also quibble with you on another point: all the explanation of what the characters are going to do. I don't know about you, but even with the explanation I was wondering exactly what was going on half the time! Since Nolan has created such a rich and complex and layered and twisted in and out of itself world, he can't just let the viewer hang and figure out how kicks and limbo and all that mumbo-jumbo work - that would he heartless and pointless and just distract you from the more important themes he's trying to mine. You'd spend all your time wondering what just happened without actually being able to follow what just happened. Sure, Nolan does tend to over-exposition in his films sometimes, but I think in this movie it's entirely necessary.

I appreciate the points that have been made about the dreams being constructed by "professionals" rather than being more traditional dreams. It's valid but for me this reinforces the idea that this is ultimately nothing more than a standard action film that simply happens to be staged on an alien planet. Setting these events in something called the "subconscious" but not actually staged as such is really no different than setting your film on Mars or Tatooine, and certainly no more "mind-blowing."

And there's nothing in the world wrong with that. But judged as an action flick/heist film, I find it lacking any kind of zest. The characters are intentionally drawn thin, which is fine with me, but to enjoy a film lacking in these other qualities I would have at least needed to be dazzled by the visuals, but this was just a rather drab, uninspired looking film. As has been the case with all of Nolan's works. He's simply not a visual stylist at all, and his undeniable popular appeal continues to baffle me.

I suppose I'll have to see this at some stage but the filmmaker whose narrative skills weren't up to conveying fairly basic hero-chases-villain-foils-scheme storytelling back in Batman Begins is hardly going to convince me as an auteur of a multilayered, blockbuster meets arthouse tour de force. The Philip K Dick comparison is instructive - PKD's narrative skills were pretty limited in a conventional sense, but his characters had such distinctive and convincing voices that I can still summon them up many years after I last read one of his books. Nolan's not capable, on the evidence so far, of creating distinctive, emotionally convincing characterisations, nor is he good at the bigger architecture of the epic. What he's actually good at, I'm still waiting to find out. But yeah, "clever, clever, clever" is as good a summation as any.

Best counter-argument so far. I'd like to see ya take a stab at this one, Jim.

Just saw the film, and while I semi-enjoyed "Inception" as an action thriller, I completely agree that I was enormously disappointed with how literal-minded and linear the dreams were. In every scene, I could always see x effecting y, and could colour-code the levels of the dream (van = 1, hotel = 2, snow = 3, abandoned city = 4). Maybe the film would have worked better if it didn't purport to be about dreams, but rather about some virtual reality game that all the characters played.

I agree that there are countless other films that follow dream logic (which is to say, almost no logic whatsoever) far better. "The Cell" is a film I would consider inferior to "Inception" on the whole (its subject matter was treated a little too luridly for my taste), but in terms of respecting the randomness and mysteries of dreams, it is infinitely superior to Nolan's work.

I recently had a dream in which a member of my family, someone I love with all my heart and who (to the best of my recollection) I have never had any argument with, suddenly changed character and began berating me with really hurtful, personal insults. Where does something like that come from? Who knows! And I've had others where the setting changes in the blink of an eye...although rarely does anything begin crumbling in such spectacular fashion as in "Inception".

Anyway, I'm still processing my thoughts on the film, but I'll end by breaking down my evaluation in a way that Nolan, with his compartmentalizing and mathemetical approach, would probably like.

As an action film - B- (it kept me entertained, but it doesn't make the heart soar like, say, "Minority Report")

As a drama - D+ - Didn't really care about the whole DiCaprio/Cotillard subplot

As an evocative representation of dreams - F - There's imagination on display, but it's too tied down to the logic of the real world.

Still, like I said, I semi-enjoyed the film, but it's far from a masterwork.

Jim,

The first thought I had after Inception was that it had to have contained the most literal minded depiction of "dreams" in film history. I agree, the dream worlds in the film are not particularly dream like at all, at least not in the way I experience dreams.

That said, I didn't care. The film did not explore the nature of dreams. What it did do is use the dreams in to build an absurdly, awesomely layered heist movie plot. It allowed Nolan to play around with time, spacial relations, parallel action, gravity, and so forth, all maintained within the general parameters of the thriller genre.

I loved it. I don't think Nolan has much skill for shoot 'em up type stuff (the Ice Station Zebra shoot out scenes in particular were indifferent and sometimes a little hard to follow), but I think he has a real knack for complicated set pieces (i.e. Gordon-Leavitt's escapades around the zero-G hotel). And I like the editing and sense of pace. Once the "inception" job kicks in during the second half, the film becomes relentless. The editing and cross-editing between scenes is like a pulse that quickens as the action keeps building.

I'm sorry to hear you didn't like it, but I'm not surprised, knowing your track record with Nolan; the thrills of Inception are just like what he did with Dark Knight and Prestige, only MORE so. It's the Nolan-iest thing he's done so far. So I can understand your disapproval of the film's literalness, but I don't share it. It's like any classic heist film: you establish the rules and the plan, set it in motion, throw in some complications, and watch the characters improvise their way around it without breaking the rules.

Saying real dreams are definitively *not* like the ones in Inception implies you have perfect recall of your dreams.

Are dreams really fragmented and non-linear or is that just because you only remember fragments of them once you wake up?

Criticize it for not delivering as an action movie/thriller...but criticizing on the basis of "those dreams sure weren't like any I'VE ever had!" seems rather unfair.

I didn't like Inception but I will defend the "joyless" criticism by simply saying that this is what Hollywood thinks audiences want in almost EVERY fantasy or sci-fi action movie, with very few exceptions (such as the Iron Man and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises).

If we have grim, bland, joyless versions of Clash of the Titans and Robin Hood, then what chance do directors like Christopher Nolan have?

In this thread and elsewhere, I'm reading defenses of "Inception" to the effect of, "So what if the dreams don't feel like dreams? They're not those kind of dreams. They're artificial constructs meant to convince the dreamer that it's all actually happening." Fair enough, I guess...but doesn't that seem kind of...counterproductive, somehow?

It's set in the world of the subsconscious... a manipulated version of someone's subconscious...where all the weird, scary, magical, amazing, taboo and yes, sexy stuff never appears, except by accident, when it slips through the matrix that these inception guys have created, in which case it's a management error, or a programming error, or something.

Uh...I guess that's valid. It's not my movie, it's Christopher Nolan's. He can do whatever he likes. But that concept strikes me, the humble viewer, as uninteresting. Why devise a film built around dreaming that deliberately and strategically omits all the most exciting, disturbing and beautiful parts of the dream experience?

It's like that series that Joel Stein did for the Trio cable channel a few years back, "Clean Porn," where he took hardcore porn films and cut out all the sex, leaving only the part where the housewife opens the door to let the cable guy in and out of the house.

Or buying a loaf of bread, opening the bag and finding that it consists of nothing but end pieces.

Christopher Long's libido crack, above, captures why I didn't like the movie. I don't really care how elaborately you rationalize the concept of the movie. To me, a 148 minute film set almost entirely within various layers of the subconscious that has no sexual feeling whatsoever -- None! -- is...beyond boring. It's inaccurate and unbelievable, insofar as those adjectives can be applied to a sci-fi film. It's sad. And kind of sick, in its own mathematically, scientifically, eminently explicable way. It's as if the film was written and directed by a guy who seems human but is really an incredibly convincing android like the ones in "A.I."

Yes, I'm criticizing the film for what it's not -- a complaint always directed at a person who disliked a film that you liked. But I think I'm entitled to do that. Anybody's entitled to do that. What's at issue here isn't any specific stylistic choice or even story choice. What's at issue is how Nolan (again, just my opinion, guys) constructed the film in such a way as to close off poetry and turn the subconscious from thrilling, dangerous, sensual place into a big spreadsheet. Why would a filmmaker do that? Why is that a defensible thing to do?

Again, loaf of bread, nothing but ends. And again, the counter-argument: "But what if the person who baked the bread WANTED to put nothing but ends in the bag?"

Fine. It's perfectly within the baker's rights to fill up the bag with ends. But it's my right as a consumer of bread -- hell, a devotee, a fan of bread, a geek for bread -- to stare into that bag and think, "What the fuck?"

The problem, as Christopher Long states, is that dreams exist in a different dimension. The only way to do this is to institute feelies from "Brave New World" to alter the consciousness of the audience.

Jim, you may be mis-understanding the movie. Cobb and his team are not just invading other people's dreams...they actually set up the dream worlds, so they're grafting a specific layout to do their jobs.

It's Nolan's best movie yet, though that's not much praise considering how awful his previous movies are.

http://theadmiralscorner.blogspot.com/2010/07/inception-christopher-nolan-2010.html

http://www.themoviespoiler.com/Spoilers/inception.html

Ya know what might be an illuminating double-feature?

"Inception" and "Limits of Control" back to back...

In my opinion each suffers from something the other has a feel for. Others may side more with one film than the other. It'd be fascinating. (If nobody else does it I will some day. But seeing as I have enough projects on the go, someone please beat me to the punch!)

The film is not about the nature of dreams, for the very good reason that dreams really have no fixed nature. Complaints about the film seem based on the fact that the dreams don't comport with Freudian theories of dreams as reflecting repressed desires. But in fact we dreams about all kinds of random things, not just sex, love, death. Freud was closer to a literary critic than a scientist. The film instead is about the inability to distinguish dreams from reality while they're going on. That's the source of the tension throughout, extending to the film's last moments. The dreams are non-surreal (no flying, walking around naked, etc) in their basis precisely because the film is about underlining our tendency to mistake them for reality.

The film wasn't about dreams, nor was it intended to be. Given how the author of this article isn't fond of Nolan's past works (not even Memento it seems, which is still thought provoking to this day), what chance did Inception stand from the start? Comparing an action/thriller to a video game is the worst insult a 'Director' can face, right?

I agree with all the points made about heist films, about how movies should set their own rules (and if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the dang kitchen), and how no one asked you to compare this to Mulholland Drive. I like David Lynch, and I think Inland Empire is his best film, period. I used to like Christopher Nolan, seriously considered the arguments about how he 'explains too much in his films,' and then immediately threw those notions back out again. Even with all the talking, we don't know for sure what happened.

The only legitimate gripes I would consider are the shoot-out on the mountain and the music. It seems in every film since Memento, Nolan uses the same three downward notes to promote lingering melancholy. And it seems in every film he adds more music. Inception was a non-stop aural assault along the lines of Natural Born Killers. Even that was more interesting since it used many different artists, not one orchestral score.

Other than that, this film was pretty good, and very thought-provoking, if just not on the scale of Memento.

Jim, have you seen the anime Paprika? Given your disappointment with the rigidity of Inception, I think it's something you might enjoy. It plays silly buggers with perception and there's visual ingenuity galore. I thought Inception worked fantastically as an entertaining sci-fi heist film, but for dream-state meanderings I'd definitely turn to Paprika. Or Eyes Wide Shut, Mulholland Dr, Last Year at Marienbad, Eternal Sunshine, etc...

Inception actually reminded me very much of Existenz, which is probably the best movie about video games out there. Existenz also explored the idea of deeper levels, dying to "wake up," the mind restructuring the game as it goes along...

Regarding Inception, I do have to say (SPOILERS) the last shot was extremely cheeky and re-contextualized the rest of the movie for me. To me, it said the movie is not really about dreams, but rather movies themselves, and how we're drawn into them the same way we're drawn into dreams. When the final shot cuts to black at just the right moment, there was an audible gasp at my screening (and, so I gather, at nearly all screenings). This is the final "drop." We'd all been entranced by the film as though in a dream state, and the cut "wakes us up." Throughout, Nolan also uses the editing strategy of dropping us in during the middle of a scene, and makes pains to explain that we accept such nonlinear narratives in dreams - implicitly stating, of course, that we do the same in movies all the time.

Also, I appreciated that the final shot left some degree of ambiguity. I enjoyed The Prestige far more than you, (possibly given my fondness for magicians and Tesla) but even I groaned at the uber-obvious and condescending reveal in that film, and both of Nolan's Batmans do their share of over sharing.

I like how when Hollywood releases one ludicrous romantic comedy after another, in which things should play out realistically because we all know what it's like to have relationships, fall in love, go on dates, and so on, very few moviegoers jump online to pick the films apart. And yet when a gifted filmmaker decides to tackle a relatively original and admittedly impossible subject, people are frothing at the mouth to find flaws or lapses of logic in it. Maybe Hollywood should just stick to the same old stories, because obviously that's what many of you want. Of course, when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, most people didn't truly understand it or find it enjoyable. Now it's considered a classic, even though most people still can't tell you what's really going in the final act of the film. I'm not even going to say that I flat-out love Inception, though I am eager to see it again. But it's ridiculous how people seem so eager to rip it to shreds when it's undoubtedly better crafted and more intriguing than 98% of widely released films. I think your overall opinion regarding the film comes down to whether you naturally give in to its bizarre premise and just roll with it. But if not, trying to dissect something that's fictional to begin with is just a waste of time.

Just saw the film today, and was struck by something that no one seems to be saying about the film: that, underneath the whole "dream" thing, the film is, in many ways, a meditation on the nature of cinema. Now, bear with me for a second (and, oh, SPOILERS!): late in the film, when we finally get down to Cobb's deep "subconscious", to the earliest (chronologically) scene, we see Mal, with her head on the train tracks, as a train comes barreling right at us. Just like, uh, you know, the first film ever screened a century ago.

