Inception: Introduction

So, this is about Inception, which I watched recently. Mostly, it’s some rough plot analysis and whining about things I didn’t like, with a few things I liked. So expect spoilers, boredom and frustration.

The film was released quite a few months before I watched it, so you can see how I’m a tad late to the party. Naturally, I heard it being talked about, a LOT. I knew it was about dreams, and that it would end with “They are actually also living in a dream!” from the start. It turned out that last bit wasn’t exactly true.

One other thing was the minor fad of “the movie stupid people watch to feel intelligent”. So I expected pretentious sleight of hand to disguise a complicated plot that doesn’t make sense, and resolved to pay extra attention to spot as many holes as I could.

That was a very bad idea! Inception is a run-of-the-mill mindfuck with a “gotcha” plot. It throws piles of obfuscated nonsense at you, only to disarm you and deliver its final “Haha, thought I was gonna do that one huh? Gotcha!” It’s like that riddle where a bus visits various stops, and so and so people get on and off each time, while you haplessly try to keep up with the arithmetic, and turns out the question is how many stops it visited.

The whole plot is an irrelevant red herring. All you get for seriously thinking about it is a nasty headache and a lingering feeling of “man, what.” So, what happened? Cobb and his buddies enter dreams and steal secrets. But Cobb is kinda hung up about his dead wife, so she keeps messing up their dream antics and being a nuisance. They try to steal from Saito, a businessman, but mess up (because of the wife. Women, right?) Saito then hires them to put a bad idea in a competitor’s mind, so his business fails and Saito benefits. They come up with a crazy dream-within-a-dream scheme to do it, encounters certain problems, overcome them, and Cobb goes back to his kids, in the real world… Or does he? Maybe he’s still dreaming! Guess we’ll never know, because it faded to black before we could see! Oh man, so exciting!