Inception is not a DREAM, but a Neapolitan-ice-cream style of reality that’s jammed with not-that-fancy visual effects, excessive car chasing, and gun fighting. Cobb spent so much time explaining, instructing, and, again, elaborating the scheme that the whole film feels like a “how-to-dream-in-a-boring-way” seminar. The deepest human emotion Inception ever digs to is Cobb’s emotional catharsis about his wife, and Fisher Jr.’s cliched problematic relationship with his father. In Nolan’s Inception, human psyche is linear and scalable, of which the best metaphor is the elevator in one of Cobb’s dream. After finishing Inception, I couldn’t help but go back to watch David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive again. The first time I saw Mullholland Drive, a bomb was dropped in my mind and I was amazed at the way Lynch wove his narratives. I was expecting a similar kind of mind-blowing experience, but I was not impressed, if not disappointed. Inception is not a shoddy product, but it’s just that I have heard so many hailings about it that I got my hope too high.
