inception

Review, part one:

Review, part two:

I liked it better a few months ago when it was called Shutter Island. 

Review, part three, random thoughts (spoilers, kinda):

• Seriously, wtf was that? Good lord, a hot mess. I will get this out of the way right now, Christopher Nolan is the most overrated writer in Hollywood. 
• So you make a "smart" movie, one that gets my brain cramping due to the complexity, but when you actually start to apply this level of thought towards details, things make no sense at all. You can't have it both ways, expect me to think really, really hard and then time suspend disbelief at the same time. 
• Example: When you die in a dream, you wake up. Okay, fine. I fully accept that. But then Saito gets shot in the heart. But he doesn't die. But it is a life threatening wound. In a dream. Like, his dream self has an actual functioning circulatory system that knows how much blood he can loose before he dies, so to kill him, you can't just shoot him, you have to shoot him in the right spot. His circulatory system follows real life science, even though nothing else does. Dude bleeds out (but with hardly any blood) for like two hours. In a dream.  
• So, note: if you get cut in a dream, be sure to disinfect that shit or you may get gangrene. 
• Also, for a bunch of dreams, none of this seemed very dreamlike. 
• Why did nobody have a test at the end of the school year, but they skipped classes and didn't study and are now freaking the fuck out over? Why did no one go to school without pants? 
• Any logical roadblocks seemed to have an easy improvised answer built right in. "What if the sedative is too strong?" "Oh, don't worry, this super special magic formula I've created will fix that." Oh, how convenient. 
• The dream inside a dream inside a dream, you know, in the snow? I think I played that level in Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Or maybe it was SiN. Or No One Lives Forever. Sniper rifles? That shit was based straight off of a first person shooter. 
• Also, all of the "defenders" need to go to a dream shooting range because they all suck really, really bad. About a billion shots fired and you hit one freaking guy? 
• Don't get me wrong, the movie looked great. The fighting in zero gravity? Awesome. But the story behind it was just a disaster. 
• I felt the same way about The Dark Knight. Awesome visuals with an incoherent plot behind it. 
• I like how only one guy has the ability to change his appearance in dreams. At least in my dreams, pretty much everyone has that ability and uses it regularly. 
• All of this dreaming and dream theft is based around....corporate espionage? You're using this power to navigate peoples dreams on CEO's? Where are the evil Russian masterminds? There must be someone who wants to rule the world. Hell, Nolan should have at least brought back the Joker for this. 
• In that same vein, the whole time I'm rooting against Cillian Murphy's character. Only after the movie did I realize, wait, that guy did nothing wrong! He was innocent! I'm supposed to feel bad for Ken Watanabe's impoverished character, who only has enough money to buy whole airlines on a whim?
• So, DiCaprio was an American married to a French woman. So, who the hell was Michael Cain supposed to be the father of?
• How the hell did Saito clear the murder charges? Really, one phone call? Who's the evil mastermind now?  
• Seriously, the girl who makes the mazes is named Ariadne? Very subtle. I'm surprised DiCaprio's character wasn't named Theseus.  
• The movie is open to interpretation, and is pretty much choose your own ending. I don't mind that concept, but here, it's open to a little too much interpretation. Hell, you could figure out a way to make this a parable a parable for the OJ Simpson trial, and I'm not sure I would be able to disagree.  
• I really did high hopes for Inception, based on the trailer and all I've heard. But really, it was just kinda stupid, packaged and marketed as smart.