GRADE: B

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy escapist fare like Inception, if only for what it is—in this case, a high-octane shoot 'em up disguised as a psychological sci-fi thriller. But there’s nothing particularly visionary about this film and its dreamlike puzzle of a plot is not nearly as labyrinthine or heady as advertised.

Yeah, I know, people streaming out of theaters talk about how deep and metaphysical (my word) writer-director Christopher Nolan’s Inception is, but that’s much the result of a relentless, months long advertising campaign that pounded the notion of this film being unfathomably profound into moviegoers’ heads to the point where most of them were predisposed to reaching that conclusion before they even saw the film!

The razor-thin plot in Inception concerns a hi-tech corporate spy who enters people’s dreams to discover industrial secrets. His team’s last mission has gone badly, and now to set things straight with his unseen employers he must undertake an assignment to plant an idea in the mind of an heir to an energy fortune.

There's some cloying back-story concerning the spy's dead wife (or is she?) that could endanger the new team being assembled, which leads to more techno-babble and the appearance of terribly miscast Ellen Page as the team’s rookie architect, who goes from total dream novice to seasoned expert in the blink of a Hollywood eye.

The actions scenes, like all of the film’s production values, are first rate, but comprised of the usual karate, gun-wielding stuff ranging from routine to unbelievable. If Nolan wants to depict an authentic imagined reality, he can't have scenes like the one in which the dream team is caught in a van surrounded by men firing automatic weapons into it that results in only one passenger being shot. And wouldn’t you know; it just happens to be the key member of the team who’s wounded.

Inception is all movement; Nolan rarely lets a non-action scene play out long enough to develop any empathy with the players, who remain just characters in a movie. And the hyper-editing and video game style stop motion photography punctuating distressingly short bursts of plot doesn't help matters.

The special effects might have come across as more special if I hadn’t seen every one of them 50 times on television, and the trailer for the film, which features the likes of Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite, is an Inception deception as the two fine actors only appear in abbreviated cameos. Why? Not because either of them brings anything unique or special to these tiny roles, but so their images could be used as part of the film’s massive advertising campaign.

Nolan’s screenplay does touch on some potentially weighty issues, but just as he has before, he chickens out in the final reel (like in his remake of Insomnia), opting for the standard Hollywood happy ending, which naturally occurs one tick of a second before catastrophe as Hans Zimmer’s overly portentous and monotonous musical score thunders in the background.

The guessing game that Inception sets-up (whose dream is it?) is more contrivance than narrative complexity, although it’s a clever bit of strategy that will send many viewers back to the box-office to plunk down another $10 to see if they can solve a puzzle that's really unsolvable because Nolan doesn’t commit.

Like the strikingly overrated Avatar, Inception is still a good film; one worth seeing. But its elevation (primarily by young males and critics afraid of appearing un-hip) to the heights of greatness is, in part, a reflection of a marketing-oriented culture in which the yearning for real substance sometimes creates the impression of it where little actually exists.

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