Inception
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Thom Berenger, Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite
written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Rating: ◊◊◊◊◊
This is a story about industrial espionage by stealing trade secrets from people’s dreams. It was another take on the What is real? theme. I was really bored. So bored that I often fast forwarded through parts of it just to escape the gratuitous piling of one level of unreality atop another - dreams within dreams within dreams. Following the story was tedious (not difficult). It recalled The Matrix (1999) movie: nothing is real. This world is not real. It’s just a dream, and everyone is dreaming. Communal participation in the dream endows it with a convincingly authentic appearance. It’s such sophomore crap. I’m not against the notion of exploring reality as a dream construction. What is real? and How do we know? are important questions. I just wish the story had been developed a lot better. There is a lot of great talent here and it should have been better. It also recalled the Michael Douglas / Sean Penn movie The Game (1997), which I watched years ago and never reviewed because it was so weird that I couldn’t figure out how to write about it. Again, it was the What is real? theme.
The musical score is really great. It’s big, grand, expanding. It deserved a better story than this.