Inception: The Matrix Several Years Later

I've never been able to enjoy movies that are hyped up, as long as they are. Even though I like Leo DiCaprio as an actor in movies like Blood Diamond or The Aviator, I couldn't really like this one. I tried, believe me but I couldn't. It's a spectacle. Inception is like the Matrix, only if the Matrix was less about eastern philosophy and more about robots. It's like Neuromancer with too much time spent tripping around other people's bodies cross-gender or not. It's no fun, for me. So what's so wrong about Inception. 


I'm going to try to be short here, but mostly I didn't enjoy the acting one bit. Everyone in the movie seemed poorly motivated, with the character equivalent of a three minute back-story. Except for the main character, who's constantly overshadowing some dark issues that he's had in his past. People run around in other people's dreams, in their own dreams, it's the Matrix all over, only this time the platform is not a virtual environment created by super-intelligent robots, but the platform could be anybody's subconscious.

Think for a second, what a scary place that would be for most people. It makes it even harder to believe characters whose innermost dreams and hallucinations have nearly as much coherence as everyday life. Dreams are usually symbolic and convoluted sets of unrelated and completely irrational events and sensations and the suspension of disbelief is based on chemicals that stop us from critically assessing why are we seeing cars float in mid air, missing one tire and inside-out. It doesn't help that it's practically impossible for two people to experience the same hallucination. But enough on how Inception could or could not work in the real world.

Finally, the plot is as straightforward and unexciting as watching Memento the second time around, only you only need about half an hour to figure out that everything could and probably is a dream, and stop caring about weather or not it is. There was a slight interest for me, when it turned out that with every level of dream you go into (I'm not even going to talk about the 'levels' of dreams within dreams) you experience time faster, which means that compared to normal time you're getting more sensations per minute, which is Einstein's Special Relativity applied to the biochemistry of sleeping. At least if you forget for a second how absurd it would be to think that you could enjoy a lifetime spent within a dream (Vanilla Sky anyone?), you could probably imagine enjoying living for hundreds or thousands of years.

Later the plot turns into an action movie and much like in the Matrix, it's a bid for our characters to do some work in the dream world, before they're 'disconnected' or die of cerebral overheating, or something else. But it's not the Matrix and that's my whole issue with it.