Posts labeled BR and AR are book and author reviews respectively. MR stands for movie reviews. I believe it is important to critically engage with movies, and in this post, I am going to rant about Inception.

Please don’t think I watched it. I really couldn’t bring myself to go beyond 17 minutes (out of 2+ hours). I think 17 minutes is enough to decide whether it is rubbish or not. In my opinion, it is a rubbish of the most interesting sort.

But how can it be? Out of 16000 reviews on Amazon, 95% are five- and four-star. On another platform, it has a 9.4 out of 10 rating. I decided to see what the hype was all about, so I patiently began watching until I really couldn’t take it anymore.

Inception is a modern case of ’the emperor’s new clothes’. Either that, or the people who have positively rated it are really stupid. This is not saying people are stupid in general, though. I think many people who didn’t like it perhaps did not even feel the need to leave a negative rating and simply moved on. I also think many intelligent people simply did not watch all of it, so the positive ratings is mostly by those who really did waste their precious 2+ hours watching a very bad movie, thinking it was a masterpiece.

I understand that art cannot satisfy everybody. You either like something or you don’t. And that’s fine. But there must be a standard, too. For instance, intelligent people should enjoy watching intelligent movies, so the probability of liking intelligent movies is higher for those who are capable of appreciating such movies. The converse is also true.

So why is it bad?

First of all, movies revolve around plot. It does not matter what kind of a plot it is–as long as it is logically consistent, understandable, and truly serving the artistic purpose. Inception is none of these. The actors are in a dream, from which they wake up and then upon waking they are in yet another dream, from which they wake up–but now viewer trust has been breached. How do I know the next scene is not a dream?

It blurs the line between reality and unreality, the same way a schizophrenic or another type of mentally ill person probably experiences. I would imagine this could even possibly be harmful to one’s mental health. Even if I concede that this dream confusion is necessarily some kind of an innovation, it must have a justifiable purpose in the movie. But in the first 17 minutes, no such justification is offered. I still don’t know why on earth these actors were ‘inside each other’ heads, running around shooting and conspiring within one dream state without any apparent purpose or goals.

I think it must have been the greatest movie hoax of all time, or perhaps even a psychological experiment on viewers. It is hard to know what purpose this movie serves. It is clearly, not a movie, at least in the normal sense of what a movie is. Even the most confusing, chaotic, disordered, disconnected, illogical, and random dream I have had was more consistent and logical than Inception.

It reminds me of Zhuangzi’s ’the usefulness of uselessness’. Zhuangzi, the ancient Chinese sage, once satirically wrote that there is a certain tree that has no uses at all. It does not bear fruit, nor has it a shade. It cannot be used in carpentry because it is twisted and crooked, and it is too hard to be cut for firewood. (I have seen this tree, it really is like that.).

Zhuangzi says, this tree is useless in its traditional sense, but objectively, it is still useful because it is safe from harm. Because it is useless to humans, this uselessness is useful to itself, protecting it from harm. Similarly, just about the only useful thing about Inception is its usefulness to the makers who raked in the millions of dollars showing people something totally pointless and useless.

Worse, people did not even realize they were being had. If it has a number of famous stars, and there’s a lot of action, and a plot too confusing to be understood, why, it must be good! Or else how could people come to terms with accepting they made a mistake and wasted their money? We want to reduce cognitive dissonance, and since, according to Descartes’s sarcastic remark, we all possess too much common sense for our own good, then it is not easy to admit we were taken for a ride; instead, we will say, ‘wow, it was a good movie, although I didn’t understand it.’ Admitting it is good is soothing because it makes the sucker think he is not stupid–he can understand good art when he sees one. After all, others agree, look at the high ratings!

Another issue is how poorly written the script is. Even the actors felt it and did not feel anything. It shows. It seems like they just wanted to be done with it as soon as possible so they could cash in, move on, and forget about it. The movie did not transform them, it did not make them feel the connection an artist needs in order to convey that art. The script seems to have been written by someone who probably did not even finish high school. It is amateurish and immature. The person who wrote the script seems to be one of those people who thinks ‘Twilight Zone’ is great literature.

Inception is about crumbling realities that are actually dreams within dreams within dreams within dreams within dreams, where a few thugs are chasing some Japanese tycoon for some reason which is not clear in the first 17 minutes. It blurs the line between reality and dream states, without any apparent logical connections, and a coherent storyline. On the surface, based on another person’s review who revealed the plot, the thugs are running around in each others’ minds trying to plant ideas in the mind of some competitor’s son, all in the name of making more profits for the Japanese tycoon who hired them to do this. But if that is the case, wouldn’t the competitor’s son hire his own hi-tech goons to do the same?

It does not make sense. All this sophistication and confusion just to plant ideas in someone’s head for profits. Supposing this were interesting, why on earth was there the need to go into multiple dream states to do something like this? It reminds me of spaghetti code or the famous spaghetti powerpoint (you know which one). It is unnecessary complexity for no reason at all. The movie fails to inspire the viewer, it does not raise any philosophical questions, it does not take any stances.

It is a waste of time, and a waste of money. But it is useful enough to become a target of this rant.