In a sense, what are being racked and stacked aren't dreams but film experiences. If scenes in the film feel less like dreams and more like classic film tropes (action films, romance films, noir, heist, etc.)-- perhaps that's because that's what they are?

I saw the film as a commentary on the film-going experience. Remember, we as audience members aren't dreaming, we are WATCHING A MOVIE. In this case, we are watching a movie about watching a movie. Ever remember something in your memory and then snap to it and realize it's a scene from a movie? Ever think about your own life, your own romances, your own hazardous moments, and then idealize them mentally in a cinematic milieu? I don't know about you, but my dreams aren't set to a musical score-- but films are. Watching "Inception" may involve watching a movie nominally about "dreams", but it's also a film about watching (and remembering) (and thinking about) movies. (SPOILER AGAIN) The entire film could have feasibly been the lazy lucid thoughts of an airline passenger going in and out whilst watching an in-flight flick.

Also, any director that can essentially re-do "Meshes In The Afternoon" and get your average moviegoer to cram into an IMAX, and then get them to clap en masse at the end must be doing something right...

Here's my problem with the argument that Inception just calls them dreams, but it's really not about dreams the way you or I think of them:

This almost makes sense. It's just that, during one of the early exposition scenes (after the prior exposition and before the middle exposition), Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page describe what dreams are like in real life to a T. They're strange, but you don't notice until you wake up. They're more about feeling than visuals. Etc. Inception immediately forgets that these are the guiding principles of dreamworld, preferring instead to mount cinema's most boring video game. The rules aren't entirely abandoned (mostly in Level 2: Hotel Fight, where the projections' defensiveness actually evokes a sense of anxiety unlike the defense mechanisms on the other levels, and later where the sudden zero-G quality goes unremarked upon by the projections in the dream), but most of the dreams we see bear little resemblance to the film's own stated understanding of dreams. Contradiction. QED.

Unless It Was All a Dream, in which case any or all of The Rules could be complete figments of Leonardo DiCaprio's subconscious avatar's imagination, as the original DiCaprio (if there is such a thing) wastes away in a hospital bed absorbing nutrients intravenously, his mind completely unaware that there is a "higher" reality. Which ontological curiosities the film has no interest in beyond "shock" value.

As far as Dreams on Film go, i would definitely have put Ragin Bull on the list. I'm not sure whether I watched that movie or dreamed it. See how swiftly Scorsese jumps from one frame of logic to another! One minute, Jake is pummeling a man in the ring. The next, he's marching around the ring in slow motion. First he lives in an apartment. Then all of a sudden, he's in a house. Looks like he moved to a new place. We've never seen it before, but we feel right at home; it feels perfectly logical. What about later? One minute, he's opening his bar. He's reciting his poem to the crowd. Then he's pouring the wine. Then he says a girl is old enough to drink. Then he's lying in bed with the police gathered around him, and they're telling him he served alcohol to a minor. But how about this one? One moment, he's being thrown into his prison cell. The police are all there. Then they leave, and the scene changes character completely. Before we know what happened, the scene has transformed into one of Jake LaMotta alone in his prison cell pounding the wall. And dig those bookends! Jake LaMotta recites his poem, in his dressing room, imperfectly, stopping to go over the words. You could swear the poetry was just flowing into him, like it does for people in a dream. And then at the end, he recites Brando's monologue from On the Waterfront, and when he's finished, he punches the air and walks away.

Only in dreams do we move so fluidly from place to place! When we see it in a movie, we wonder if we're really awake, and when it's over, we wonder if it wasn't a dream.

excellent blog, as always. however, in your list of accurate portrayals of dream-states in film, you did fail to mention fellini's "8 1/2."

I think the whole criticism is very insightful. Real dreams are the most incredibly absurd environment. If you decide to take a bus somewhere in a dream, your next moment will be you already on it, sitting next to Bugs Bunny. Then you might see a beautiful woman, so your next moment will be you suddenly having sex with her. In a forest. Until you look up and realize that you're actually in your own house and your parents are watching. There's no rhyme or reason at all in a dream.

Indeed, the dreams in the film were very un-dreamlike, they were unimaginative carbon copies of reality. No dreamlike randomness or strangeness. The dreams in "Inception" are flat, dull and boring.

The other problem I had with "Inception" is that out of everyone involved in the project, Dom was the ONLY person with personal issues that manifested themselves in the dreams.

And why was Eames able to change his appearance and conjure up a big gun but none of the others could do the same? Why wasn't that big gun used during the chases? Makes no sense whatsoever.

The more I think about this film the more I feel ripped off. "Inception" is a Hollywood shoot-em-up disguised as something more substantive.

"Nolan makes crafty little puzzle boxes (and sometimes big ones), but they never quite get beyond merely clever. Like "Sleuth" or "The Usual Suspects," they're not about characters or emotions or ideas or human experience at all; they're just self-contained gadgets, amusing but mechanical."

I'm sorry, but this is completely false. I haven't seen INCEPTION, and I don't care about INSOMNIA or BATMAN BEGINS, but I think anyone who watched MEMENTO and THE PRESTIGE and went to the trouble of, you know, *actually* looking beyond the "puzzle box" nature of these movies can tell you that they have pretty powerful ideas that are (yes) cleverly being communicated.

Take THE PRESTIGE, which seems to be the most underrated. (Some spoilers) It takes a complex story about rival magicians and uses it to make a statement about our need for some kind of supernatural belief. What's funny is that Nolan goes right out and tells you this.

In one scene, after Bale and Jackman see a particularly impressive act from a chinese magician, Jackman asks why would that magician sacrifice himself to such an extent for a magic trick, and Bale answers by punching a wall and saying "To escape *this*". This moment clearly sets up magic as a metaphor for that need to "escape" (escape a world that's "solid all the way through", as Jackman puts it in the end).

Suddenly, a lot of the clever puzzles gain a tremendous amount of significance. For example, when Michael Caine's character explains the three acts of a magic trick, he points out that the audience doesn't clap when something disappears. That's because it "isn't enough. You have to make it come back". I.e. the audience is not satisfied by something vanishing (death), it needs that something to come back (rebirth, afterlife, how ever you want to look at it). They're looking for that kind of affirmation.

Nolan makes that necessity even more transparent by setting this movie in a time of scientific revolutions (Tesla and Edison's competition), where the mysteries of the world look a bit more solvable, where each new scientific discovery looks more and more like magic (Arthur C. Clarke's third law).

One of the brilliant things about it is that when Jackman starts using science to create the absolute version of his Transported Man trick, he's advised to conceal the science, to give the audience enough reason to doubt it. Because, of course, if the audience *knows* it's possible, then it's no longer supernatural, it's real magic.

I think I've made enough of a case for this movie, although I could go on and on about it. MEMENTO seems even easier to read. Claiming these movies are not about ideas or the human experience is only possible if you're not "watching closely", as a character in PRESTIGE asks right in the beginning.

I'm not entirely sure that I can trust my own reaction to the movie after seeing it for the first time. I definitely have to see it again to get a better sense of it. My reaction immediately after it ended was complete and utter exhaustion. It was one of the most overwhelming experiences I have ever had watching a movie.

This is why I completely disagree with the idea that Christopher Nolan's films are not emotional. I've found a lot of emotion in all of his films that I've seen. The ending of "The Dark Knight" not only deals with emotion, but deals with several different emotions at the same time: first hopelessness and despair when it appears that the Joker has defeated them, then an odd feeling of victory and triumph that comes simply comes from a decision made by two adult characters. I get chills every time I watch that ending.

And I thought "Inception" also has an incredible amount of emotion and tension at the end. It does seem rather mechanical at first, especially the supposed McGuffin involving Cillian Murphey, but it builds to a really high emotional level. I felt that the last hour of the film was superbly done, especially with how Nolan maintains tension between four simultaneous action sequences. I have never seen a movie that keeps up such a high level of tension for so long.

As for the complaints that the movie is too literal and has too many rules, I think those are necessary to create a compelling story. First of all, science-fiction and fantasy need to have rules. Fantasy without rules feels like the writer is just making it up as he goes along. The rules of "Inception" not only helped to create tension, but I thought were rather reasonable.

As for it being too literal, film is a literal medium. There is no way to make it not literal. And Nolan is dealing with one of the most difficult philosophical concepts in a literal medium. Due to the visual constraints of the medium, dreams on film can either be realistic or completely unreal. Sometimes filmmakers try to split the difference by shooting real life with some sort of visual distortion (the most interesting recent example of this was in "Winter's Bone" where the main character dreams in 16 mm black and white).

But no one will be able to exactly capture what dreams look like because we can never remember exactly what they look like. I thought the idea of dreams as physical architecture was a brilliant way to visually demonstrate dreams. I also liked that most of the dreams seemed to take place on physical locations or sets rather than CGI environments. Of course there were no dreams of people naked in public because the movie was about people manipulating dreams to reveal the subconscious rather than completely random dreams. The dreams were close to reality so that the victim's subconscious would not realize it was dreaming. The realistic nature of the dreams also leads to the final question of whether or not everything was a dream.

I definitely need to see "Inception" a second time to fully understand how I feel about it. However, what I can't ignore about my initial reaction to it was that I was drained and exhausted at the end. That could only have happened if I cared about the characters and the action. The difference between "Inception" and the equally loud and violent action of "Transformers" is that I was bored by "Transformers." There were a lot of explosions and loud noises, but I didn't care. I cared about what happened in "Inception". The film is so ambitious and such an overwhelming experience that while I can imagine someone not liking it, I can't imagine anyone dismissing it.

I loved it, but with reservations. I was expecting a eternal sunshine of the spotless mindesque masterpiece, instead, I got a fairly entertaining action film. I accepted the verisimilitude of the dreamscape based on the rules established in the narrative. However, and I know this is a rather presumptious thing to do, but what I would have liked to see is once Dom's crew entered the mutual dreamscape then have his subconscious, it being as wracked with guilt as it is, usurp the structured dream reality and then have a chaotic descent into fantastical images. Nolan basically had a license to create any image he so wished and then we got...hotel rooms. But then again it is rather unfair to criticisize a movie for what I would have like to see rather than on its own terms.

there's been a lot of talk about joylessness regarding inception,
can i just say, that i come to this blog often, and i frankly find it to be one the most joyless sites that i know of.
that's not to say that there aren't positive articles or opinions. but there's very little joy. to me, it seems like this site almost goes out of it's way to find flaws in films that it clearly wasn't going to like in the first place.
emmerson, you don't like chris nolan. there's nothing wrong with that per se, but you don't. you didn't like TDK, inception, or the prestige. i don't know how you felt about his other four films, but even if you liked them, you've hated almost half of his movies.
why are you still talking about him? are you surprised that you didn't like inception? why are all you people posting about it? why did you see it in the first place?
i'm not angry or anything, i'm just curious, how many people here who hated inception can honestly (honestly now) say that they went in to the movie trying to like it?
it's okay to not like something, and it's okay to not want to like something. i've watched plenty of movies with the intention of not liking them. sometimes i'm won over, usually i'm not, because there really isn't any such thing as an open mind. for the most part, people see what they want to see.
which brings me back to joylessness.if there's any joy that comes from these articles and posts, it seems to be from tearing something that's widely enjoyed down. i can't see any other reason for these posts and many of the comments.
emmerson, i'm sorry but i've been reading you for years, at least since you've been editing ebert's site and if you were one of the cinemania guys, longer than that, and i've never gotten the impression that you were a mainstream blockbuster guy. of your top movies of the decade, i think only one of them made more than fifty million dollars. there are exceptions sure, war of the worlds comes to mind, but these aren't your movies, why do you feel the need to talk about them?
the rest of you, what motivates your desire to come here and vent?
is it joy?
please understand all of you, you all have the right to your opinions, and you have the right to express them. what i'm questioning, is what motivates that need.
maybe i'm, just some clown, but i'm not getting a lot of joy motivating any of this.
you've said in the past emmerson, that you write about these movies (inception, avatar, TDK ect) because they're the big movies everyone's talking about. you've also said you don't write about movies like alice in wonderland or iron man or twilight, movies that have many of the same goals as inception in terms of being expensive high profile populist pictures, because you have no interest in them.
but the only interest you (and a lot of the posters here) seem to have in inception is to tear it down.
that's hardly joyful.
is inception better than eclipse? better than alice? better than transformers 2, or iron man or the harry potter movies or knight and day or prince of persia or sex and the city or sorcerers apprentice? is it more worthy and interesting than it's contemporaries and therefor worth talking about?
then say that.
talk about WHY it's better than those other movies. how it's CLOSER to what you like, along with how it's still far away.
what are it's virtues that cause you (any of you) to seek out nolan's movies, or cameron's, or any mainstream film maker?
to me at least, THAT'S joyful. commonality. positivity. seeing and celebrating the good and growth in things.
"hey, all of a sudden blockbusters are worth talking about! thank god they aren't all transformers 2 and twilight! they might not be perfect, but they're getting better! HOORAY!"
if there aren't any virtues, if they're truly as bad as all the other crap coming out then why are you talking about them?
why are any of you talking about them?
if they're (inception, avatar, TDK) so unworthy of your time and attention, then don't give it to them. if they're actually offensive, then for god's sake stay away. i haven't seen juno or crash or a todd soldntz movie since happiness because i have no desire to be offended.
there's no law that says you have to see any movie.
just walk away.
this all started for me with the use of the phrase joy. what is joyful, what does it mean? how is an experience joyful and why is reading this site, for me, so often not joyful? why does it make me not want to watch movies or talk about them or think about them? why does it make me so sad?
i think it's because if i only had the words of the people who write and post here, if i had no context, and i was only judging my impressions of the attitudes, posture, and language, i would think that this site hates movies. i would think that this site thinks that it is better and smarter than movies and the people who make them.
i look at these posts, by you emmerson but also by the people commenting on them, and i don't see joy. i see anger.
look, i don't even know if this is going to get posted, and if it is, i doubt people will read it all the way through. it's long and pompous and pretty insulting. but it's also what i see. and as odd as it may sound, i really mean no offence to anyone, i'm just confused by the paradoxical posturing and specific use of the phrase joyful.
i hope someone responds. i'd love to hear what you think emmerson. i think you're a smart insightful guy, i guess you probably have to read this either way in order to vette it. i hope i don't come off too assish. probably i do. what are you gonna do right?
and why don't you ever write about pixar anyway? no studio has ever done what they've done. surely that's worth some attention too right?

