Christopher Nolan's "Inception" (2010): Interesting Concept, Could Have Been Better

Typically films such as this inspire me to write pretty lengthy reviews about symbolism and hidden messages, but Inception was a different breed.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS!

Yes, as expected from a Christopher Nolan film, this was definitely better than most of what Hollywood churns out. Still, whether intended or not, this was clearly tailored to be a blockbuster, when it could have been a way more interesting movie. All the action scenes, in particular the walking-on-hotel-walls with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, were indeed fun to watch, but I felt a way more interesting plot focus would've been on Cobb & his wife- namely, the topic of reality perception.

Yes, Inception is difficult to understand on the first watch, but I found myself not so interested in the terminology and rules of the dreamscape, which didn't seem to matter too much except to remember that the characters were on a plane, in a dream (city/kidnapping), within a dream (hotel), within a dream (snow), within a dream (Mal's world/limbo). No matter how straight-forward the plot may have seemed in this regard, I'm sure Nolan may've tricked our eyes somehow, making us believe we understood the dream world when there was something else going on entirely. But due to the emphasis in dialogue on the rules of what can and can't be done when entering another's dreams, I lost interest in trying to read between the lines.

We do enter Cobb's subconscious, and thus do learn what happened to his wife. It should be noted that, although Cobb is a likeable character, and didn't mean to harm his wife, his implanted idea is technically what killed her. This is another aspect the film included but didn't emphasize: the dangers of inception, which can obviously be used for means of deception. Outwardly to us, Mal's condition appears psychological (which technically it is), but her state of mind was brought on by inception- the idea was not originally hers, and it destroyed her. (Personally this brought to mind all those conspiracy theories regarding brainwashed assassins).

What interested me most was how Mal couldn't discern the difference between reality and dreams once she woke up. We all get that feeling sometimes, some of us more than others, that the world we call reality isn't real- it's a feeling often so indescribable that I can't imagine how one would depict it on screen. But perhaps if we actually got to see Cobb and Mal create their dream-world, we would better understand how damaging it was for Mal to be torn from it.

With all the special effects, I felt the film could've done a lot more with the dream scenes than moving around architecture, without it becoming a Tim Burton film. While the dream-scenes were interesting, they mostly mirrored real-life, albeit without gravity in some instances. If this technology one day became mainstream, would the dreams of society at that point become mechanized as a result? Or are our dreams already this unimaginative? Perhaps the more technology that's invented, the more our subconscious withdraws from creating something from a blank slate- meaning, our subconscious is more likely to fill our dreams with fragments from reality vs. creating something new or extracting something meaningful from a past life.

I must say this film reminded me of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999), which may seem entirely different as it's based on a video game, but essentially is the same concept in that people 'plug in' to escape reality.

Overall, I suppose I was expecting from this film something more modernly poetic, with less machine gun action and more visual science fiction.

What are your thoughts?