A Note on INCEPTION (English; 2010)

I saw Inception earlier tonight, and was more impressed than spellbound by this tale of espionage and loss set in the dreams of its protagonists. For all the talk and representations of dreams in the film,what was missing from every instance of a dream here was what Freud would have called "the uncanny," that strangeness that is the very texture of a dream . In Inception, every aspect of the dreams can be accounted for, leading to an effect more akin to that of a puzzle, or a Rubik's Cube. Or, most obviously, of a video game: the compartmentalized layers of the dreams in Inception are the products of a post-electronic gaming era, and have little to do with the imaginative, dense, mysterious tapestries seen only in half-light, conjured up for me by the word "dream." As a result, the film, while always gripping, felt more than a little impoverished, missing that touch of madness that suffused the last DiCaprio film, Shutter Island.