Thoughts on Inception

I finally got around to seeing Inception recently. It was entertaining, but I was really put off by it overall. Here's why:

1. The ground rules were really arbitrary. The Matrix worked so well to some extent because the premise did such a good job of justifying the action. Granted, the human battery business was laughable, but the ideas of computer-controlled reality, agents, and so on allowed for some good action scenes in that context without sacrificing too much believability.
   
   Inception went with dreamworlds rather than computer-generated ones, but in the process it still opted for a very prescriptive formula. There was some cool stuff with gravity here and there, but it still seemed to conveniently adhere to real-world mechanics. People appear strictly as themselves in their dreams—they can't fly, they age normally, and so forth. Meanwhile, the premise that justifies the action is that the "architect" of the entourage provides the locales, while the dreamer merely populates the world with characters from their subconscious to come to their defense. (This last quirk could have worked out really well if the movie had been a video game called Psychonauts.) Likewise, according to completely arbitrary ground rules, ***SPOILER ALERT*** the main subject had gone through the trouble of learning to militarize his subconscious defense, but didn't bother with lucid dreaming or anything of that sort (or even to use "totems" or other signs). ***END SPOILER***
   
   
2. I think Inception is a prime example of a mismatch in medium. It would have been a great action video game. Instead it was a short two-hour movie that relied heavily on absurd premises in order to justify big-budget action sequences. If the movie had traded out its incessant gunfights and action scenes for character development, it could have been something amazing.
   
   
3. The inception metaphor is ridiculous. A core idea in Inception is that one can insert an "infectious" idea into someone else's mind. Although it's a provocative metaphor, it's completely ridiculous and pseudoscientific in application—kind of like Richard Dawkins's meme metaphor. It's just another absurd facet in an already absurd premise.