Haven't read any of the comments. I agree with your assessment to an extent, but I think in another way that's wanting the movie to be something it's not. The movie sets up the rules of the dream world like any other sci-fi or fantasy movie sets up the rules of its world. Here, dreams access the subconscious, but, yeah, they can be understood mathematically and scientifically. I miss and prefer the surrealism of the cinematic dreamers you mention, but still enjoyed the film and found it interesting for what it is.

I don't know why everyone seems to think this film is about "dreams." It is set in "dreams," yes, but at its core I don't think that makes any more about "dreams" than it is about "Paris" or "Japan." Insofar as Inception is more than just a passable way to spend two hours and change, it is about the power of IDEAS to shape our lives and completely change how we perceive the world.

It also works as a commentary on cinematic techniques - note the way cuts are used throughout the film compared to how Cobb describes "dreams" as jumping around in time. At the end, this sets up the possible illusory nature of his reality long before we see the spinning top.

The criticism so far on this post has been excellent. If I may, I'd like to add one big like and one dislike that has grown (and groaned) since I've left the theater:

- The actual inception into Robert Fischer's subconscious may be one of the best Macguffins of all time. Did anyone find the pinwheel in his father's safe a bit, well, quixotic? As if the heist-part of the movie was really just chasing giants further and further down a rabbit-hole?

While that part of the story seems like a heady Chinese finger-trap, I found Cobb's redemptive story rather powerful and emotionally engaging. Apart from the hallway-vertigo scene (which I hear used few-to-no computer effects), The action sequences did not fulfill like the backstory with Cobb and Mal. I was particularly disappointed with the snow fortress sequence, mainly because all the characters stranded in that dream world had garnered about 3 minutes of exposition and character development. However, the sub-conscious beach sequences (or as Cobb might consider it, the basement) came the closest to feeling quite dreamy. I enjoyed how the thread-spinning Ariadne was the only one capable of both following and leading Cobb out of those depths. It's either very romantic or rather disturbing how far he is willing to go to keep hold of Mal.

That being said, I find the gimmick of the last shot either despairing or a bit cruel by Mr. Nolan. Tt's one of the only times at the movies where I heard the audience let out a loud, collective groan. It just seemed rather distasteful towards Cobb's personal suffering to merely suggest the questionable reality/unreality of the final sequence and end on that note. This man has been stranded in subconscious purgatory for an unknown amount of time, and, I dunno, I just didn't like that his reunion with his children wasn't more intimate and sincere.

While some find it laughable, I admired the Freudian references throughout the movie. In particular, water. The opening shot of slowly frothing-waves begins the story in the rolling fluidity of the subconscious. Cobb and Fischer order waters on the plane. It's raining in the city-dream. In the hotel, Fischer and Cobb are at a bar. Close-ups of the liquid trembling in their cubs suggests the fragility of the mind. Then there is the snow-fortress and the avalanche. Finally, a return to the beach. Even Mal's knife she holds close to her heart resembles water. Whether it's pseudo-Freud or not, I appreciate the iconography.

@Brockman - Hey, I like the idea that Inception is a metaphor for the film industry. They create cliched, undreamlike dreams for us to inhabit solely as tools to rip us off. Dig it. You could turn that into a Master's Thesis.

I agree with many of your points here. Still, I can't help but feeling that there's enough room in the world to approach the same subjects from various angles. Yes, Mulholland Drive is a great movie about dreams, and may be more "true" to the way we actually experience them, but why shouldn't there also be a movie that takes dreams more literally? Wouldn't we get bored if every movie approached dreaming like Mulholland Drive did? Inception has many flaws, but I think it's more useful to address them in terms of what the movie was trying to do. My concern was not that it should have been "more dreamy," but that, if it was going to take a very mathematical approach to dreaming, as it did, it needed to do a better job setting up the rules and logistics of this world. The mathematics of dream-time was a nice touch, but there was remarkably little attention to the physical mechanics. You just strap something around your wrist and that puts you inside someone else's head? That seemed a bit flimsy to me.

I'm not a gamer, but I'm getting a little annoyed by the continual use of the "It reminded me of a video game" argument used incessantly by nearly all film critics regarding action films. In scanning several reviews, this point of view has surfaced more often than not. To met, it's flawed logic and a bit troubling. Haven't action films ALWAYS operated this way? Like...before video games existed?

It seems like more of a criticism of the fanboy audience experiencing the film than of the film itself. Couldn't that logic work for any film? Isn't Thompson's search for the origins of the phrase "Rosebud" just a series of flashback "levels" in "Citizen Kane"?

Forgive me for adding one more comment to this post, but I just finished Heather Havrilesky's wonderful essay on the new season of Mad Men:

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/heather_havrilesky/2010/07/17/mad_men_season_four_preview/index.html

It seems to dovetail nicely with the discussion here, and if you're a fan of the show I strongly recommend reading it.

The essay got me thinking about the dreams we have and where they come from, and the dreams we would rather be having, and the dreams we think we should be having. Yes, it would be nice if Nolan's dreams had more feeling, more empathy, but the dream (film) he's presenting springs from the society we're living in.

Yes, we live in a time when the Magna Carta and the Constitution have been trashed, and where torture has been euphemized into "enhanced interrogation" by not only the right-wing, but also the mainstream media, including, shamefully, the NYT.

Do you want better, more humanely feeling movies? Please don't blame the messenger. That would be like blaming Raphael for the crucifixion. But, just think how much greater his paintings would have been if they had been a bit more, hmmm, realistic and logical.

"Have you ever experienced seven consecutive days in the course of a single-setting dream?"

No, though a close friend of mine says she did spend an entire month, at least, in a single dream. She says that the dream world actually did maintain consistency with its own rules, and that she built up friendships and completed tasks and practically lived a whole different life, for day upon consecutive day...until she woke up. I haven't experienced something like that myself, but my friend is a much more accomplished lucid dreamer than I am, and I am inclined to believe her account (and wish for my own!).

Your criticism of "Inception" interests me -- I intend to see the film, but I was hoping that it would be more inventive with its dreamlands than you indicate. That peculiar combination of chaos and logic that we find in dreams must be just too difficult to capture on film. Perhaps animation is better suited to depicting it...

Also, I await to see how "The Adjustment Bureau" (starring Matt Damon) will handle dreams.

Some people here who did not like Inception seem to believe that because the dreams in Inception are so "literal" it completely robs any deeper meaning that can mined from diving into the subconscious, and I would have to deeply, deeply disagree with them. The characters explain stuff yes, and there is some exposition related to emotional issues, but the themes that I've mined from discussions with friends and online blogs come not from exposition but from clues within how the film is strucutred, intricately and painstakingly (remember, it took Nolan ten years to get this to the screen). Most of the people who seem to dislike it in this thread dislike it because, on the surface, it's a traditional heist movie with a (insert deprecating adjective here) twist. The very idea of the movie seems to turn them off. Now, mind you, I'm not suggesting that the people opposed to my side made this judgment completely based on opinion, but I do believe that they are misunderstanding the movie and being turned off by a, proportionately, pretty small aspect of it.

For example, I've heard so many complaints about the action scenes, but like another commenter on here, I too watched the film with Jim's dislike for TDK's admittedly sloppy action cinematography in mind, and found these scenes to be a huge improvement over TDK's. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is on the base in the mountains, while it was flashing between 3 different perspectives or so, not including the van endlessly falling into the river, where each subsequent cut to a different scene forces you to re-evaluate your perspective on time and the characters' interaction with one another, making it absolutely crucial that you've paid attention throughout the whole movie the understand the in-depth mechanics of how time and space work in this dream world. I admit, I had an occasionally hard time following that ten or fifteen minute scene, but it's too easy to blame Nolan's sloppy cinematography, when individually, the shots are great, but it's their meticulous composition that, for me, makes them extremely exhilirating to watch. I can't wait to see this movie again. Now, like Jim was mentioning up above in a comment, this is a subjective description of an objective fact. It's clear that some people did not find these scenes to be that way at all, but I don't know, maybe you guys are looking for the wrong thing. It happens to me all the time. My experience watching a movie in a theatre for the first time and my thoughts on it months later when I finally re-watch it are often wildly different. But to each his own, you know.

I too saw Je t'aime, je t'aime in a film class; I think it was by Resnais. What struck me at the time was how similar it was in many respects to Eternal Sunshine - in both films, the protagonist is put to sleep and undergoes a scientific process to experience his own memories. And in both films, there is a dreamlike stream of (un)consciousness permeating throughout.
At the risk of echoing many others' sentiments, this is where I think Inception fails. In Je t'aime, je t'aime, the protagonist literally finds himself cutting from memory to memory, finding himself in the ocean in one second, in his house the next, etc. In Inception, the characters may prattle on about the inability to remember how you got somewhere in a dream, but Nolan does his best to make the concept easily digestible, and thereby strip it of its effectiveness. What use is it to describe this lack of memory when we, the audience, understand exactly how these characters entered their dreams and their dream environments?

Some people here who did not like Inception seem to believe that because the dreams in Inception are so "literal" it completely robs any deeper meaning that can mined from diving into the subconscious, and I would have to deeply, deeply disagree with them. The characters explain stuff yes, and there is some exposition related to emotional issues, but the themes that I've mined from discussions with friends and online blogs come not from exposition but from clues within how the film is strucutred, intricately and painstakingly (remember, it took Nolan ten years to get this to the screen). Most of the people who seem to dislike it in this thread dislike it because, on the surface, it's a traditional heist movie with a (insert deprecating adjective here) twist. The very idea of the movie seems to turn them off. Now, mind you, I'm not suggesting that the people opposed to my side made this judgment completely based on opinion, but I do believe that they are misunderstanding the movie and being turned off by a, proportionately, pretty small aspect of it.

For example, I've heard so many complaints about the action scenes, but like another commenter on here, I too watched the film with Jim's dislike for TDK's admittedly sloppy action cinematography in mind, and found these scenes to be a huge improvement over TDK's. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is on the base in the mountains, while it was flashing between 3 different perspectives or so, not including the van endlessly falling into the river, where each subsequent cut to a different scene forces you to re-evaluate your perspective on time and the characters' interaction with one another, making it absolutely crucial that you've paid attention throughout the whole movie the understand the in-depth mechanics of how time and space work in this dream world. I admit, I had an occasionally hard time following that ten or fifteen minute scene, but it's too easy to blame Nolan's sloppy cinematography, when individually, the shots are great, but it's their meticulous composition that, for me, makes them extremely exhilirating to watch. I can't wait to see this movie again. Now, like Jim was mentioning up above in a comment, this is a subjective description of an objective fact. It's clear that some people did not find these scenes to be that way at all, but I don't know, maybe you guys are looking for the wrong thing. It happens to me all the time. My experience watching a movie in a theatre for the first time and my thoughts on it months later when I finally re-watch it are often wildly different. But to each his own, you know.

I'm grateful to you for this. I really am.

The other thing (you touched on this) is how poorly shot the entire thing is. Like: to the point of carelessness.

What's most disappointing to me, too, is how little there is to talk about re this movie. It's just that empty.

I'd rather take a spectacular failure on instead of whatever this is: timid and simple and just engaging enough for me to visit the bathroom twice.

I agree with your take. I was hoping that this would be a film that would generate interesting conversations about the nature of dreams and the mysteries of the subconscious, and it does in a way (in so much as any film containing a dream might), but this is just an expensive, polished action film, and for me, that's not enough. All the films you mentioned came up later in the night as my friends and I discussed the film. Basically, the film provided a jumping off point to discuss how Bunuel, Lynch and Bergman explored dreams to infinitely greater results.

You're blogs are always great. I really appreciate how you are able to discuss films in a fine, detailed way without allowing emotion to take over. I can't stand hyperbole or that Rex Reed style (not to pick on him) all gut reaction. We really need film criticism that is detailed, emotionally restrained and articulate. I know the feeling you have about this film -- I was really hoping for a big mainstream film that engaged people intellectually and opened things up to rigorous analysis and dissection. It's so rare that a blockbuster does that and the hype for this film suggested it might.

I haven't seen Inception yet, don't know if I will, but the way the dreams have been related here and in other places make it sound as though the "Nexus" of Star Trek: Generations was a more richly-imagined dream world.

Other comments might have already pointed out the obvious - these aren't normal dreams. These are professional dreams where all sleepers are hooked up to a machine that keeps them sedated and synchronizes their states. It's the machine, not the human, that keeps the dreams 'linear.' If it weren't for the machine, there could be no way to navigate a human subconscious.

