I’ve seen “Inception” three times, and each time I’ve gawked, mesmerized, at any number of sequences, like the streets of Paris literally folding in on themselves.
So, at last, we arrive: at the moment of truth, the film that separates the believers from the skeptics, and the gallery capsule that will make a lot of you hate me. I’ve seen “Inception” three times, and each time I’ve gawked, mesmerized, at any number of sequences, like the streets of Paris literally folding in on themselves. Yet I persist in feeling that the impact of that moment, along with too many others, has no real meaning within the interior scheme of the movie. I persist in feeling that if “Inception” lived up to its premise — Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb and his team enter other people’s dreams, at different “levels” of dreaming — it might be one of the greatest films ever made, but that it doesn’t live up to the premise (not really), because what we’re watching fuses the hypnotic and the arbitrary, leaving me, at least, with a WTF-I-kind-of-get-it-but-not-really feeling. A few of the questions I’ve always had: How does what’s happening in one dream level influence the next? Since different people are occupying the same dream, which of them is determining, at any given moment, what happens? And why does everything, on every level, look like it all came out of the same lofty balletic action movie? Yet to even raise those questions is to reveal yourself as one of the uncool, the un-anointed, the un-Nolan. “Inception,” the defining 21st-century brainiac video-game thrill ride, demands that you give it up and go with its flow, but I’d say that anyone who thinks this movie adds up to a coherent vision is dreaming.