The wicked cool idea of course is that Nolan's team of hi-tech mind engineers are able to create and plant within an unsuspecting target's consciousness a dream architecture which they can then inhabit along with the target. The goal is to learn things about the target or otherwise manipulate them by planting ideas in their mind during the controlled dream. The latter a process called inception.
The problem with Inception as a movie, the thing that makes it labored and ultimately unsuccessful as a film is that it has the whole dream thing backwards. Dreams are primarily emotional in nature. The brain summons unresolved or unhappily resolved emotional situations to review and provides a visual forum to play them out in, with both the narrative and the stage being created on the fly. Sometimes the feelings get ahead of the images and the images shift abruptly in an attempt to compensate. Sometimes the imagery gets out in front of the feelings and the feelings shift gears. All this shifting around can be jarring and is one of the reasons dreams are so difficult to remember. While its been proven that you can 'direct' your dreaming; that is, guide your mind into its initial dream state once you fall asleep, fact is that there's no way to dictate how long this directed dream will hold together. When the mind wishes to move on to something else it just does.
In his film Nolan proposes a kind of directed dreaming on steroids. One where you can not only instruct the mind where to go when you fall asleep, but one where the visual context is also provided down to the last rivet as well as the ability to force the dreamer to stay within the provided dream context until something wakes them up. How do you impose such a rigid and vivid architecture on the mind and force it to play out? How do you prevent the mind from tiring of the dream you've presented it and simply moving on to something else? To his credit Nolan tries to address this issue and his answer is a kind of white blood cell response: when the mind detects the presence of "others" who shouldn't be there it attacks them and the dream falls apart (literally).
Okay Mr Nolan. Lets say for a moment that I simply accept your character's ability to provide the brain with a set of pre-defined dream parameters, as well as the ability to force the dreamer to stay within the dream of your choosing, as well as your explanation of what happens should the mind of the dreamer rebel, I'm still left with the nagging fact that your dreams simply don't look or, more importantly, feel like dreams. Not at all. Not a bit. Not 1%. Nada. Just because I've accepted (for the sake of argument here) that you can provide the contextual framework for someone else's dream it doesn't mean you're off the hook regarding the look and feel of said dream world. Even leaving aside the fact that dreams occur from a first person POV and Inception slavishly maintains its third person perspective throughout, dreams are not the clean, static visual experiences depicted here; even the most vivid ones. If a dream is vivid its because the feelings it brought up were spot on. A place 'felt' right. The feelings stirred up by the presence of a lost loved one were exactly the same feelings the dreamer used to experience in that person's presence, and so on. The visual context is window dressing. A late loved one may appear with an entirely nebulous face that tells me little about who I'm talking to, but the feelings surrounding this apparition tell me without a doubt who it is. In Inception Nolan has it backwards. All the attention goes into the visuals, which look plenty expensive but which in reality have only a secondary connection to the experience of dreaming.
Emotions are how dreams maintain their stability, not visuals. A hotel can go through 20 or 30 different looks in a dream and still remain the same hotel as long as it feels like the same hotel. So Nolan's insistence on the rigid visual architecture as the glue that holds the whole mess together is meaningless since it's the feelings not the visual details of place that maintain dream continuity. To be sure there are moments sprinkled within the film where the narrative makes mention of the importance of feelings but these seem mere afterthoughts or nods to a conceptual truth the film maker seems unable to address.
Because of this I believe it's pointless to go into detail about the movie, it's plot, it's characters, the acting etc. It fails from the start by addressing its fundamental conceptual premise in an upside down fashion so everything else is just expensive furniture going down with the Titanic.
All of this may seem like just so much Christopher Nolan bashing to some but I'm not the one that set the table here, he is. He decided he was going to take $200 million and bring his big dream idea to the silver screen. While the film made some $800 million around the world my guess is that if it were the product of some relatively unknown director instead of the latest "visionary" effort by the hot director du jour the box office would have been tepid at best and it would have been met with a chorus of reviews that commented on it as a kind of noble failure, which is exactly what it is.
I give Nolan credit for trying, though. At least someone out there is willing to attempt to find something interesting to do with the new technology. Unfortunately he chose perhaps the most difficult landscape to capture convincingly as the stage for his narrative and his idea either wasn't very well thought out or was taken over early on in the process by studio types who wanted to prevent him from creating a David Lynch type product that would be hard to mass market. As a result what we wind up with is a series of well crafted cinematic images that purport to depict the emotion-based inner world but do so in a cold, emotionally neutral manner that left me walking out of the theater thinking not about lofty questions of reality and inner-world conflict but about whether I was going to go straight home or pick up something to eat first.
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