Inception is an extremely fatiguing and boring movie. My wife was falling asleep, and that is saying something because the last two hours of the film is nothing but car chases, gun fire, explosions, people fighting in zero gravity, buildings and mountainsides collapsing, and general mayhem. It’s one of these movies where it doesn’t take too long for the filmmakers to turn the dial to 10 and leave it there for the rest of the movie. How can you have every second of two hours treated as if it is the climax of the movie? It just doesn’t work. I felt like my brain had been reduced to scrambled eggs after watching this film.

Inception does not really have a story. It has a story idea. The plot and characters are laid out very much like a comic book. The set up is really quite poor. The movie can’t be bothered to tell you anything about any of these people, the time we’re in, how the field of dream espionage got started and what state of development it’s currently in, how Leo and his co-workers got into this business, what the fuck Michael Cain actually does at that stuffy university (does he really train dream architects? Can you major in that?), or anything that would have provided some badly needed texture to this mess. The “training” of Ellen Page is done in a perfunctory and uninteresting way – for example, the maze test scene is just pure crap. The Japanese guy who hires them is straight out of a comic book, as is the Chemist from Mumbai.  There is a grand tradition in movies of “assembling the team,” but this film treats it as an after-thought, and is mainly interested in making everybody look cool. All the details are ignored, left to the viewer, as it were. As a result, you really don’t care about any of them because you don’t know them. They’re all pretty much cardboard cutouts.

This film could have been approached very differently. There was no reason for the dreams to be so militarized. This choice was simply the easy way out for the filmmakers, because everyone knows people are in love with military paraphernalia and scenes of gun violence. If they had approached the dream sequences totally in terms of a cloak-and-dagger, irrational, absurdest tableaux the film would have been leagues more interesting, suspenseful, and watchable. It certainly would have made more sense (I don’t know about you, but my dreams aren’t populated with raging armies!) But this would have required the filmmakers to create a real, fleshed-out story and actually write dialog, and God knows we can’t have any of that in a summer blockbuster! Instead, we are subjected to hours of poorly-filmed modern warfare combat, done in such a way that you can’t really tell who’s fighting who, who’s getting shot, or generally what the fuck is going on. All you know is that the main characters are probably not going to take any hits in all this, so you unconsciously tune out the action, hence the falling asleep or feeling like your brain is frying on a red-hot skillet.

I have to hand it to Leonardo Dicaprio. The guy can really sell any shit that he gets involved in. He just has this certain energy that captivates you whether or not the material is captivating. He did it in Shutter Island and he does it here. Compare his performance to how badly all the other actors struggle to make this crap work. Joseph Gordon Levitt (a personal favorite of mine) is for some reason doing a Keanu Reeves impersonation, complete with the artificially low-pitch voice and paralyzed facial muscles. The guy playing the target of the team’s inception attack looks completely lost – he could be in a TV sit-calm about lawyers. The others are not even worth commenting on, they are so one-dimensional.

Then there is Ellen Page. I’ve said this before on these pages, but I will say it again. I really want to like Ellen Page, mainly because she has such a fantastic porcelain doll look about her and she has such a great voice. But her delivery of lines and her physical acting always strikes me as atrocious. Imagine what Julia Stiles could have done with this role, for example, even with the crappy dialog! I joke that Meryl Streep has only 12 ways she delivers lines. Well, Ellen Page has ONE way she delivers lines, regardless of what scene she is in: lying on a bed, falling off a cliff, buying things in a store, in a high speed chase, talking with her dad, with a gun to her head, sitting in a classroom, it doesn’t matter. It always sounds the same. And sometimes her physical acting is so out of sync with the scene she is playing it’s jarring, like when she says to Leo “and then you steal it,” and she makes this little nonchalant pointing motion from her hip, reminiscent of stuff you see on a middle school playground (the scene is in one of the trailers, if you want to check it out.) Luckily, she is attached to Leo at the hip for the entire movie, and he props her up. It’s really interesting to watch in their dialog how his counter-delivery actually rescues her delivery on a regular basis.

This film reminded me a lot of 2012, another film with the dial on 10 the entire time, with the predictable result that you could care less what happens the entire time. Of course 2012 at least had John Cusack, who is so warm and winning it immediately elevates the quality of anything he is in by at least a notch. It also had a few laughs, where as Inception has none.

As far as the “science” of Inception goes, the filmmakers are clearly not sweating it. They just toss these quarter-baked ideas out there as placeholders and expect the audience to swallow. My wife pointed out that their treatment of these details was similar to Hot Tub Time Machine, a film in which they likewise make up the science as they go along, and don’t even bat an eye at glaring problems and inconsistencies (like how those guys would not remember their lives after returning to the present, and so on and so forth.) But that was Hot Tub Time Machine!, a completely ridiculous farce which exists only to mock the 1980s and provide a stage for the teenage foulness of the characters. In Inception, the poverty of this approach is a lot more problematic and a lot more damaging.

So, combine the spirit of The Matrix, the wall-to-wall stone-boring CGI action of 2012, and the plot coherence of Hot Tub Time Machine, and you have Inception.