I'm sure I'll be considered "not getting it" for not fawning over this movie, but the thing to "get" seems to be the multiplication of the different dream levels' time rates. I think it's an incredibly dubious notion, but I'm pretty sure I got it.

I can live with the dream machine as a plot device. I'm considerably less forgiving of using the long discredited pseudoscience that we only use a fraction of our brain. There's a term for using your whole brain at once and that term is 'seizure.'

But the dreams are just so boring. Snow skiing? After the billboards for the film and the training sequence with very neat visuals and ideas, snow skiing? And the train thing? And the rotating hall? All of this was done long before in 007, Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

To me, this movie is the Emperor's New Clothes. Sure, if you hadn't seen the older stuff, it might seem new.

And I'm no Nolan hater. I really like Interstellar and Memento. Both those truly had groundbreaking parts, at least for widely released material. Memento had the "reverse" time thing.

Interstellar had the breathtaking and accurate depictions of both a back hole and a wormhole, plus relativistic time effects of dealing with massive gravity wells. That's actual brainy stuff for a feature. Inception depicted dreams duller than the decades old Dreamscape-- and many many others.