Thanks, I Hate It: Inception

"You've got to dream a little bigger, darling," says Tom Hardy's character to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's as, pinned down in a gun battle with faceless dream goons, Hardy pulls a grenade launcher out of nowhere. Aside from its folding cityscapes and the storm-wracked ruins it uses to represent the psychological bedrock of human dreaming, this is the closest Christopher Nolan's Inception gets to actually depicting something that would happen in a dream. The movie's failure of imagination is jaw-dropping, a tour de force of big boy action figure coolness fantasies liberally dunked in gray paint.

Inception is a fine heist movie. The quirks of its world are not without charm. But why set it in the landscape of the human mind at all if you have nothing to say about what makes that mind unique? Why bring the unlimited creative and psychologically exploratory nature of the dreaming consciousness into play if you aren't going to use it, if your entire film is drab cityscapes, hotel lobbies, and mountain compounds? It's a fundamental flaw so egregious that it poisons everything about the entire production, which by itself is unremarkable but inoffensive, the kind of thing you might turn on at a party or when you're sick. 

Nor is the "are they still in the dream?" nonsense successful at providing any kind of psychological meat to chew on. It's an exterior problem for a movie manifestly about the emotional interior. Why should we care if they're awake or dreaming? The idea of being trapped for eons in slowed-down dream time is frightening, I suppose, but the characters are largely opaque, their psyches hidden from us and unexplored. Why should we care if they get stuck? After all, they're trying to help a rich guy compete in international business. It's not like the emotional stakes of the plot are particularly high.

Watching Nolan delve again and again into a limitless story concept and produce, like, a humvee, or a handgun, or a rotating hallway is one of the most deadening things I've experienced in a theater. It reminds me of when Morpheus takes Neo to the digital armory in The Matrix and I realized "Ah, guns. That's what kind of movie this is." If you're going to strike the locks off your screenplay its on you to throw its doors open. Instead, we got Inception, a movie for 17-year-olds who find James Bond too cerebral.