That said, JE's biggest complaint is that Nolan's dreams weren't like all the other Hollywood dream cliches. Really? That's what you missed and wanted? Nightmare on Elm Street?

Personally, I dream linear. Whole stories sometimes - beginning, middle, end. No flying, no naked at the party, no breaking teeth, etc.

It's as if a machine were controlling my dream state, keeping it from flying wild all over the place...

The reason the dreams are literal and on-the-level in "Inception" is BECAUSE they are created by an architect and placed inside the mind of the target. Literal and linear dreams would make it easier to implant and extract information from the target. Also, just because we see the entire movie from the perspective of people whose job is to create and manipulate dreams that end up literal doesn't mean illiteral, surrealist dreams don't exist.

"Like "Sleuth" or "The Usual Suspects," they're not about characters or emotions or ideas or human experience at all"

I'll concede emotion, as that is subjective. I felt it did have emotion, but you perhaps did not. Cobb and Mal are both fantastic and interesting characters. I will give you that the rest of the characters outside of these were not too that interesting (though I did fine Eames and Arthur to be much fun), but this isn't a Robert Altman film with twenty characters each having their own backstory. Nolan likes to focus on a few characters with everyone else being a piece of the maze. I like Altman's way but I also like Nolan's way because they both make it work.

And ideas? The film is ALL about ideas. It's about the power of an idea and the dangers it can bring. Also, on a subtle level, digs into the idea of free will. On the surface level, Fischer doesn't willfully come up with the idea; it is forced in him. But the team uses what is already in Fischer to implant this. They manipulate him yes, but...they use what is in his mind to implant it. Could Fischer have attained this idea on his own or must it have been forced in him? Did the team guide him to make a decision or make the decision for him? I think it's the former, and that's what's beautiful. Despite the fact that they have invaded his mind and have deceived him, in the end, it all came from Fischer himself. It's also about struggling between the reality of the world and the reality we create in our minds. Which one is better, which one we choose to live in.

And human experience? Cobb's journey is all about the human experience. Overcoming guilt and letting go of regret. That is the human experience!

Now, I will concede that Inception isn't a realistic film. But very few movies are actually realistic, and I think the best of films are actually not that realistic in the sense that you could imagine real life happening like the way it does in the film. What Inception does though is create a fantasy world that makes you think about ideas in the real world and experience humanity in a piece of fiction. That to me is the power of film: To connect the world of fantasy with the world of reality.

You know, nobody claimed that it was our time, place, or even planet in the movie. Sometimes you just gotta roll with it, Jim. A fun movie is a fun movie, and sometimes the fun is lost when you walk in the door with your own set of expectations set too firmly.

Some great points, Jim, and a very valid position. Most films about dreams fail because dreams are so much more subjective and nonlinear; they don't make good films because narrative structure often requires structure, even if only thematically.

However, I do think the film works intellectually. Here is my take on the debate around the films ending and meaning:

http://unfilteredlens.com/dreamstate-a-perspective-on-inception/

Hello Jim,

I throughly enjoy reading your Scanners blog, even if I disagree with a huge majority of it. Just because we don't see eye to eye doesn't mean the discussion isn't worthwhile.

Regarding "Inception", I believe a lot of critics have confused its intentions. While there are dramatic elements to the story and tries to explore a new realm, it is first and foremost a thriller.

Christopher Nolan is trying to present an action heist thriller using a new concept as the backdrop. It was never meant to be a psychological exploration of the human subconcious. "Inception" is not a commentary on the human subconcious; it's a portrayal of a few criminals who have the (admittedly unexplained) technology to infiltrate and map out dreams.

Would I have liked more exploration of the dreams, or less emphasis on the final action sequences? Sure. I would've loved to see this concept explored deeper.

But I didn't expect one going in. "Inception" was advertised as a thriller with a twist, and I have yet to be disappointed by Christopher Nolan's clever mechanics.

I understand your disappointment at the sterile nature of the dream worlds, but I didn't mind. Nolan created a reality with rules, and stuck to those rules. It seems as though you heard the premise of "dreams" and based your entire expectation of the film off of that. It's certainly not as good as Vertigo (which Nolan obviously drew heavily from), but I found it largely enjoyable.

I saw Inception this afternoon and I'm still in shock over just how terrible it was. The film read like notes for a screenplay rather than a screenplay itself. Most every scene seemed to include unnecessary exposition that would explain away what was about to be seen in great, redundant detail. Ellen Page's character seemed to exist solely to ask, "What's happening?" She was not much more than a device used to channel plot points.

The film had no cohesion. Instead, it felt like a 50/50 split between painfully boring scenes of talking heads and relatively nifty scenes where "cool shit happened" (which had just been explained away for us. Thank you, Ellen Page's character!).

I just can't believe what a turkey it was. Nothing could have prepared me for it.

Not sure if we saw the same movie, but the whole point of going into people's dreams was to trick them into believing that it is a reality for them. That's the whole reason for hiring Ellen Page's character (which is the most confusing part of the movie - hiring a 20 year old to design a prison?) Either way, every scene was meant to feel like reality to the dreamer they are trying to dupe.

I've seen comments (some in defense of the movie) about the very controlled, very "normal" nature of dreams in Nolan's "Inception," explaining that because these are lucid dreams shaped and controlled by the dreamer and architect (Ellen Page's character), they should be that way. And I agree that the dreams of this film are in line with the film's logic and that there's nothing inherently wrong with them coming from that angle.

But doesn't anyone realize how utterly boring that is? If these architects and dreamers are simply going to conjure up men with automatic rifles and shotguns, cars, hummers and skis, a rainy and normal looking city, a retro but normal looking hotel and a mountain fortress out of (again) James Bond, then why bother including dreaming at all, especially the literal-minded and unimaginative things Nolan does with the few dream-like elements of the film. Mal is a glorified plot device, and Cobb's brooding is obvious (even has an elevator in his consciousness to help you access the layers of his psyche one floor at a time, at your leisure).

So yes, delve into the weird a little. Don't explain everything away in neat and tidy order. Give us something to think about outside of the final, pointless shot, Mr. Nolan. Such things will inspire conversation long after the film has finished, and they're more engaging of thought than explosions, heists and chase scenes.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!
Inception's visuals were stunning but it's a rip off of The Matrix and Bond. Dreams fascinate me and the concept of heisting someone's dream is intriguing but this movie was flat and unimaginative. There was no emotional depth to the characters and I didn't really care if Leo got back to his kids. I couldn't even remember Leo's character's name after the movie.

Nolan spent too much time having Leo do exposition explaining the dream process instead of creating relationships and conflict. The only source of conflict for Leo (after Ken Watanabe became an ally) was his “crazed” wife. I never got what was so sucky about their real lives that lead them to want to stay in the dream one. Is dreaming like a drug or are they addicted to the dream drugs? If we had a clue maybe we would have cared and the movie may have worked. Maybe Inception is the Michael Jackson story?

Nolan under-utilized Michael Caine and Ellen Page. How Leo and Caine knew so much about dreaming was never explained and the same goes for Ellen's character. Ken Watanabe, who was the best part of the first half of the movie, “fades” in the second Act.

The only bright spots were Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy. Gordon-Levitt's heist savy and zero-gravity fight scenes were the action high-light of the movie and I wish that was what the movie was about. Hardy was great and got the biggest laughs of the movie. However, the action lagged and I got very bored and then sleepy. I thought the guy behind me was asleep but the snoring was coming from the film's sound. Also, the cold ending was a cop out and THEY MADE ME DO MATH! 10 hours in real life = 50 years? WTC!

No one understands this movie but fanboys are suggesting that "you're just not smart enough” if you don't get it. I shouldn't have to show my Asimov collection, my 3 advance science degrees, my IQ points or my cherished copy of Blade Runner as proof of my deep love and understand-ing of sci-fi.

So I warn you:
DO NOT GO BACK AND SEE THIS MOVIE AGAIN LOOKING FOR A DEEPER MEANING OR ANSWERS THAT ELUDED YOU ON FIRST VIEWING! You did not miss anything because there was nothing there. The movie is a great visual escape but the the substance is not there. Your money will be better spent elsewhere (especially in this economy). Inception is a "no go". "There is no spoon".

What I find interesting about your comments... and the comments of others here, is that you assume everyone dreams the same way. That we all have constantly morphing people, places, and ideas as we dream. That dreams are chaotic and uncontrollable. And because Inception doesn't match your experience, Nolan is out of touch.

The reason I find that interesting is because what I saw on screen matches my own dream experience quite closely.

It hasn't always been this way. I've been studying my dreams for decades. When I first started, it was hard for me to even remember what I had dreamt.

Now, several years later... I am not only capable of being an active participant in my dreams, but I can also control and change "architectures." And I even have certain constants that act as "signals" to me. Different signals have different meanings. For example, if my first crush ever shows up in the dream, that means that I'm supposed to be paying closer attention to what's going on, because whatever my subconscious has to say to me is something that I really need to pay attention to in my waking life.

Elevators act as a signal for me too... but I won't go into that now. ;)

I guess my point is, for people who study dreams (and dreaming) day in and day out, what we saw onscreen isn't as out of the norm as you might think. And I find it kind of funny that so many people here are accusing Nolan of being too closed minded and literal because he didn't portray dreams in chaos--- while few are opening their minds to the unlimited possibilities of the psyche... such as being able to control them. Just my two cents.

I think it's almost impossible to argue with people who weren't engulfed by the film. Now, I'm not saying it is "wrong" to NOT be engulfed by the film. But I think the feelings you get from the film are much different.

This isn't a film meant to be watched from the outside looking in. This is not a film for voyeurs. Now, I love being a voyeur when watching certain films. But not in Nolan's films. Nolan's films are roller-coaster rides, ones where you sit on the cart along with the film.

If you choose to watch the ride instead of being apart of it, the experience will be completely different.

I can't get over how casually Nolan glossed over the moral quandary of invading someone's mind and essentially brainwashing them. There was so much potential to explore what it means to have that much power over the very stuff that dictates behavior, choice, inspiration, etc. Not to mention that it's done in the service of corporate espionage, which opens a whole other can of thematic worms that are then ignored by Nolan. Oh, the possibilities!

Oh well. I still had a good time with it. I actually really liked the time-synching between layers of dreams, if only as a cool, fun cinematic device. But you're right, Jim. Nolan just makes nifty gadgets, but I'm becoming more convinced he's no artist.

Would have made a great HBO series. That way you could do all the exposition in bits and pieces over 10 episodes. The first season would have just been based on introducing us to this world and how the technology works and introducing us to the individual characters and companies involved. Nolan has way too many ideas that don't get fleshed out enough to be the movie its ideas deserve. This movie had about three movies in it. Not really a bad thing, but shouldn't give it a pass.

I agree with what you're saying because there are no explanations for a lot of what we see on camera. For instance, how could you age in a dream with no knowledge of what you'd look like? It'd be fuzzy I'm sure. Unless of course, much like most of these commenters, you bring in an outside logic or explanation apart from what the movie used to describe the internal logic.

It is easy to say the technology adds a stability to the dream, or some knowledge outside of your brain, but it doesn't say so in the movie.

Or maybe another comment on here, about how an "architect" forms the world so there's stability. Still your brain is free to do as it wishes, so Cilian Murphy's character being unaware of the dream, would probably pull off some insane things to prove to himself it was a dream.

The only thing I don't agree with in your comments is that you went in with preconceptions which sort of cheats the movie.

I am not going to go into the aesthetics of the film. I loved it for reasons that it would take me all night to elaborate on. But my main concern is that I'm beginning to think that if Jim could fight one director to the death in a cage match it would be Christopher Nolan. No, his films are not perfect in comparison to everything within the history of cinema. But where does this mentality that, somehow, nothing new can be amazing come from? All I want to say is, in a modern society where masses of moviegoers hail Twilight and Saw movies as a creative breakthrough, why are you so hard on pure, unadulterated ambition? Creativity has fallen on hard times commercially, and I'm not trying to say that we should all just "take what we can get", but perhaps your inability to appreciate this effort for what it is is a reflection of something other than Nolan's actual filmmaking skills. Just a guess. I'll take Inception over about 99% of this year's big budget releases any day. You called the movie no fun. Let me ask, have you ever come across an individual who is just completely lacking in a sense of humor? You can have the funniest joke in the world ready to go, but there's no point in telling it to them. So you learn to not tell that person any jokes at all and just settle for feeling sorry for them because they can't experience the joy of laughter. Of course this argument isn't without its flaws, as any Transformers or Twilight fan could probably employ it just as I have to defend their allegiance to their trashy films. However, that's where common sense should come into play. If something sucks, it sucks. But it's senseless to try to bring something with such ambition as Inception down JUST BECAUSE it's being hailed as genius. People are evolving and it will take more the mentally stimulate those who look for such intellectual exercises. Inception is the answer for every moviegoer who thought Avatar was a bit too "Disney"-like. For every person who thought the Matrix was good, but thinks Keanu Reeves has the emotional range of a tree. And for every person who knows that seriousness and darkness is not a bad thing. It's a reflection of something that lives within us all. And to call a movie out for being somewhat of a downer...well, that's just a downer in itself.

As always a good read even if I disagree completely. I actually feel bad you didn't enjoy. I respect your reading but I feel like you talk a lot about what wasn't there in terms of dream scape as opposed to what was actually their.

You have a lot of cool ideas that could pack like three more movies but to define dream state in itself is a pretty hard argument to make. What one person dreams like is not like another.

