Inception

I just watched Inception (I know, so last year) and this post will include spoilers.

Maybe I just expected too much from it and maybe I had heard enough little spoilers that it wasn't as surprising as it would have been in the theater. But I wasn't that impressed. I actually hope that there is something I missed that makes it awesome.

-My biggest complaint was that I didn't care about any of the characters. No one had enough of a back story or connections to others to care about them. I don't expect every movie to be Serenity, but even the Matrix with its awkward dialog was able to give viewers a reason to care about nearly every major character. Same with Memento where the main character doesn't even know his own story.

-One of the main attractions was a mind bending journey through levels of dreams. But once they said they can have dreams in dreams, everything past that seemed reasonably straight forward. I thought Memento was awesome so I can be impressed by Nolan's mind bending style. They linearly dropped from one dream level to the next then back up. Did I miss the bendy part? Also when a show/movie ends with someone waking up from one dream to find themselves in another it is cliche. So why is a whole movie about multilevel dreams ground breaking? What would have been awesome is if they split off on different dream paths. Then they could create ways to cut between the different dream worlds, or even create dream circles where they go from one level to the next and end up at the first one. Then they'd have to deal with dropping back out of that circle. And it would be truly difficult to sort out if you'd made your way back out of all the dreams. Ok, I guess it is telling that I'm not impressed by a linked list and I think the movie would be improved by exploring some of the more difficult problems with complicated linked lists. Oh, or what if there are two groups in shared dreams and then they are connected together and the dreams have to some how merge and then people could move between the two group dreams. I was going to say that this could have been a cool dollhouse like TV show, but dollhouse actually touched on quite a bit of this already.

-Along the lines of the previous point another attraction was the mystery ending. But I don't really see the mystery. There was no point I saw where it seemed like he could have gotten stuck in a dream. I figured that the reason we didn't see the top stop spinning is that the main character decided he didn't care, then reading Nolan's quotation in wikipedia it seems he agrees. The only point that made me think it was a dream is that the Grandpa was back in America instead of in Paris, which seemed more like over editing than a hint that he was stuck in a dream world.

-I read something that mentioned that the movie doesn't really get dreams right, but that's ok, because it is almost impossible to create a reasonable movie that accounts for the full weirdness of dreams. But I would have appreciated a little more attention paid to the true weirdness of dreams. And if I spend 50 years in a dream world where I can build whatever I want, there are going to be some way crazier architecture. One of the only movies/tv episodes I've seen that comes anywhere close to getting the strangeness of dreams right is the last episode of season 4 of Buffy and now that I think about it, it is a shared dream between several people and involves multiple levels of dreaming (and it is Whedon so viewers care about the characters). How's that for throwing down the gauntlet, I'm claiming that an episode of Buffy is a better shared multilevel dream story than Inception. Hm, really didn't mean to make this a post about how everything Whedon has ever done is better than this movie.

-They spent some time training the architect. The scenes were cool and the character was important to the story. But I thought they should have showed off those skills she learned during the mission. Show us how the city or hotel folds in on itself. Or have her make some adjustments on the fly. Otherwise those training scenes just seem like a moment to play with visual effects and provide an excuse for involving the character.

-There were some reasonably cool action scenes, but nothing that the Matrix trilogy didn't do better years ago. And in the ice scene it wasn't just that I didn't care about the characters, I could hardly tell who was who.

-Not only didn't I care about the characters, I also didn't care about the mission. They spent a whole sentence establishing why planting the idea would be a good thing, given to us by the guy the main character just tried to steal from.

Ok, now what is it that I'm missing that everyone else liked so much and found so mind bending and discussion inspiring? Is this a Big Lebowski where a second viewing magically transforms the film? Or did other scifi fans have the same, ho hum, reaction that I did? Have years of Philip K Dick inspired stories caused an immunity to the trippiness of dream and reality questioning tales?