But folks have been saying, “It feels nothing like real dreams,” and my point is that it feels a lot like lucid dreams. Not that it is one, but that you can see the line of descent from that phenomenon to this movie.

What I did miss was a sense of misplacement: things shifting about on a countertop, for example, paintings on the wall that were Picassos one moment and Wythes the next. The eerie feeling of something amiss in the dream worlds… I didn’t notice it, so if the effect was there, they did too good a job of being subtle with it…

However, my concern is that much of the ambiguity is due to characters being more archetypes than realized individuals.

Compare this to the sum of its parts – the grit and comic book spectable of the Matrix; as well as the banter and camraderie of Soderbergh’s first Oceans film.

Yeah, the architect can mess around with the landscape that he/she creates, but not the elements that the dreamer’s subconscious populates it with. I don’t think that fits in with the “lucid dream” theory because it’s just control over one aspect of the dream; the setting, not the contents. You can set it in Generic City, but theoretically, there’s nothing to keep the dreamer’s subconscious from populating it with Looney Tunes characters and Victoria’s Secret models.

Like many elements of of the film, it bears a passing resemblance to something about dreaming, but there are more differences than similarities. The architect has some semblance of control like the lucid dreamer, but only over one aspect and not others, and the architect isn’t the dreamer, and the… subconscious turns on you? Wha’?

Meanwhile, the dreamer can action rationally and logically within his own subconscious, knowing full well it’s a dream, and doesn’t have control over any of it. So lucid dreaming via designated driver?

This is all narrative contrivance as far as it goes. The rules that the movie wants to play by, which is fine, but there’s no real basis for it outside of auctorial fiat.

The reason they don’t steer the dream isn’t because they can’t, it’s because it’s not their dream.

I agree, he wasn’t making a film about dreams. I don’t believe they were lucid dreams, not as you describe them, because if the dreamer was able to do any “steering,” it wasn’t evident in this case. The architect can lay out the setting, the dreamer populates it with his subconscious, everyone hitching a ride is able to apparently import weapons, clothing and vehicles as needed, but the dreamer doesn’t really have any control over the outside elements.

But really, that isn’t my complaint. Call them subconscious landscapes or something else (which I’m fine with, it’s all semantics) the resemblance to actual dreams is tangential at best. I’m just saying when you have the subconscious to play with, the possibilities are endless. The drab, sterile environments weren’t chosen because it made sense for them to be that way. It was an artistic choice, because Inception is a Serious Film and color is not serious enough for it. Everything must be brown or gray; serious, businesslike, fitting colors. Even in Cobb and Mal’s fantasy world, which supposedly existed to serve as their own sandbox playground, everything is fugly. Their “dream house” looks like a freaking office building, for chrissakes.

But whatever; I think it’s visually drab, despite being striking in spots. Your mileage may vary, but that’s only one complaint.

I’m not going to debate into the internal logic of the film, since the drift away from reality means you can justify pretty much anything, and while the explanations (like Matt’s) may be clever, their not necessarily justified. Salma Hayek and I don’t go flying ass over teakettle every time I roll over in my sleep, but hell, the anti-gravity fight looked cool even if it didn’t make any sense.

What I’m criticizing is the results. The film spends a hell of a lot of time setting up rules that it winds up breaking almost immediately (and don’t say “because it was all a dream;” that’s an intellectual copout.) If I’m nitpicking and I wasn’t supposed to pay attention to all that exposition, fair enough. What’s left? Cobb’s story leads more to questioning than emotional investment. The action scenes, aside from some cool physics-bending in the hotel, were very conventional. Can anyone say there was anything the least bit exciting about the assault up the snow fortress?

I know the above paragraphs seem overly critical. I mentioned that I liked the movie, and I even saw it twice (although mostly because the second ticket was free). There are some interesting ideas. It has spawned some cool theories, although aside from Ariadne’s name, I haven’t read one that the film has even hinted at justifying. There were cool special effects, and Marion Cotillard was almost as effectively scary here as she was in MA VIE EN ROSE. I just don’t think it holds up to the deep thought it’s trying to provoke.