Inception

2010 cerebral action movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Loosely based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, this involves Leonardo Dicaprio busting into people's dreams to steal their ideas. It's a confusing job, but somebody's got to do it. The work's cost him. His wife's dead, and for various reasons, he can't return to the United States and be with his children. An Asian guy offers him a job, but instead of the extraction he's used to performing, he's given the task of planting an idea in a guy's brain. That's called inception. He gathers together a team and meticulously plans this reverse heist. It won't be easy, and there will be a lot of explosions.

While watching this movie, I fell asleep and had my own tri-level dream. I don't remember my dream details often, but I know this one had something to do with trying to warn a dog that my friend Don's hot older sister who liked The Doors had put dynamite under his bowl. Then Lionel Richie broke into my dream and sang that "I had a dream; I had an awesome dream" song, but I couldn't pay attention to lyrics because his pants were too bright. Suddenly, I'm shooting at gypsies. Blam blam blam blam! Explosion! It was a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within Christopher Nolan's jism. And Shooby Leboof (he's in all of my dreams) taps me on the shoulder and says that we've only got thirteen third level dream days remaining before we'll have to clean up dog guts from the first level dream. I had enough of that sort of thing on my honeymoon, so Shooby and I walk arm in arm so that we can push my cousin off a ladder so that he can pop balloons in close proximity to our faces. When I woke up, Roger Ebert was standing by my bed (this is not unusual lately) calling me a genius. And he knew the lyrics to that Lionel Richie song, but he couldn't sing them.

The general idea behind this movie is pretty cool, and the special effects are dazzling. But all that razzle-dazzle is really just hiding the fact that this is a big, dumb action movie covered in layers and layers of intellectual mumbo-jumbo. It's a simple story packed in multicolored packing peanuts, surrounded by shimmering baubles, and scrambled by the world's most expensive spatula. It's not nearly as masturbatory as the worst parts of the Matrix movies, but it has more than a little bit in common with them. After the intriguing premise and the rules of the movie unfold with Dicarprio explaining things to that girl from Juno, you get a solid hour and fifteen minutes or so of car chases, shoot 'em ups, and those aforementioned 'splosions. I didn't just have a headache because I already developed a headache from trying to think too much. It was a double headache, a headache that folded over on top of itself like the city in that dream. Boredom set in. I give credit to Nolan for coming up with a very original idea and for allowing the story to unfold in an interesting way. The performances are fine, maybe better than you'd expect from a movie with more special effects than non-special ones. It's really a pretty good movie, but it could have been a whole lot shorter. I had heard that the ending is ambiguous, but it seemed self explanatory to me. I think the fact that I don't really care to think about it all that much shows my true feelings about Inception.