Inside the rules Nolan created I think that everything is pretty airtight. If the dreams worked like you describe I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to try to rob or plant an idea in somebody's mind. That's why they hire an architect. That said I think the movie can be seen to have the flaws you describe but I don't think they break the movie.

Even so I think they're are many dreamlike images, elements and structural breaks. For example the time he retells the dream to the young girl or the weather changing outside the hotel. I think these elements evoke a dream like quality.

I see it more as a heist picture using dream as its setting but I also think it's more about memories and ideas than actual dreams according to your definition.

"Mulholland Dr." is the most accurate depiction of nightmare I've ever seen in a film. From an artistic, technical, and narrative viewpoint, it is masterful. And as a result of its proficiency, I found it fairly void of emotional resonance. I was effected, but unmoved. It warranted a second viewing, but not a third.

"Inception" abandons the dream world for the world of cinemapsych (upsettingly recognizable depictions of the undepictionable). It violates the fundamental understanding every human being holds of how dreams function. It is pure fantasy, with its own set of wholly synthetic rules. But the characters hold weight, the visuals are ocassionally breathtaking, and though it does not warrant it -- I will end up watching it many times again.

So, I guess what I'm saying is this: I don't require accuracy in film (especially in a self-proclaimed sci-fi action flick) as much as I'd like to believe I do.

PS: You might consider adding "Northfork" to your list of quality dream films.

I think Inception is a great film in many ways, and I think it brought a unique take on dreams that the critical minds on this blog seem to think is uncreative, my favorite interpretation being: if you could really control your dreams, wouldn't you be bringing your banality, your strict humanity, into the dream? In that case, the dream really isn't a dream anymore, more like a laboratory and especially more like stiff architecture, which to the inceptors (ha) is exactly what they want. The point is to have no limits in creating a mission in order to guarantee the success of accomplishing that mission. The problem is, of course, our humanity keeps creeping up on our attempts at perfection, which is symbolized by the dead wife. The film comes out and explains a lot, but it certainly inspired me to feel out its concepts.

I find it funny how many times I've read on this blog entry people talking about how the film doesn't lead into a deeper discussion about dreams. In saying that, I think the blog is having that exact discussion. Are there flaws in the film? If you pick it apart, like many films there are many "flaws", but I think flaws are just as subjective as anything. I feel the film deserves to be interpreted. I've read a few times people saying that Cobb using his wife's top is a "story flaw", but why can't that be a clue into something deeper? To me, it could mean that the whole film was about the perfect crime which was broken before it started, or even worse, doesn't even exist at all.

Of course, you don't seem to like Nolan's style, which is a different argument. I've found his last few films to be jolting and chaotic (in a good way), only the second time through to realize that the chaos was my creation. As a filmmaker myself, I find that to be the work of a master inceptor.

I'm not a critic; I either like, love, dislike or hate films, with certain situations in which I have to put certain factors into my judgment (for example, I loved "The Motocycle Diaries" as a film, but I couldn't quite get over the fact that this was about Che). But I certainly feel that I have a grasp of what a great film is to me, and Inception falls into that vague realm of mine, especially as a well-directed film.

Inception touched things in my architect’s sensibility that triggered all kinds of deep enjoyments. I guess it’s a good glimpse into the kinds of images and situations that play out in an architect’s (or maybe just my own) imagination. Architects spend a lot of time doing a lot of diverse things, the most maddening of which might be having to obey multiple sets of rules that sometimes have to contradict each other. This kind of diverse activity can lead to a lot of playful mischief making and strange preoccupations in an architect’s daydreams (or maybe just my daydreams), and the whole experience of Inception somehow seems to synthesize and represent these kinds of strange preoccupations in a really fun and oblique way. And I am realizing also that almost none of the enjoyment I got out of this movie really came from anything emotional or warm or even intellectual that may or may not actually be found in the movie. Instead, I was simply delighted with watching a new world of aesthetic choices and ridiculous rules being established, then allowing those rules to generate a preposterous series of circumstances, and then watching a series of performance art / kinetic sculptural pieces enact themselves following those rules, with extreme rigor and panache. Though what separated Inception from any other action / caper movie about mere rules being followed was the following aspects (among others):

1) A deeply embedded and droll sense of humor at work at its very core. I think a good portion of it is not really meant to be a “serious” or “realistic” movie at all, but rather a wild, preposterous, and fun adventure romp just this side of silly. Examples: The heedless glee of darting from one arbitrary James Bondian exotic location and set piece to another, the impossibly suave characters, lavish schemes to accomplish very minor things, ridiculously overcomplicated set pieces, wildly interesting buildings. Also, Murphy’s character being dragged (like any ordinary dreamer) through all sorts of nonsensical interactions and ultimately reaching an emotional climax with the pinwheel discovery was not at all an emotional high point for us viewers who know he’s just being toyed with. I had a lot of fun watching this game of subjecting this completely unaware character to all kinds of bafflement and watching him start to try and play along. (I also crack up laughing with delight when reading Borges stories, and I know that’s not a typical reaction.) Incidentally as a result, Murphy’s character is probably the only person in the whole movie who had my genuine sympathy for being completely kept in the dark from start to finish. I think the difficulty of seeing this movie as fun and silly is simply because of stuff like the dark music, the very restrained and austere camera work and production design, the subplot of the wife, and no outward nudge at the audience telling us we are allowed to find humor or whimsy in almost any of it.

2) The movie is a series of lavish “kinetic / sculptural / performance art pieces” I guess I’d call them, one after another, and these “pieces” remind me more of certain avant garde artistic works than merely being in the tradition of standard movie “scenes”. Examples: pulling the two mirrors together to make an infinite hallway and then shattering them, and also the floating sequence where we are allowed the time to watch Arthur solve a ridiculously convoluted problem in a visually stunning way. The movie is basically just one fascinating “art piece” after another. I have no idea if it’s valid to compose a movie out of this kind of raw material, but I found the material itself to be wonderful nonetheless.

This is a very rich movie even if a lot of the “serious” stuff might appear to be preposterous.

This is just one little example to add to the mountain pile... but to me it spoke a lot about how little time the movie took to really sink into its world. It comes from my friend Julia (who, it may be relevant here to note, loves "The Fall"):

"Nolan was aiming at a mainstream audience, trying to make a film that the 'average' person can sit down and enjoy without having to think much... just watch the visuals I guess. But could it have worked if Nolan had focused more on the affect dreaming has on their minds, not just the drug aspect of never wanting to leave, and always searching for a way back? What if nolan had added things like characters forgetting they were in a dream so that they suddenly couldn't walk on walls? Or staring at an empty space and trying to create something fictional..."

I like that. Seems like something Tarsem might do in one of his films.

She adds:

"All the characters didn't seem disjointed with their surroundings, even Ellen Page's who is the newest to the dreaming world does not show difficulty with adjusting each time. Its; like they leave the dream world and enter the real world and hardly act as if anything happened."

Just like in "The Prestige" when they create A MACHINE THAT CAN DUPLICATE MATTER and their first thought is merely, "Well that's handy, I can do that trick to upstage my rival now."

Jim, I'm a young man who looks to wise elders such as yourself for informed cinematic critique. You are at the top of my list. I have your page bookmarked. I have argued with friends in defense of your opinions even when I didn't totally agree with them. In this case, I think you're being needlessly hard on this movie. You seem to simply disagree with the nature of the premise. You're not the only one to do this. Also, another precursor - until this point I've been very dubious of the application of Auteur Theory to Nolan. He had never shown any consistency in theme whereby I would say he was a filmmaker of notoriety.

Anyway, your critique seems to be a bit arrogant in that you completely dismiss Nolan's conceptualization of the nature of dreams. Dreams are by nature allusive, difficult to understand. They are also an extremely personal experience. How can one criticize the validity of the way another describes the nature of their own dreams? It seems like you're sort of doing that exact thing.

And it seems like this is where your criticism begins and ends. You're not looking deeper into the relationship between emotional theme and filmic language, story structure, acting behavior, etc.. I'm convinced that there are some great things going on here (beyond the visceral huge action set-pieces) which the dubious critics such as yourself are overlooking. But yeah, just walked out, need to think more. Just saying, your critique feels weak. But you're still awesome!

Really, the characters could have achieved the same end result just by whispering in the guy's ear during his 10 hour nap.

Just want to add that Boone's comments are extremely frustrating. I always argue for character development, but when you have strong emotional acting, a very powerful score, and great cinematography - this is the beauty of cinema. Every character's backstory doesn't necessarily need to be spelled out (which happens to be a serious problem with the more mainstream action/superhero movies of today). It can be a beautiful and moving experience to an audience simply based on its participation in the human experience. The argument that Boone pushes is so superficial - it has no place here. It seems like he should probably be attacking the nature of sexual/gender identity if cinema. Seriously, this is a Hollywood picture. Evaluate it for what it is. If you want to grandstand on the nature of mainstream cinema in general, do it in its own column. It's not really appropriate in a specific review. I just got angry for a minute.

My reply to Rothman's comment is that I've not heard "cinemapsych" before, but I like that description.

Inception's dream sequences don't represent what I'd consider dreams to be made of, but it's about what's there more than what isn't.

It is as much about the true nature of dreams as Inglourious Basterds was about World War II. And both films I enjoy immensely, partly for their ability to toy with our expectations, each in their own way, specific to the styles of their writer/director. Through their films, both of these "auteurs" deliver what are clearly very personal notions of what gets them off at the movies.

It IS pure fantasy and I do allow the film to take on its own rules so long as I don't feel too burned. In Inception's case, I do not. I'll take a little burnt. I won't send that back. Even if I'm watching what could easily be deemed absurd, such absurdity need not obstruct my having a good time at the movies. I'd kind of hate to say it, but I credit the incessantly frenzied editing style for leaving most of us without much room to cry foul of nonsense and inconsistencies, and for keeping all those damned plates spinning.

If experiencing a good story is all about wanting to know what happens next, you could've considered me well satiated. It was an exciting journey, period, but also allowing that Nolan's brush strokes give the story a compelling singularity. Such distinction at that budget-level is rare and most welcome.

Forgive me if someone above has already mentioned this, but the film's premise is an obvious ripoff of "eXistenZ".

I popped it in right after I came back from this disappointing mess, and recovered right away. The mastery of tone and visual inventiveness is apparent in practically every frame, not to mention that it's among the most beautifully shot films ever made. The most striking element that "Inception" tries to achieve and fails is what "eXistenZ" does so well: establishing the characters as real people worth caring about. Even if, as many have pointed out, the very nature of the unreal environment eliminates any real-world stakes or consequences, the pathos in "eXistenZ" arises from the failure of the characters, who do exist on some plane of reality, to distinguish the real from the virtual.

"Inception" is a hollow shell through and through. The DiCaprio role seemed miscast; imagine what Casey Affleck could have done with this. Even so, as Jim pointed out, the film's basic approach to the material is all wrong. The dream concept is a distraction, all the more so as one notes how undreamlike the sequences are.

The score is overly bombastic and quite a distraction at times. Contrast that with Howard Shore's atmospheric, haunting work in Cronenberg's film.

I had high hopes for Nolan ever since "Memento", but since coming to terms with how fast "The Dark Knight" wore off on me, Nolan's technique has come to appear lightweight and depthless.

What city/country does Michael Cain's character teach in?

Cobb can visit him no problem but also gives him gifts to take home to his kids in the U.S. and he also knows exactly when his secret mission plane would arrive to give him a ride from the airport. Also how long has Cobb been away from his kids, I was surprised to see them looking the exact same as from his memory, unaged, etc.

Also, in the first scene in Fisher's dream where it's raining and they pick up the guy who had to go to the bathroom, does he wet himself in real life on the 747 cause he peed in his dream?

My biggest gripe was the 90% exposition dialogue explaining the movie's reality to us. It would be like if throughout Lord of the Rings Gandalf had to stop mid action and explain to the hobbits/audience, "So these guys are called Elves, here's what they can do, and don't be surprised when they..."

I bought into the movie a little more emotionally then others I guess. The scene where Cobb steps onto the ledge and his wife is going to jump because she believes it's a dream and wants him believe with her got me.

The movie was a good puzzle and got us talking about it after for a while. I'm glad I spent $11.75 on this instead of Airbender.

I really have trouble believing the critics who didn't like Inception watched the same movie as me. It was easily the best movie I've seen all year.

I don't think the movie was so much about recreating dream states as it was about blurring the lines between dreams and reality. Things happen in the dream world which defy real-world physics, but there's an order in the dreams that's foreign to dreams. Nolan's decision to have things stay happen was a good one, frankly, considering the number of layers of dreams he has in the movie (five). If things changed constantly for no reason, then the movie would become incoherent since it'd be incredibly difficult to differentiate the dreams.

Blah to your impressions on the movie.

I think the issue here is that to you, this is supposed to feel like a dream--unfocused, shifting, following a set of undefined and changing rules. But Nolan wasn't taking dreams as his inspiration; he was taking the phenomenon known as "lucid dreaming" as his inspiration, the idea that with practice, you can actually be aware in a dream and control the experience as you see it. It's not meant to feel like a "real" dream at all, it's meant to feel like a lucid dream, and it does that quite well.

You might want to poke around at some of the information about lucid dreaming, then come back to the movie and see if that informs your perception of it at all. Not saying you'll necessarily like it better, but you'll have a better idea of where Nolan was coming from.

