so, yeah, inception.

[sophiaserpentia]

cowgrrl and I went to see "Inception" on Sunday. It's fun in a sort of video-game-y way but on the whole we were underwhelmed.

Basically, it's a caper movie. The protagonist is Cobb, who describes himself as the best in the world at stealing secrets from people's brains while they sleep. If he's the best then it must be a field full of people who really suck, because Cobb's emotional baggage comes along and majorly screws things up every single time.

The problem seems to be that Christopher Nolan couldn't decide, ultimately, whether he wanted to make a movie about a caper being pulled off in a dreamworld -- a genre of movie that is typically very light emotionally -- or a movie about how the protagonist attempts to make peace with his emotional traumas.

The basic premise is kind of neat, but I felt it was kind of remarkable how little it felt like things were happening in dreams. There are some neat effects with geometry and gravity but that's where any purported 'dreaminess' ends. When a threat arises, no one ever deals with it in a dreamlike way; it's all car chases and guns and explosions. (Like one reviewer said, maybe Chris Nolan's dreams are directed by Michael Bay.) And then the movie jumps the shark (I almost laughed out loud) when halfway through it's announced that this time, if you die in the dream you don't wake up, but get sucked down into a limbo-like dream state where 50 years or even infinite amounts of time could pass before the sedative wears off and you wake up. Sorry, I couldn't buy it, not even in a cinematic-suspension-of-disbelief way.

I kept expecting the movie to go all Philip-K.-Dick-ian and have it turn out that Cobb was the one who was being played in one long dream sequence. Nope. This underscores the frustration of being a science fiction fan who sometimes watches movies; it's rare for a movie to match the conceptual ingenuity of even the average SF novel.

Maybe most people *do* dream like this and I'm the odd exception here. Most of my dreams vary from the exceedingly mundane to the stark raving weird and non-linear, to the very occasional epic story (which means, I guess, any dream lasting more than ten or fifteen minutes of subjective time). The only movie I've ever seen which felt like it was happening in actual dreams was "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Even "Dreamscape" felt more like it took place in dreams than this movie.