... and I was full of hope that it would be rather like Stevie Wonder :)

Comparing Inception (2010) with The Matrix (1997) is inevitable. The same concept defines both of them - the concept of perceiving the reality (or rather "mispercieving"). And the same flaw of choosing not precisely the right way to tell the concept, ruins the final impression - the flaw of being pretentious.

Matrix was very pretentious. It was pretentious enough to became a religion. Inception is not so. But still lacks the serious tone. I mean who the hell names the girl who builds mind labyrinths Ariadne??? It's SO OBVIOUS symbolism. And it's unnecessary - the whole concept needs realistic grounding or poetic quotation marks rather than references to mythology. Those quotations and groundings are delivered by Marion Cotillard (who is the most frightening ex I've seen in movies a long time). Her interpretation of Cobbs wife, Mal is a little treasure in that shallow chest. She makes this movie a tale about HUMANS instead of CHARACTERS. But everyone else in the team don't have that intuition.

Except her, everything is more or less pretentious. Screenplay - besides quite original concept - spoils the fun by very bad dialogs, and predictable scenes (like for example the scene of testing Ariadne by Cobb, based on the "rule of three" - two mistakes gives you last chance to win). Next - we have here very poor director's and screenwriter's imagination revealed in quite boring or random creation of worlds visited by our team (and I don't want those worlds to be second Pandora from Avatar (2010). I want them to be less Cameron, more Lynch.) We have here very cheap "entertaining while learning" directing. The ways chosen by Nolan to describe the audience rules of dreaming are like from TV show Colombo - straight forward. Like the Infinite Staircase, or bunch of scenes where someone finds the way of solving some problem, and Cobb tells that's impossible, because... in dreams it's impossible. Gee, it's like reading an article in Newsweek! And because of those big expectations and "masterpiece" reviews I must to say this - this movie is too boring to be a masterpiece. I felt some suspense in few scenes (with Mal mainly), but the pacing is rather ...random and - sad thing to say - in the majority f the screen time, it's a result of constant background music.

I think, that this movie should be a book in first place. Or maybe I should be like 10 years younger to be amused.