Bah; this is just inevitable backlash from the too-hip-for-the-room. I don't see why Nolan's literal, rational approach to dreams and their inherent (il)logic should be such a problem for anyone. To describe "Inception" this way is accurate, but it's just that; a description, not a criticism. I agree that Nolan is a long way off from Buñuel, Kubrick, Cronenberg, David Lynch, and Tarsem Singh (and I'd add Jodorowsky, whose perception of reality seems as random as any dream state), but . . so? He's also a long way off from Uwe Boll and Brett Ratner. I fail to see the point.

I'd argue it's much more difficult to make a film like "Inception" than it was to make "The Phantom of Liberty," "The Cell," or "Videodrome." Those movies don't have to make any sense; the tone of the material and their creators' sensibilities inform the audience early on that anything goes. While that can be liberating, it eliminates the need for any structural discipline. Hey, lets throw in a scene of an (theretofore unseen and never to be seen again) emu randomely strutting past the foot of a character's bed. Why? Because I have access to an emu and have eliminated any need for logic. Buñuel, if I recall, mentioned this scene from "The Phantom of Liberty" in an interview, chuckling that chin-stroking film buffs were arguing over the symbolism therein. Thar weren't none. He was just taking the piss. That, in itself, was funny, and I enjoy films of this sort to an extent, but where is it written that all films addressing dreams have to equally as random?

Christopher Nolan keeps getting compared (to his detriment) to Kubrick, more than anyone else. This makes little sense to me. Kubrick made films; not movies. Each one may have fit into a particular genre, and some managed to find huge audiences despite their oddness, but they were all films made purely by Kubrick, for Kubrick. They were "Films," but sometimes managed (despite themselves) to become "Movies." Nolan is kind of the reverse. He sets out to make big, mass-market Movies, and damned if once in awhile some filmness doesn't slip out.

This is a good thing, people, isn't it? With all the moaning about sequels, CGI-fest fantasy flicks, video game and TV show adaptations, reboots, and all things Michael Bay, you have the audacity to complain about mass-market movie that is none of the above, yet cribs elements from each in the attempt to bring the popcorn munchers in and give them a unique ride? How about something, you know, for the effort? Walking out of every "summer movie" I've seen so far this year, I've thought to myself "I could have written that script in about three days." I hold no such delusions about "Inception."

The more I think about Emerson's argument, the more baffled I get. We're turning up our noses and dismissing logic, structure and precision as the qualities of a hack -- enough with his grating "cleverness," because who in the world would want that? Nolan's films require uncommon intelligence to construct on the page, and ridiculous skill and discipline to assemble into a coherent film. I bemoan the day he decides to start making art films, because he's about the only one preventing the summer slate from morphing completely into Saturday morning cartoons.

"Like "Sleuth" or "The Usual Suspects," they're not about characters or emotions or ideas or human experience at all; they're just self-contained gadgets, amusing but mechanical. "

Are you honestly claiming that the original 1972 Laurence Olivier/Micheal Caine film wasn't about character or emotion? Yes, it contains a puzzle but only as a vehicle (or even frame, if you must) for the emotion and character.

I really hope no one has made the mistake of paying you for your opinions. I hate to see good money wasted.

t was very clear from the onset that the dreams were manufactured and controlled by the Extractors (if that's the right term), which would make it perfectly sensible that the dreams would be linear, dictated by cause and effect, and thoroughly controlled by the Extractors, given that the dream takes place in one of the Extractor's minds and especially since the whole purpose of the endeavor is to convince the mark that the dream is in fact reality. When they become aware they are in a dream state they begin to wake. All of this was explained, on the screen, or in plain sight.

Also, from a story-telling standpoint, Nolan likely figured the movie would be difficult enough to follow without the hallucinatory and illogic that characterizes dream, so it was likely a decision made to not confound audiences further, as well give them ways to relate to the characters and story. Otherwise, like the dream, the film would fall apart into nonsense.

This strikes me as a very strange criticism of this film. I have never seen a film about dreams where dreams are depicted in a manner that really makes them feel like dreams. I don't think it's even possible to do this.

Your own examples of films with a "dream like" quality are puzzling. There are no dreams in "Videodrome", "Eyes Wide Shut" or "Mulholland Dr.", but it sure is true in all of them that "[o]bjects and characters maintain their identities without randomly changing or melding".

The setting exists in service of a story, and only has to be realistic enough to drive that story. Do you really think it would have helped the story to have characters that randomly change?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the criticism seems to me to be the sort of extremely pedantic criticism that comes from someone who has already decided not to like a film and is now going to nitpick it death. The setting wasn't 100% accurate, there are a few character choices I didn't agree with, and so on. It seems insincere, the product of someone looking for reasons not to like something.

(SPOILERS)

Jim,

I'm probably going to echo the thoughts of other readers, but I'll try to keep it short. Much like what Ebert said, the majority of critics who have panned "Inception" found a fundamental flaw in the depiction and use of the dream state. Those critics (including you) found Nolan's dream state to be too linear, too reliable, too kinetic, and too rational, which (I assume) results in inhibiting the movie from delving into the nature of the human mind and subconscious. I would agree that the movie deals with dreams in these manners, and I don't see that as any kind of flaw.

The film deals with dreams this way because that is how they have been set up. In some timeline in the future, Cobb is dealing with technology and methods in which dreams are manifested and controlled for the benefit of a customer, whether it be for subconscious security (learning how to defend against extraction) or for inception (in this case, corporate espionage). This level of control over dreams makes them linear, reliable (reasonably), kinetic, and rational, but that is what's required of dreams in order for Cobb to have success in his business.

Okay, so dreams are set up this way. But why? Is this kind of narrative device actually useful for exploring dreams? Does it provide any depth to explore themes of human emotion and subconscious? Absolutely. First, I think it's a refreshing approach to dreams. In countless films, dreams are explored with limitless boundaries, surreal surroundings and situations, and "shame, lust, embarrassment, exhilaration; flying, nakedness in public, pop quizzes, 'actor's nightmares,' quicksand floors, teeth falling out".

This film takes a different route; it is not concerned with the limitless of our dreams and minds, but rather, when we attempt to control our dreams and subconscious through some manipulation, our emotions/memories can still skew that control. This setup allows for perfect examination of conscious control over our minds versus subconscious emotional takeover. Even when our subconscious is controlled to the highest degree (via planned dreams used during inception), we sometimes cannot withhold our deepest emotions from being untamed. Cobb has the least instability in the team regarding his subconscious, because the trauma involved with losing his spouse (which was caused no less by controlled exploration of dreams/subconscious) is too great within his mind. The movie has no concern with standard dreams that we all deal with, like the ones you mentioned (naked in public, teeth falling out), because our emotions are already graded there. We know how we feel in those situations. How would that advance what we know about dreams and our subconscious? Controlling the physical aspect of dreams, in this film, creates a stage for one's subconscious to inadvertently appear and take form.

For the ideas of extraction and inception to work, the dream state must be controlled, or at least be controllable. Sure, it is kinetic, but by allowing for physical control of a dream (like keeping a variable constant), Nolan is allowed to explore the prevalence of memories and the subconscious, and how much control we truly have over that.

Moreover, this supposed "control" really shows that we indeed have very little control over our subconscious emotions. The final shot opens the door for questions: is Cobb dreaming? Only for that final scene? Maybe for the whole film? Maybe none of it was real? Maybe his wife, rather than having died in reality, actually died a second time in yet another subconscious/dream state, and is now waiting in reality for Cobb, who is forever to live in his subconscious? Maybe another umpteen hypotheses? Well that's okay. The different routes through which the film can be explained only further strengthens the idea that Cobb has little control over his subconscious. The control we thought was there is not really there at all. Even if we set up a way in which all the physical parameters of a dream are controlled, the power of our subconscious is too great and influential to be completely mastered (Cobb says he is the greatest extractor, but that says nothing of how his own subconscious is controlled). Not to say that we cannot change our subconscious, which is the entire notion of inception, but that we are inseparable from our subconscious, even when dreams are controlled.

So, you made muddle over the fact that Nolan makes the dream state very controlled and kinetic, but it is an unconventional way of doing dreams (which would usually garner support for innovation, rather than get bashed for NOT being like all other dream-drenched films). I think critics who pan this movie aren't giving enough credit to Nolan; they seem to think that due to Nolan's linearity and logical style of narrative, he is inhibited by his own "uncreative" thought and therefore cannot create a proper, untethered, sprawling version of dreams. I think the opposite: Nolan chose this route, and by allowing his characters to (attempt to) control dreams physically, the uncontrollable nature of the subconscious fleshes out. Does anybody know where Cobb's head is at at the end? I don't think he even knows.

I'm sorry, why is this important? Shouldn't we be talking about the iPhone4? Oh, wait, that's not really newsworthy or interesting either... how about Lindsey Lohan?

This is a movie, right? Did you like it? GREAT! Didn't like it? Moving on. Movies are gambles. And opinions are your own. See it, don't see it. Like it, don't like it. We're wasting bandwidth here, people. Not to mention time. Now get back to work!

If you didn't understand it, wait for the DVD. Hopefully Nolan will include a commentary for those who can't form their own opinions or conclusions.

Jim,

I can't say your criticism isn't valid, but I do think you're overreacting. I had a dream a couple nights ago:

There was a company that sent me a pet great white shark. The shark was temporarily sedated (an actual process they use in the seafood industry when shipping fish overseas). But here's the thing: Because the shark was so big, they sent it in different parts. So, the head came in one box, the fins in another, the tail, the body etc. The package came with chemicals to bring it back to life and, get this, a needle and string to sew it back together.

I woke up laughing my ass off. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever thought of. But then I realized how stupid it was.

Dreams are banal for the most part. Like DiCaprio says in the film: "They only seem strange when you wake up." I would say "they only seem clever when you're asleep". Not that good ideas never originate from dreams, but the connection is usually tenuous.

I enjoyed Nolan's vision of our sub-conscious as a architectural labyrinth. In our dreams we do create our own landscapes. Was it a accurate representation of real dreams. No. But was it more interesting than a shark that came in different boxes? I think so. I am willing to take it as a metaphor. And perhaps you were right, maybe "dream" is the wrong word. Besides, if the characters consciously knew they were entering a dream, wouldn't they make it navigable? And remember, whenever DiCaprio lost his bearing in the reality of the dream, his own sub-conscious made it stranger, i.e. his kids returning in odd places.

Also keep in mind that, in the movie, this technology had been used for a few years. They probably learned how to train their minds to make sense of things. If you could consciously enter your dreams, wouldn't you have more control over them?

In the end, why would I want to see a movie where DiCaprio and friends fight their way through a Dali painting. We have Terry Gilliam for that. The dreams they make for themselves are a glorified and desired version of our real world.

Maybe "imagination" would of worked better.

Ontological status of dream machines within dreams???

Here's the big issue that's eating at me: what's the status of a dream machine once they are already inside a shared dream. The machine inside the dream is as "real" as the dreamed up architecture they surrounded by. So why and how does it work? The one in the hotel and the one in the snow fort. If we accept that the machine is the necessary technological device for linking them up and sedating and syncing the group from actual reality into that shared first dream level--why and how is this necessary for other deeper levels? How is it possible for imagined technology (the non-physical, dream world, dream machines) to work with the precision necessary for the machinery of Nolan's world to play out the way it does? Is it all just a matter of the group's belief that it will work the same way? And if so, why not dispense with the machine altogether and just will yourself deeper? Or only hook Fischer up to it--the only one with no experience navigating dreams.

For now, the only explanation that makes any sense to me is that everything we see is, unfortunately, somehow all a dream of Cobb's. The whole movie. And this has less to do with the spinning totem than this problem of the dream machine.

Jim, even though you're not so fond of it, thanks for having one of the best places to discuss this film on the net.

While I certainly agree that Nolan's dream levels aren't like actual dreams, I do believe that's missing what he's actually aiming for. He's aiming for shared dreaming as a metaphor for cinema. And the dream layers in the film are based on variations on the heist film, the gritty urban crime movie, the upscale Oceans 11 type caper, and Bond movies.

You can probably track the whole movie as an elaborate metaphor for film making. Cobb as the director. Ariadne as the screenwriter. Fischer as the audience.

I had a problem with a few things in the movie.

I am not really a fan of Nolan, but I don't dislike him either. I think he's a decent film maker who had a lot of potential, starting with Memento and improving with Insomnia.

The action scenes were tolerable, by and large, except for the disaster that was the snow scene. Even people who say things like, "it's a popcorn action movie, so why should I care about literalism, etc." ought to be offended.

The literalism that many of you talk about is certainly evident, and it hurts the picture. But I can't fault Nolan for not making a better picture than he has; I can only judge the picture that exists. I wish he weren't so fond of beating the audience over the head with expository dialogue, but it doesn't ruin the picture altogether.

What does ruin the picture, and what I can fault Nolan for, is writing a script that sets up the picture as a corporate dream-heist picture, despite that story line being entirely pointless. It is the most obvious form of cheap plot device - both a huge McGuffin and a deus ex machina. And I don't see that Nolan even means to do it, or that he even recognizes it. After all, he tries very hard to bring some sort of emotional resonance to the scene between Cilian Murphy and his dying father.

At the risk of sounding too simple, I must ask: who are the good guys? The bad guys? Are the mind-thiefs good? Is the heir to the huge energy company, whose mind is being hacked, the good guy?

At a more basic level, who should we care for, and why?

Nolan doesn't answere these, and I think the reason is because he himself doesn't know, or even care. He needed a premise on which to hang the shared dream/espionage reality of the picture, so he created a silly plot device. The problem is that the device carries the whole picture!

