Warner Brothers
Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page
This movie starts with a 1 minute flashback. Uh oh. This movie has held #1 in the box office for 2 weeks in a row, and shows no sign of letting up. When I went to see it, the theater was full. I was expecting to be blown away. Well, I wasn’t. What’s Leonardo doing these days? He’s been in one weird movie after another.
Now, I certainly did not HATE this movie. I just wasn’t blown away as I expected to be. Maybe I expected too much.
The concept is original….oh wait, no it isn’t. Didn’t I see Sandra Bullock, Kevin Bacon, and Natalie Wood doing this some time ago? Ok, so you can go into someone’s dreams and control what they see, and fake them out. You can “extract” their most well guarded secrets. (Didn’t Robert Jordan write this in the Wheel of Time series? Until he died, that is without finishing the story, I might add. (Bummer). So what would happen if you were to give a person an idea in the dream, but make them think they thought it up, and it wasn’t given to them. Very difficult and to do this you must think up the most convoluted, werid, strange, far fetched, out of the question, impossible scenario known to modern cinema. How many dreams inside dreams inside dreams can we create? Then the “phsyics” of this. Hey, did you know that every level of dream within a dream is faster? What poppycock.
However, the views were exceptional! I sat in the first row, surrounded by the beauty. There were colors, and sounds, and scenery. There is a James Bondesque chase scene on a snowy mountain.
So did they succeed, or fail? Did you really care? Do you know what’s real and what isn’t? I think this film is like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Two thirds of the people in the theater had no idea what just happened, but everyone wanted to say how great it was because they didn’t want anyone to know they didn’t know what was going on.
So the word of mouth grows. You must see this, it’s so cerebral.
Well, don’t expect a great flick storywise. Be prepared to set your common sense (dare I say intelligence) aside, and enjoy the cinematography. You’ll definitely want to know what it’s about, so you can share the conversation around the water cooler. Just don’t tell anyone the Emperor has no clothes. 🙂