Directed by Christopher Nolan
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Blu-ray, Warner Bros.)
A team is assembled to use a "shared dream" machine to plant an idea in the mind of a wealthy man who recently lost his father. The idea is to get him to break up a corporation, which will benefit the person who hired the team. Leo DiCaprio is their leader, an experienced "extractor" who has used the machine in the past to get information from the subconscious of unsuspecting dreamers. They drug the man on a long plane flight and all plug into the machine. They must pretend to not be in a dream and convince the man that it is reality. However, in order to "plant" an idea in his mind, they must plug into another dream machine and go into a dream-within-a-dream. More things go wrong and they decide to descend to another dream level. At this deepest level the subconscious begins to take over and Leo's personal problems with his ex-wife threaten to ruin the whole mission. The overly complex plot does not always stand up to deep scrutiny. For instance, one dream level obeys the physics of the dreamers, but at others levels it does not. They are relentlessly attacked on all levels by anonymous men with guns, who apparently represent the "defense mechanisms" of the wealthy man with a military background. As a result, it frequently turns into a mindless action movie. If the plot had concentrated instead on the much more interesting personal story of Leo and his wife, it would have been more effective, but that story is stuck inside a loud, bloated, CGI driven 3-hour epic.
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