I believe that the picture Nolan really wanted to tell was about Cobb and his grief, set in the dream-heist world. But how does one write such a script; where does one begin, how does one progress, and how does one sell such a 'reality' to an audience?

So Nolan makes a picture inside of a picture, and isn't deft enough to make both of them relevent. Instead, he pushes the entire movie along via an utterly useless plot line. This is the big problem with Inception. It is impossible to forgive, unlike other complaints such as lack of dream-like qualities, literalism, and dumb exposition. Those things can be forgiven if the end product is satisfactory on any other level, particularly by those who watch a movie for a few laughs, a nice explosion, and perhaps even some old fashioned tension (which I think Nolan actually did a good job of, through pacing, music, and the differing time-flows). But such blatant cheating as setting up the movie based on a pointless premise, using it to move along the plot and set up new action set-pieces, and trying to fake some sort of emotional ending is unforgivable. It makes Nolan look like a hack. And the truth is I don't think he is.

Despite that, I was delighted by a part early in the movie, where Cobb and the architect are in the shared dream for the first time. A man passes them on a bike, and the sound of the wheels spinning actually slows down as it approaches them, and speeds up the farther it movies away. It is relativity in reverse; the opposite of what happens when a car whizzes past you in real life. It is the sort of thing that could have lent a great deal of 'dreaminess' or cantered perception of reality to the picture. Despite the architecture of the dreams being very rigid, logical, and literal, this one scene hinted at the possibility that Nolan was actually on to something, that the dream world was somehow 'off'. I thought it was brilliant, but I was the only of out of my group of friends to have noticed it, despite it drawing attention to itself by being played rather loudly during a part with little of no dialogue.

No one has mentioned Cobb's fear of homosexual rape (having to avoid being rear-ended by that damned train)! Can't accuse it of being covertly homophobic though, since at least Eames' character was presented in such a matter-of-fact way, "darling." Now how about a sequel based on Eames's dreamses? Guaranteed fun!

By the way Jim, I really appreciated hearing more of your explication on the lack of emotion in the dreams. What happened to me while watching the film, though, was that the imagery made me focus on my feelings, as they related to certain dream-related imagery. For example, I laughed at that train business, felt lighter than air during the JGL hallway sequence, was terrified as Mal fell, and got a bit turned on at the sight of fluttering cotton curtains.

k, i'm checking out of this discussion. toodles.

You mentioned about how he felt different on the 747 at the end about his father.

Just because he feels a certain way about his father and they did the inception, that is put the idea into this head in an emotionally positive way (which was the only way it could work), that doesn't necessarily mean that it will happen.

A lot of people KNOW that certain paths in life will make them feel more positive if they chose it, yet, they still don't: or I guess the movie's side of the debate/message is that positivity always trumps negativity, or that one's negative associations are precluding a positive life; kind of sounds like a self-help thing, but I suppose is how the brain really works; but once again, we aren't mechanical. There's still that pesky thing called free will.

But I agree about the mark "militarizing his subconscious" to protect people from stealing his idea, which sounds like all action movies. Every villain in the action-romps of Stallone, Schwarzenegger etc. (and the stars themselves) have "militarized their subconscious" to protect themselves; their guns are an extension of their insecurity, and they will shoot their way to self-esteem; God help you, if you make them feel small.

Not much has been made of the tottering top in the very final scene of the movie. Was Cobb's happy ending just another layer in a deep dream state? I think so.

Cobb himself said that his totem once belonged to his wife, which in the context of its purpose might make it an 'unreliable narrator.' We see him at various times in the movie spinning the top to validate to himself that he, at present, exists in the real world. The most intriguing instance of this, to me, is when he is alone in his hotel room after the botched job on the train. He spins the top while holding a (real?)gun against an unfocused background of a decidedly dendritic tree (a screenshot of this scene appears before Jims first Inception blog). Does Mr. Cobb suspect that he is dreaming? This is one of two scenes in the film where we are made to believe that a weapon has real, final power. I can only wonder if Cobb considered using that power to dispatch all of his synapses, to wake up from a half-suspected dream, and if only the intervention of his beloved children(subconscious self preservation or sticky plot device?)prevented him from doing so.

A stream of unconnected thoughts:

What stuck out most to me was the editing of the scene when Mal jumps from the window. The cutting back and forth instead of having them in the same shot makes the geography unsure. He says he's in the room they stayed in for their anniversary, but she appears to be across the street. And yet the way its cut together it could just as well be that she is just outside the window of the room he is in, and since they're never in the same shot, we don't know for sure until he actually goes to the window and climbs out. It's unnecessarily choppy/clumsy.

Early in the movie Arthur tells Ariadne (an unnecessarily obtuse name if e'er there were one) that she can design impossible structures into the dreamworlds she's building (I think as a defense mechanism) and gives her an example of an Penrose staircase (which was cool to see realized on-screen). Then later in the movie we see that of all the impossible architecture she could've thought up to include in one of her "mazes" we find out she put the exact staircase he had shown her earlier into the hotel.

The first time she is in the dream with Cobb she starts fooling with the physics of the dreamscape, makes those big glass doors appear, but once they actually get into the "inception" part of the movie, none of this stuff plays any part.
Why show us how you can do all of this stuff if you're not gonna make it relevant.

Later, conveniently, Eames had added an entry to the snow fort through, of all things, the air duct. I love what John August wrote about air ducts/vents in a scene from Lost a couple years back and have never forgotten it:
"You’ve got polar bears, black smoke monsters, and a cabal of mysterious Others. There’s no shortage of dramatic opportunities, which is why it’s so disheartening to see the show reach for that lowest-hanging fruit: a guy in an air duct. "

One last thing about the "rules". Maybe I missed the math, but I think I got it right: When they were going in for the big Inception they said they'd have about 10 hours in "reality", a week at the first level, 6 months at the second, and 10 years at the third...increasing exponentially. Then when they miss "the kick" the first time, they figure they have 10 seconds til the van hits the river, which then gives Arthur 2-3 minutes at the 2nd level and the team 16 minutes at the third level. Maybe I got something wrong, but it seemed the time-scaling was vastly diminished when the plot demanded a faster-ticking clock.

There's a hole in the story.

The whole premise of the movie is that they are trying to plant the idea into someone's head WITH THE HOPE THAT HE WILL FOLLOW THROUGH ON THAT POSITIVE EMOTION. They plant the idea into his head successfully with a positive emotion, and then the movie just kind of ends and every is happy about the good job they did, but he still has to follow through with that emotion in the real world. People feel good about a lot of paths in life, but that doesn't mean they have the courage or perhaps even the situation in their life will permit them to easily act on that: and certainly not the mark in the movie. He was on the verge of becoming a super power. So, his feeling good about an idea and his real life situation are two very different things. What about his greed, or his business partners or global partners? He suddenly feels good about an idea and all the rest of this stuff just goes away? I don't think so. How does he feel about being a one man superpower?

Seems many critics, as well as the general audience, of the movie have the same problem with Inception: that the dreams aren't like real dreams. I don't think that was Nolan's intention though. I went into the film with few preconceived ideas about the movie or about how a movie should portray dreams, and very much enjoyed the movie. That the "dreams" in the movie are nothing like real dreams doesn't bother me at all. This wasn't a movie about portraying dreams as they really are, but about dreams as a way of bringing forth ideas.

I really disagree with the opinion of many people that nothing is on the line in the movie because the people can't die in the dreams. There's a lot on the line. Cobb wants to get back to his children, and he's given the chance by performing this inception. Then, Nolan adds in the detail of limbo once they're all in the dreams, which increases the danger. I really felt there was a lot on the line. Wanting to be with one's children is probably more important to many people than their own lives, and being caught in a limbo state is a terrifying idea to me.

On the theory that the entire movie is a dream: I don't buy into that either and think it entirely misses the point of the movie. I think that Nolan is drawing a parallel between the dreams and a movie, even movie-making. The characters creating the dream for Fischer Jr. are like people creating a movie: they create a world to draw their audience in, they put on disguises, they can't go too far from reality or the audience will rebel, and they are doing it all to plant an idea in the audience's mind. To me the final shot is Nolan's way of referencing the idea in the film of how they create the dreams so that the audience can't escape, the audience is stuck not knowing if Cobb is in a dream or in reality, and then the movie goes to black and then credits, "kicking" us out.

I think there's a lot more going on in Inception than a heist movie within dreams or trying to decipher whether the whole thing is a dream. I think Nolan made a movie about movies, about how movies (like the dreams in the movie) might be artificial but can plant ideas, bring emotions, and change lives, that they can pull an audience in, basically fool them to care for these characters and plots that aren't real, but still leave something important in real life.

"If a filmmaker is going to dream, the challenge is to dream big, to show us things in ways we haven't seen before..."

Oh, dang. Is that The Challenge? I can understand how Nolan missed it, because I did too. How does one find out about The Challenge? Is there a website for it? Does an angel come down in the night to potential dream-movie writers? Do you deliver it yourself? I think you should cut Nolan some slack. He may simply be completely unaware of The Challenge.

I think you're wrong, and this is what I think is right: that the dreams in the movie are highly structured action set piece worlds. I was terribly worried they would be more like real dreams where anything can happen, which I would have found very dull in an action film. I think Nolan did a hell of a job finding a way to make the dream world a place to set unique and wonderful action sequences. That's exactly what I was hoping for. That's what I would consider to be The Challenge.

Also, I think he met your challenge beautifully as well. I wasn't all that emotionally involved with the film, and that bugged me. But Nolan spent the entire time showing me wonderful things I had never experienced before. I really appreciate that these days.

I think Devin Faraci at CHUD really hit the nail on the head. This is the best explanation of Inception I've seen yet. The entire story is a dream, even the parts you think are real: http://bit.ly/8Z1SHZ

I agree that Inception is really part of The Heist genre and there is nothing really new here. If he had gone all out and created the dreamlike film you are all talking about it would appeal to us, the film nerds who spend a lot of time thinking about movies, but not to a mass audience. To paraphrase Woody Allen in Manhattan, lets face it Nolan wants to sell some tickets here.

I enjoyed this film while it was un-spooling because it presented a puzzle and I found it interesting to see how they unraveled and solved it within the rules setup in Nolan's universe and dare I say it, it did so with some intelligence. Did it represent the definitive dream-like state that we all experience...no. But should it? I don't know about you but sometimes my dreams make no sense at all and is that what we want to see in a film? I'm not sure if a big budget summer movie is the place to explore the definitive dream state.

I haven't read through all of these comments just yet, so I may be repeating someone here, but...am I the only person in the world who seems to have quite explicitly literal-minded dreams? Granted, I don't remember my dreams terribly often, but when I do, they oftentimes seem to be a very straightforward and logical progression of events. They may be about very strange things or unusual characters, yes, but they tend to follow a pretty convincing internal logic, and I can generally recall the narrative clarity of them pretty well. Inception did not seem to be too far distant from the kinds of things I have dreamed in the past. Truthfully, I can't actually remember any single dream I've ever had looking like something out of David Lynch or Luis Bunuel or Terry Gilliam. That's part of the reason I love those filmmakers - their dream worlds are so fundamentally different than mine. I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Inception for not closely resembling YOUR dreams, when it is entirely possible that it does closely resemble someone else's. Is there, in fact, a "proper" way to go about dealing with the dream world cinematically? I'm not so sure.

Does no one get that the whole point of the movie was to constrict the dreams so that they were able to extract, or in this case plant the information. You could not have the Mark realize it was a dream or it obviously wouldn't work. The architect created a world that seemed so real so that the mark literally thought he wasn't dreaming but was in fact awake and going about his daily stuff. This isn't supposed to be some kind of fantastical movie of imagination. the whole point is to limit that so the crew can do their jobs.

The best movie I ever saw that I thought accurately depicted the dream state is "Waking Life." The movie is made using a technique called rotoscope animation, in which a team of artists take a live-action scene and draw over every frame. In "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" it was used to insert cartoon characters into a live-action film. But in "Waking Life" the whole shot is drawn over, using the live-action footage as a trace. Everything shakes, twists, and morphs in a free-form soup of color, choosing only to focus on whatever the dreamer is focusing on. Uncanny depth perception is bestowed and then ripped away from the audience as the images on the screen twist on a whim. But there's always just enough stability in the image to understand what's going on, and why. "Waking Life" delves into the concept of shared dreaming and lucid dreams, as well as many other topics, but this is a movie that's more about the experience than any one idea.

A straight, live-action movie like "Inception" cannot hope to approach an image that is truly evocative of a dream state. Nolan simply chose not to try. I choose to believe that the nature of "Inception"'s dreams are simply a consequence of the sci-fi technology that allows shared dreaming to happen. And it makes sense that in a world where people can "construct" dreams, that they would logically have to follow a set of rules for the dream world to have any stability. If the dreams were as lawless as what was represented in "Waking Life", the story that Nolan wanted to tell couldn't happen.

Having accepted this movie's version of dreaming (which is consistent throughout the whole movie) I was able to enjoy the action and the style. After all, what good is a science-fiction film if you can't accept its premise?

But in all seriousness folks, how well does Levitt rock those three-piece suits?

Another line of thinking after sleeping on it. I remember Jim talking about "open" drama earlier this year with The White Ribbon; how would compare Nolan's "ambiguous"/"open" ending in Inception to what Michael Haneke does in White Ribbon or Cache?

