Inception (2010)

By Eric Jessen August 2, 2010

Not since Christmas Eve when I was ten years old have I been so eager to call it a night. Thanks to Christopher Nolan's Inception, I don't think I've ever been so excited about dreaming since I first learned about Freud.
Inception may be the first movie in a long time deserving of its place atop the box office. It's like a cross between Mission: Impossible and The Matrix cut together with as much boldness and flashiness as Nolan's Memento. (You can already give Lee Smith the Oscar for Best aka “Most” Editing.) Although I was a little disappointed the movie was easier to follow than I was led to believe. The pieces of the puzzle, the dreams within dreams within dreams within dreams actually fit together quite nicely. With the help of some rather lame explanations, of course. I would suggest instead of having these explanation scenes a word bank be printed on the back of our ticket defining "inception," "extraction," "kick," "limbo," "totem," "forger" etc. That would just about cover it – then straight into dreamland. Which leads me to my even bigger gripe. Why does every character in the end have to prefer reality when the dream world is so clearly more interesting?
But really I can't criticize Inception. It was a lot of fun. Some may say it's too literal minded, the characters are shallow, the dialogue is weak. It's not very witty, a little too dower like it doesn't know it's supposed to be fun. (And then again, it's fun anyway.) And all of those things may be true. But show me a movie with as complicated a structure, as many layers of story that also has well developed characters and great dialogue, all while sparing time to dazzle us with special effects. Maybe, in our dreams.