Christopher Nolan is the 21st century's leading cinematic show-off. His 2010 movie Inception is a marvel of visual ingenuity and multi-tiered storytelling. Even as I watched this film for the first time, ten years after its creation, there was no denying he'd pulled off a very original, sumptuous film that sets a different standard for filmmaking in the new millennium. I was impressed. I was interested. But I was never really involved. Concerned that I may have been too obtuse to have taken in this film properly, I set out to learn a bit more about Nolan and Inception. From Wikipedia, I learned that "Nolan's films are typically rooted in epistemological and metaphysical themes, exploring human morality, the construction of time, and the malleable nature of memory and personal identity." Wow. If I hadn't dropped out of my first year philosophy course, I might have been better able to enjoy this film. At least I wouldn't have had to look up epistemological ("having to do with the theory of knowledge," in case you were wondering). Okay, so I guess Inception may be all of those things, but as The New Yorker's David Denby points out in his review of the film, "There's no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this" (New Yorker July 26, 2010 issue). I couldn't have said it any better. In case you haven't seen it already, Inception traces the story of Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). He has a nifty job title: extractor. That means he craftily enters people's subconscious minds through a shared dream that his victims do not know is shared, and steals sensitive information to help the people who hire him become really rich and really powerful. Nice guy! Also, he is in exile. He sorely misses his young son and daughter, whose mirages we see many times throughout the movie, but only from behind, never glimpsing their faces. Poor Dom can not be reunited with his children in America because he is a wanted man there, accused of the murder of his wife Mal. Is the charge justified? This is one of the questions the film explores. It's difficult to summarize the movie's labyrinthine plot in a review of this length. Suffice it to say, Dominic is sort of like Odysseus. He just wants to get home to his family but he is stalled in a dangerous voyage of his own undertaking, having to fight battles and outsmart unexpected adversaries in his latest victim's unconscious mind. Doing so will secure a safe passage to the U.S., provided as payment by his latest employer Saito (Ken Watanabe), a greedy Japanese energy tycoon. Instead of adventures on the high seas, Dominic's adventures take place in a multi-layered dreamworld. His mission this time is a little different. Instead of extracting information he must plant an idea in his wealthy target's mind. That's called "inception." If successful, this will make his already super rich employer Saito become obscenely rich (what a great cause!). In order to build this maze-like dreamworld, making it safe and impervious to invasion from unwanted forces such as the lingering ghost of Mal (like in malware--get it?), he enlists the aid of a really smart young lady. In keeping with Nolan's habit of giving his female characters stupidly obvious names, he calls her Ariadne (Ellen Page), a reference to the mythical Greek daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus escape the maze of the man-eating Minotaur to whom he was sacrificed. I believe this is what we call "intertextual" storytelling. It's meant to enrich the meaning of the story by drawing in archetypal stories and themes to add depth. One would expect nothing less from Nolan, the grandiose showman of cinema. Well done Nolan! You are very smart. THE ONE THING that disappoints the most about this film is that, even though the film transpires mostly in people's dreams, there is very little that is dreamlike about them. Instead, the dream landscapes are there to accommodate a handful of action movie setpieces. They are visually stunning setpieces to be sure. In particular, the gravity defying fight scene in a hotel corridor, in which people's bodies are pulled toward constantly shifting centers of gravity, to match a parallel tumble off a bridge in which the bodies of the sleeping dreamers within the dream are plummeting through space in a van. It is a remarkable achievement. However, it is not the stuff of dreams. Dreams are eery and psychologically unsettling. They express buried fears and longings while hinting at the existence of awe-inspiring supernatural forces. And quite often, the locations are spare and minimal. Great filmmakers like Federico Fellini and David Lynch filmed dream sequences that left viewers with gooseflesh, and they did so by fiddling with combinations of settings and sounds usually in spare surroundings. They did so by tugging at the viewer's empathic sense of kinship with the character, and sparking a commingled sense of attraction and dread to the dream narrative. Films can only achieve this effect of heightened emotion and involvement when there is something at stake, something that the viewer cares about. Regrettably, I didn't care about anybody or any outcome in Inception. Will one multinational corporation surpass the other in wealth? Who cares? Will the morally shady Dominic be reunited with his kids? I don't care that much because he's an emotionally closed character. Will Christopher Nolan tie up all the loose ends in his high tech mental thriller? I suppose he did but, again, I didn't care. Inception reminds me of another film in which the main character yearns to return home, The Wizard of Oz. But unlike that film, it is all brains and no heart. Nolan needs to find the courage to admit he is wanting as a complete filmmaker and change his game to reflect the maxim that I learned when I entered teacher's college: "No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care."