Doesn't he, too, graft his ideas/themes onto a "macgufffin" story and then throw it away because it doesn't matter because what he's really interested in is the idea of Cobb dealing with his guilt/grief/past (not unlike Georges in Cache)?

I think Nolan suggests the idea of an "ending" where Haneke doesn't, but the approach is similar isn't it?

Nolan says something in a supplement on the Insomnia DVD that sounds not unlike Haneke:
"It's not enough to just construct a simple scenario and then resolve it. In some ways it's as valid or more valid to raise difficult questions and acknowledge that they're not easy to answer; and that you can't as a filmmaker just wrap things up neatly and say well this is the solution to these things. The type of stories I'm interested in telling do have a slightly more messy approach to them in a way, a slightly more unsettling approach perhaps."

I've seen this arguement in several reviews of "Inception." While there is a literal truth to it, arguing this is a bit of a cheat. I've heard people complain about the "hard line" concept in "The Matrix." Why did the characters who traveled into the Matrix need to use hard line phones to return from it, especially considering that anything that exists within the Matrix, including those phones, doesn't exist. Makes logical sense, but it's only fair to accept it as a necessary story component. If the characters in "The Matrix" didn't require obscure and hard to find exits, if they could just beam themselves out on a whim when they got into trouble, the tension from the movie would drop to zero.

Now, consider "Inception" and the arguement that what it displays in terms of dreams is too literal. Yes, this is true. I did find it funny that the mind's "security" resorted to the old stand-by of automatic weapons, and people's secrets were literally locked away in safes and vaults. But think about the alternative. Jim, you mention the quality of dreams where everything shifts and nothing is static. Remember "Waking Life?" To me, that's the closest to the true experience of a dream I've seen in the movies, and probably along the lines of what critics of "Inception" were looking for in terms of how Christopher Nolan painted his dreamscape. But there's a problem hardwired into that consideration- "Waking Life" had no real story narrative to follow. It was a movie to be experienced, not followed. Could you imagine hanging a plot like "Inception" (not the most intricate plot ever devised, but it has more than its share of twists and details and sub-details) and present it through the lens of a true dream? Where scenery, people, and intentions change every few moments? By definition, the entire plot would have to change at random and it would have to turn to a completely different movie on a whim. The literalness is not completely true to the experience of dreams, I'll give you that, but what I think Nolan did was give a fair compromise between the elusive feeling of a dream and still retaining a coherence that allowed a more intricate plot. Arguing otherwise is making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Pinnochio does a good job of getting into the subconscious of males, especially with the donkey scene.

Indeed, Stephen, what I find odd about the complaint that the film is too literal in its representation of dream architecture is how literal an interpretation that is of the film itself. I don't think Nolan ever had any intention of reproducing an actual dream state. He wants to suggest that sense of normalcy that can suddenly be thrown off balance when we are asleep. Even if the film intended a truer representation of dream imagery, we're so used to films presenting dreams as surreality in its most visually direct form (Dali-like bleeding clocks, smoke and mirrors and distortion) that we've forgotten how mundane dreaming can be, until we fall, or we are attacked without reason, or we can't escape a circular pattern. Further, these are manufactured dreams. That is the point. The "dreams" are designed to be navigable in a rational manner by those who are aware of its construction. Sure, this isn't a natural dream-state, but requiring that Nolan come up with a different term for the experience is an awfully petty complaint. The film isn't about dreaming as we experience it every night, it is about the manipulation of the rational and emotional sides of the mind through the unconscious. I find Jim's disappointment has less to do with any failures on the film's part, and more to do with misplaced expectations (and, dare I say, his tendency to react negatively against hype and popularity).

It just seems to me that you're missing the point here... These characters aren't just entering other people's dreams for fun, they're doing it for specific purposes. That's the whole purpose of having an architect. They need to create a dream world that the dreamer will believe is a real world. That's why there are no unicorns or giant tap-dancing ants. The mark needs to believe they're not dreaming, therefore the dream world needs to be very very similar to the dream world. How did so many of your commenters miss that?

Invention is surely one of many most effective Science Fiction films has been ever in your life manufactured and it creates you to take into account most with the scenes and wait around to observe what can take place in future. Science fictions are supposed to get created this way. It isn't enjoyable to check out a dvd which has lots of confusing components, and ends devoid of any conclusions; nonetheless, in Creation, the tale is informed particularly clear with the starting and also the target audience will enjoy the rest of your motion picture, quite a few questions may likely pop up, but there are actually answers for all. After the motion picture, some many people would can come out declaring "I am in reality baffled now!” clearly, they were being spending NO attentions through the dvd. It really is obviously understandable and very fun being watched. The Storyline is extremely exciting and has its uniqueness, you know what's the strategy but you can't wait around to discover what's about to occur!!!! Christopher Nolan has directed very very well and it really is single his best shows. Acting is outstanding and they've gathered superb casts, Leonardo Dicaprio has done a ft fabulous job as usually and May be an Oscar nominee. And last but not the lowest, the visuals in Inception is outstanding! Wonderful visual side effects and exciting ways of displaying issues have been employed in this movie. In all round, this really is one of several best science fictions videos, one of several most excellent films of Christopher Nolan and Leonardo Dicaprio. Unquestionably worth to become viewed and hope you appreciate it.

We've gotten for the stage in which a motion picture that wanders remotely off the reservation stuns and wows us and leads us to feel it happens to be outstanding. "Inception" is not a terrible tv show. It's definitely much better than anything at all else Hollywood has to offer this yr. Neither, on the other hand, is it awesome.

The Taoist text known since the Chuang Tzu asks how we know we aren't in the aspiration when we walk up from the goal. Inception leaves you asking the very same question. It makes you query "reality", which can be where the similarity with all the Matrix lies. Invention subtly insinuates that lifestyle is illusionary, or synonymous with what Indian philosophy refers to as "Maya." To be able to bring this topic closer to home, the movie adroitly exposes the self-created, phantasmal and haunting character of emotional attachments, which is why we're reminded of Solaris when seeing Creation. Taken like a full, these movies invite us to take into consideration the nature of our mind and its desperate will want for making feeling out of your insecurity and instability that defines human existence. Considering that these give rise to yearnings, hopes and expectations, lifestyle can also be filled with discomfort, which can be why there is a Buddhist message the following too.

I imagined the acting was stiff, along with the visuals were definitely a bit bleak. The cinema is way too very long, and it can be no Matrix that is for certain. I understood the principle and all, but it was a tad as well long winded for my taste. I assumed Ellen Site was beneficial. Would I suggest this movie flick? No! Save it for a rental. It is like a Vanilla Sky meets the Matrix with much less breathtaking visuals. Also, you need to be a thinker. If you are not...undeniably skip this a single. 8 people walked out with the displaying we went to. I wouldn't look at it once again!

All that mentioned, it truly is certainly refreshing to observe a movie not determined by a comic book, not according to an aged television demonstrate, and not just a remake that never needed for being produced inside the primary location. It's it, folks, the only one blockbuster this summer that are going to be worth the cash you set down for it.

Creation is a brilliant, beautiful motion picture for two hours, but on this setup for a sequel, the target audience, within your stop, has seasoned little and knows absolutely nothing of any certainty. Consider it: Nothing.

I've read the user-reviews that rated it C, D or F and concluded that they were definitely rather young or not wise enough to follow the storyline to achieve any satisfaction. These are perhaps the very same viewers that gave the Eclipse series motion pictures high ratings.

Christopher Nolan is one of the couple of directors/writers (Scorcese, Spielberg, Eastwood) who has the gift of regularly making great motion pictures. He is just like a Picasso and churns out masterpieces. A number of directors get lucky for 1 show and fail to duplicate their achievement. For Creation, Nolan masterfully engages his target audience as he builds up the account to intrigue you by means of the rather finish whilst injecting activity scenes and visible effects to excite you.

Fine..
.so complete it was a superb tv show...inside a way...The tale was seriously confusing and hard to catch on to..however the visible outcomes have been awesome! The acting (particularly by Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page) was seriously superior too..but I still didn't seriously realize what was planning on. I got the fundamentals of it though. And I consider loads of many people will agree with me.

Ok I'm sick from the praise with the flick. Okay I have heard a ton of arguments ranging out of your cinema tends to make you presume and is graphic breathtaking, and has great particular results. My response for you is so what. Just due to the fact that a dvd is diverse, has incredible particular effects, and makes you imagine does not

This is certainly the most unique dvd movie to take place all around given that the Matrix but with far better acting and direction. With all the sequels and remakes, it's a fresh tv show not for being missed. Disregard THE Bad Assessments if you happen to think about yourself intelligent.

Hello,

Upon first reading, I thought "What an excellent point!" I love your list of films that DO portray dreams more accurately.

However, you must remember that all the dreams shown in the film were deliberately "architect-ed" in such a way as to make the dreamer believe ze was in real life. The first dream sequence showed what happens when an architect does a poor job--the dreamer realizes ze is dreaming.

The reason dreams are like reality is so reality can be more like a dream; the subject of the dream might not notice anything amiss about the reality-bending non sequitur landscape but the audience most certainly would.

And that's important because we're meant to wonder what is and isn't real along with Cobb. In the first scene he informs us an idea is like a virus. Cobb convinced Mal that reality was false, an idea that came back to infect him and ultimately us as an audience.

That's the heart of Inception. The search for reality on any number of levels (Was Fischer's catharsis real? How about Cobbs'?).

If we were treated to two sharply contrasting worlds - the mundane and the fantastic - then we as the audience would never question whether we were sleeping too.

I was thinking that the movie was hardly about the nature of dreams as it was about the nature of reality, and how we reconcile ourselves in our dreams.

Nolan seems to have portrayed the characters as "heroes" in the Campbellian sense, somehow being able to perform all actions at all times in every circumstance, constantly negotiating their journey in mythological and epic terms (ie "What is reality?). This makes more sense when you consider all artists as portraying themselves as the 'hero' through music, illustration, etc. Mythology evades all disciplines and all forms of communication.

I do agree with you that the movie felt self-contained, but that's actually why I liked it, the same as enjoying a good pop song; something that for a brief moment doesn't necessarily define a condition, but serves as a looking glass or portal into the condition itself, the 'ecstatic experience.'

Thanks for your comments Jim. I finally had the chance to see the film today with great anticipation but I left the theatre feeling rather empty. I believe Nolan is a clever filmmaker and there is excellent craftsmanship in his work but there are always elemental flaws that I cannot accept such as over exposition, sentimentality, continuity errors (see joseph gordon levitt's earphones inexplicably appear and disappear during the van's fall in the river) lack of movement and rhythm, etc. The dreams projected in this story are neatly tied without divulging in any sort of wild dream escapism. The films you mentioned are fantastic but I would also suggest that Bergman's Wild Strawberries and for a wild ride in a person's subconscious Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich (malkovich, malkovich!)

Isn't it a little absurd to claim what is "realistic" within the context of dreams? "Oh...but I'VE never dreamed like THAT!" Nolan is the grand 'architect' here and I think he's done an exceptional job--better than any moviemaker up to this point--to physically portray some of the most metaphysical ideas we encounter everyday. A movie like "Eternal Sunshine" pokes at these ideas from a protected, hipster vantage point. "Inception" dives in--unafraid of criticism--and the result is a brilliantly layered film that can even be enjoyed by the mainstream.

Sadly Mr. Emerson you have really missed the mark with this film. Your doing exactly what Nolan anticipated happening, by getting annoyed at not accurately representing this or that and submitting itself to literal, clichéd action/heist thrillers. The ending of the film provides the key tongue-in-cheek caveat of the entire film. Namely, do not get too worked up about an internal logic. Nolan is not posing to be anything other than providing entertainment, exploring a concept that has fascinated him. I feel in analysing the literacy of Nolan's crafting of the narrative, you yourself, have taken the film all too literally. A point made in case in the final shot of the film ;).

The movie is entertaining and clever but like the author of this article said, the fabric of dreams in Inception isn't authentic at all. It's an action/heist flick in disguise. You can't make anything you want into a dream, because dreams still have an internal logic and certain archetypal content that have been explored by so many sientists and artists. For instance, "sex" is one of the main and recurring themes of unconscious wish-fulfullment. Did anyone notice the absence of "sex" from Inception? Out of so many dreams and dream levels there's not one erotic scene. So whether they get to control and share dreams in the future why isn't there any erotic imagery? The future in Nolan's vision is so prude that they get to eradicate sexual libido from dreams?!

Nolan is fast becoming the new Ridley Scott, and after an early promise ("Following" and "Memento"--just like Ridley Scott's exciting earlier films "The Duellists", "Alien", "Bladerunner" and "Legend") he's become a big budget hollywood director and he's gonna continue to make consumable, grandiose epic movies.

Yup... it's totally La Jatee. Scientists that tapped into his memory/dreams to see his past and his romance and sorrow. The story of La Jatee, for those who've seen it, is very formulaic, and relies on it's own steam to pull the story through-- partly because its comprised almost entirely of still images, but also it's a short movie that requires a lot of explanation through the narrator about traveling into this man's head. We see his past, his romance with a woman, and his death.

Inception is very similar in it that the characters are also semi-narrating the plot for the audience (my mother still doesn't quite get the movie which surprises me) For me, the reason of all the formula has something to do with the fact that depicting, in art, what the true inside of a person's mind looks and feels like is impossible. It's like trying to picture what death might feel like. Adding an understandable guide for the sake of a plot like Nolan has given Inception seems very reasonable here. I disagree with the writer of this article on that respect.